Insights

The boss of Australia's biggest live cattle exporter is urging a swift diplomatic resolution to the growing rift between the Abbott government and Indonesia over the phonetapping of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his wife.

Australian Securities and Investments Commission chairman Greg Medcraft has defended his role as the head of the International Organisation of Securities Commissions, saying the body does important work fighting cyber crime and reforming capital markets.

Woolies shoppers have obviously been looking in the wrong place when it comes to hunting bargains at the pokie and grocery giant.

Will the Abbott government ultimately be judged a great reforming government or the worst money manager since Whitlam? In a delicious irony considering all the phoney outrage Abbott & Co expressed on the subject in opposition, this judgment will turn on how they respond to the budget's deep structural problems.

Maurice Blackburn has dismissed the chief of Treasury Wine Estates' criticism about shareholder class actions as a "glass-jaw reaction".

Australia's dairy processors will be "absolutely whacked" by multinationals unless a super co-operative is formed, Murray Goulburn managing director Gary Helou says.

Australia's export credit agency wrote more loans in the 2013 financial year than the year before, despite almost halving the total amount of taxpayers' funds it provided.

Spray-on skin company Avita Medical has pledged to reform its executive pay policy after shareholders overwhelmingly rejected its remuneration report, earning the company a first strike.

The use of jawboning by central banks has come into focus after a month of intense efforts by the Reserve Bank to talk down the dollar culminated in governor Glenn Stevens last week flagging a possible intervention in foreign exchange markets.

Institutional investors are increasingly keen to take on risk held by Australian insurers via reinsurance markets, in a trend that is tipped to limit premium rises after severe natural disasters.

The sharemarket is tipped to start the week in positive territory, as investors await a clearer picture of the strength of the non-mining sector through the release of business spending expectation figures.

Houses were the hot favourites over the weekend, outselling units by a factor of 14 percentage points.

I am putting together a wish-list. It is not being mailed to the North Pole for Santa's attention; it is instead addressed to Joe Hockey in Canberra. This wish-list has nothing to do with the latest and best gadget on the market, but has everything to do with a fairer tax and retirement system.

China says candidates for Hong Kong's chief executive election in 2017 must be vetted by a committee, reiterating the ground rules as the city plans to start public consultation on universal suffrage.

A former top executive at the Credit Suisse Group was sentenced to 2 years in prison on Friday for inflating the value of mortgage bonds as the housing market collapsed.

One year after the Tazreen factory fire in Bangladesh, many retailers that sold garments produced there or in the Rana Plaza building that collapsed in April are refusing to join an effort to compensate families of the more than 1200 workers who died in those disasters.

The regulator of accounting firms in the United States says Deloitte & Touche for two consecutive years had failed to correct deficiencies in its audit procedures to its satisfaction.