James R. Hennessy

Sydney

Ideas and Features Editor at Capital Brief

ideas & features editor @capitalbrief. cohost @downroundpod. tips go here: james.hennessy (at) https://t.co/bxoQNwuUij / signal: jhenn.01

Articles

Canadian club

2 weeks ago | capitalbrief.com | James R. Hennessy

There are some obvious parallels between Canada and Australia. Both are geographically enormous and wealthy Anglophone resource economies living in the long shadow of bigger trading partners — Canada under America’s elbow and Australia tangled up with China. This weekend, Peter Dutton will be hoping the similarities end there. The Canadian Liberals today pulled off one of the most remarkable political turnarounds in recent memory.
Under the influence

2 weeks ago | capitalbrief.com | James R. Hennessy

Looking at the media coverage of what has been a relatively subdued election campaign, one theme has received outsized airtime: the rise of millennials and Gen Z to ‘median voter’ status. It’s a demographic inevitability that comes with strategic implications.
De-escalation day

3 weeks ago | capitalbrief.com | James R. Hennessy

The market isn’t paying much attention to fundamentals right now, instead running on vibes, rhetoric and hearsay. And today, the vibes are marginally less catastrophic — despite the persistence of underlying problems in the US-led global economy that would have looked catastrophic to an investor back in November.
Bargaining chips

4 weeks ago | capitalbrief.com | James R. Hennessy

Nvidia has been the engine room of the great post-COVID market melt-up — a trillion-dollar distillation of every bet on AI, reshoring and America’s industrial rearmament. But amid the chaos and caprices of Donald Trump’s tariff agenda, the chipmaker is feeling the heat.
Canva's suite dreams

1 month ago | capitalbrief.com | James R. Hennessy

Overnight, Canva announced a significant upgrade to its Visual Suite platform — first launched in 2022 — including new spreadsheet and data visualisation tools, shared workspaces and heavier AI integrations. As Bronwen Clune reported, it’s all framed as a push to make the Sydney-based unicorn’s product the ultimate all-in-one design and communication platform for businesses operating at scale. Underneath the gloss, though, is a far more interesting business story.
Buyer's remorse

1 month ago | capitalbrief.com | James R. Hennessy

Hedge fund crusader Bill Ackman, who backed Donald Trump with the zeal of a convert ahead of the 2024 US election, seems to be experiencing some buyer’s remorse. Taking to X this morning as US equity futures plunged, he urged the president to pause his extraordinary 'Liberation Day' tariff plan, lest the US — and possibly the world — careens inexorably toward a “self-induced, economic nuclear winter”. Get The Edition in your inboxSigned up to The EditionA must-read afternoon newsletter.
Chaos theory

1 month ago | capitalbrief.com | James R. Hennessy

Today’s deep market seizures were a predictable outcome of Donald Trump’s radical tariff rollout, which has roiled the globe and tested the diplomatic infrastructure that has governed it for decades. Trump generally follows the classic pattern of charismatic strongman politics: instinct first, ideology later. His instinct, rightly or wrongly, is that America is being taken to the cleaners. Tariffs satisfy his primal urge to hit back at countries he thinks are cheating.
AI anxiety

1 month ago | capitalbrief.com | James R. Hennessy

Like clockwork, a story seems to emerge every month or two that reignites public anxiety about the wrecking ball of artificial intelligence on jobs and labour. Over the past week it has undoubtedly been OpenAI’s powerful new image generation system built into ChatGPT.
Bitter pill

1 month ago | capitalbrief.com | James R. Hennessy

Back in 2003, when the Howard government was negotiating the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement with the Bush administration, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) became a political hot potato. Despised by American pharma companies for decades for aggressively negotiating prices and refusing to pay a premium for brand-name drugs, the PBS had long been seen as a threat to their global pricing strategies. Get The Edition in your inboxSigned up to The EditionA must-read afternoon newsletter.
Google's Wiz wager

1 month ago | capitalbrief.com | James R. Hennessy

The news overnight that Google will snap up Israeli-American cybersecurity firm Wiz for an eye-popping US$32 billion ($50.3 billion) in its biggest acquisition ever is being viewed as the starting gun on a new era of Big Tech M&A activity after a prolonged deep freeze. But there’s also a more interesting corporate story here. In brutally simple terms, Google just paid tens of billions of dollars for a functional enterprise sales team.