Here’s what you need to know today

• Commonwealth Bank shares rose 2% today after Australia’s biggest bank reported a better-than-expected set of results for the first half of the financial year. The bank broke records for home loans and business lending on its way to a $5.13 billion profit, up 8% from this time last year. (AFR)
  
  

• Australians with HECS/HELP debt will be able to borrow more to buy property, after Jim Chalmers told the regulator APRA to relax lending rules. Banks will not be allowed to overlook student loans when calculating debt if they are due to pay off the debt in the near term. (ABC News)
  
  

• The Australian government has said it is prepared to acquire Regional Express (Rex) if the administrator cannot find a suitable buyer. The government has previously spent $80 million to keep Rex flying when it first fell into administration, and earlier this year spent $50 million to become the airlines biggest creditor. (ABC News)
  
  

• US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell told a Senate committee the Fed was in “no hurry” to lower interest rates because cutting rates too quickly “could hinder progress on inflation”. This puts Powell at odds with President Trump who has urged the Fed to lower rates faster to drive economic growth. (Sky News)
  
  

• Political leaders on opposite sides of the Atlantic clashed over AI regulation at a conference in Paris. US Vice-President J.D. Vance criticised Europe’s “excessive” policing of AI and called for a “regulatory regime that fosters creation”. In response, French President Emmanuel Macron warned that more rules were needed to manage disputes between countries. (Reuters)
  
  

• Elon Musk and Sam Altman continue to trade barbs back-and-forth, including Musk calling Altman “Scam Altman” and Altman calling Musk “not a happy person”. If you’re interested in tracking the billionaires exchanges, Quartz have compiled a full recap of their past 24 hours. But we understand if you are not. (Quartz)
  
  

• Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company saw shares fall 6% as Chinese rival BYD announced plans to introduce autonomous features, named “God’s Eye”, across its entire lineup. (Fortune)
  
  

• While it seems that corporate America has largely lined up behind President Trump, we are starting to see some fractures. Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, has blasted Trump’s tariffs calling them “chaotic”. Ford was a big loser of Trump’s steel tariffs in his last administration, reportedly costing the car maker more than $1 billion. (NY Times)
  
  

• Australia’s Federal Opposition has told the crypto industry it would be a “priority” under a Dutton government. This mirrors last year’s US Presidential Election when both candidates Trump and Harris courted the crypto vote. (Capital Brief)

What the…?

If a President can create a memecoin, why can’t a country? That may have been what leaders of the Central African Republic were thinking as they launched $CAR, a crypto memecoin that briefly reached a market cap of $350 million before collapsing 95%.

The President of the Central African Republic, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, called the token “an experiment” that would “unite people” and “support national development” with roughly one-third of the funds going to development projects in the country. (Reuters)

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Investing is a lifelong journey

Here’s what you can learn today.

Getting out of consumer debt

This question came from Monique: What are some of the best tips to help me get out of consumer debt that I racked up at university?

We put this question to Ben Wauchope, financial adviser and Director of Wealth Health Co. on an episode of Equity Mates Investing podcast (Apple | Spotify)

This was Ben’s response:

It's important to define what consumer debt actually is first.

Consumer debt refers to the sort of debt incurred by individuals for personal or household consumption purposes. So taking out debt to acquire everyday expenses for major purchases, things like credit cards, personal loans, car loans or buy now pay later services which are quite popular these days.

So in terms of those debts, and tips to help get out of them - the first mistake I see a lot of my clients do is solely focus on paying down their consumer debt first at the expense of generating something like an emergency fund or cash reserve.

I always advise my clients to build a cash reserve first, before paying down their consumer debt because the issue is that you're going to make some progress paying down this consumer debt. But then if you are hit with any other unexpected costs, then you don't have any other savings to rely on to pay those expenses. And then you are just forced to rely back on other consumer debt, like taking out more credit cards. Then you just get in this sort of debt trap.

So I think the first thing is to make sure that you've got a cash flow plan in place. You need to be spending less than you earn, and then you start building that buffer initially. That might be five, or ten of fifteen grand.

Then you focus on paying down that consumer debt from there.

If you've already got that financial sort of cushion in terms of a cash reserve, that you're sort of stuck with this high interest debt that's accumulating over time.

I had a client and she had one of these payday loans and the interest rate was 49%. So she was just paying $100 a week to this. And it was just interest. It wasn't paying it down.

In that case, you could look at something like a balance transfer on a credit card that has an interest free period. So that generally you have 12 to 24 months where you can take over that debt with a new credit card and pay down the balance. You would only just use this as a way to clear that existing debt and then pay it off within the interest free period. So that's one strategy.

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