Afternoon Report | Gold stocks rally

This is the Fear and Greed Afternoon Report - everything you need to know about what happened in the markets, economy and world of business today, in just a few minutes.

1. ASX closes flat

2. Social ban starts

3. Westpac outage

4. Seniors scammed

5. Putin’s secret sons

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to the Fear and Greed Business News Afternoon Report
for Wednesday, the tenth of December. I'm Michael Thompson, and
every afternoon we've got the five stories that happened today
that you need to know about. Let's go with story
number one. A very flat day really on the SMPA
SEX two hundred, today's investors process, yesterday's decision by the
Reserve Bank to leave rates on hold, and more importantly,
the commentary around the likelihood of no more interest rate cuts.

(00:26):
The share market closed down zero point zero eight percent
today to eighty five hundred and seventy nine points, so
just off a touch. The best performing sector was the
materials stocks, the worst the tech companies. A lot of
anticipation ahead of the US FED meeting overnight the Central
Bank tip to cut interest rates in the world's biggest economy.

(00:47):
The decision will come through tomorrow morning. Locally, we'll start
with the miners, the gold diggers, in particular Newmont and
Northern Star both jumped more than four percent today. Romilius
Resources was up after an hour, seeing new share buybacks
and an increased dividend, as well a record silver price
today of sixty US dollars. An Outsource, South thirty two

(01:08):
and Sunsilver have a very good day mix day for
the banks, and at the other end, the tech stocks
had an ordinary one, Technology one, Wisetech Global and zero
were all off between one and a half and two
percent today Story number two. This is day one of
the federal government's social media ban for under sixteens and

(01:29):
teenagers are already finding workarounds. As you would expect, Lesser
known apps like Lemonade, YopE and cover Star are rocketing
up the download charts. Teams looking for loopholes. We'll have
more on that tomorrow. Others are using their parents logins
using VPNs to dodge age checks. Media reports also include
stories of underage teens being deemed old enough by Snapchat's

(01:52):
facial age check, or the age check software just not
working at all and giving them access still. The Financial
Review reports a poll of fifty ten year seven students
from a school in Geelong that out of those fifteen,
only two had been removed from their accounts over the
past week. The others had mostly used fake birth dates
to avoid removal. The government admits that the system is

(02:15):
not and won't be perfect, but says the law sets
a very clear national standard and gives parents back up
when they say no to social media. Sorry Number three.
Westpac customers have been hit by an outage today that's
left some unable to pay or get paid. From about
lunchtime today, thousands of people reported problems with f post
terminals and online payments, with some retailers saying they couldn't

(02:36):
process any sales. Westpac has confirmed the outage, saying some
merchant systems and card systems were degraded and that it
was working to restore services as quickly as possible, while
apologizing for the disruption. The bank's status page says terminals
and e commerce platforms are suffering intermittent failures, and call
center messages were warning of issues with merchant terminals as well.

(03:00):
Story number four. This is a little bit worrying. More
than four in five Senior Australians say they have encountered scams,
and around one in five have actually lost money, in
some cases tragically, more than fifty thousand dollars. A new
report commissioned by Seniors Australia says most individual losses were
smaller under one thousand dollars, but it also revealed the

(03:20):
number of victims who don't actually report the crime, with
sixteen percent of those who lost money not reporting the
loss to any organization. Those who did report mostly went
to their bank, but around twenty percent went to Scam Watch.
Another twenty percent went to the police. Parcel delivery cons,
fake overdue bills, and phishing scams are the most common

(03:41):
ones encountered, but AI is starting to play a role,
including deep fake voices pretending to be loved ones, hyperrealistic emails,
and bogus images that are hard to pick. Nearly ninety
percent of seniors feel that they are being left behind
on AI, and most admit they still sometimes assume what
they see online is real without checking, which I think

(04:02):
all of us do. That story number five Fresh images
out of Russia our fueling long running claims that Vladimir
Putin has two secret young sons with a former Olympic gymnast,
Elena Kavieva. The Australian newspaper reports videos posted on a
Russian language website show two boys said to be ten
year old Ivan and six year old Vladimir Junior, training

(04:24):
and performing at a gymnastics academy linked to Kavieva. Investigative
journalists say the children news an alias surname, live under
heavy security at a forest compound outside Moscow and have
effectively been erased from official records. The Kremlin has never
acknowledged any relationship between Putin and Kaveeva, and Russian state
media are banned from mentioning it. Putin publicly recognizes only

(04:48):
two adult daughters from his former wife, but rumours about
a second secret family have swirled for more than a decade.
That's it for the afternoon Report for Wednesday, the tenth
of December. Make sure you're following the podcast, and please
head on inter Fear and Greed dot com dot au
to sign up for our free daily newsletter. I'm Michael Thompson.
Enjoy your evening. H