It's off 0.1%.

Thank you for being here with us on this very interesting news week. What will next week bring? Tariffs? Trade wars? We'll be here with you whatever happens.

This one goes out to an audience member. Thanks for your email!

To Emilia.

If you have time, do you have any information as to why MMS share price seems to be continuously falling over the past four months or so. Big 8% drop today. Thank you. 

MMS stands for McMillan Shakespeare Limited. It is a provider of salary packaging, novated leasing, disability plan management, support coordination, asset management and other financial products and services.

It's down almost 10% today when the market is flat. 

I can't find any market notes it has made today to explain this sharp dip. However I did read in another media outlet that the firm Bell Potter put out a note about the company today, downgrading its stock from buy to neutral.

It has also apparently downgraded what it thinks its stock is worth. 

I haven't seen this note myself and have emailed Bell Potter.

Hope that helps!

ARENA is giving the cash to EVX for 250 public kerbside electric vehicle chargers in over 60 local government areas across Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.

EVX is a company that installs chargers and is working in tandem with the Sydney university UTS.

“Not all electric vehicle owners have the ability to charge their vehicle at home or at work," ARENA CEO Darren Miller said in a media release today.

"Kerbside pole charging provided the perfect solution to increasing public EV chargers."

“While sales of EVs are increasing, the expansion of public charging is vital in catering for future demand right across Australia."

Yet the data actually shows EV sales have stalled, as my colleague Rachel Clayton reports today.

According to data from the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI) and Electric Vehicle Council (EVC) EV sales were just 4.4 per cent of the Australian market in January, down from 5.5 per cent in January last year. 

Sales of hybrids, which also often take EV chargers, are rising, though.

Tarrifs, tariffs, tariffs! What a week of them it's been.

More from Westpac.

We see Australia as a small and unlikely target of trade wars. Any impact is likely to come indirectly via slower global growth and weaker sentiment that could see business put plans on hold and consumers lift precautionary savings. The RBA continues to navigate a more finely balanced growth and inflation outlook. Westpac now sees a first cut in February, but the pace and scale of easing is still expected to be modest. That should in turn allow for a continued gradual recovery in growth but with a Federal election due and the new ‘normal’ abroad, we will need to stay ‘buckled up’ for what could be a rough ride. 

The bank's economists have just put out this note.

In our previous edition of Market Outlook, released late last year, our main question was what kind of "normal" the global economy was returning to, having finally dealt with the post-COVID inflation burst. Our assessment was that it would look like the 2016-19 period of the first Trump administration just prior to the pandemic. The past month has refined that view – it now looks like we are instead "speedrunning" the back end of that period, when the US-China tariff wars were in full swing. The second Trump administration has launched straight into another, wider set of tariff wars that will clearly be a cornerstone of US policy in coming years. This is making for an even more unsettled global backdrop, characterised by asymmetric risks and divergent economic paths for growth, inflation, interest rates and exchanges. The USD is already overvalued, and this could persist. 

The whiplash associated with President Trump’s tariff announcements has seen dramatic swings between "risk-on" and "risk-off" sentiment in markets, both the S&P500 and gold prices hitting fresh record highs in the space of weeks. As far as assessing the economic impacts of these policies goes, there remains a significant degree of uncertainty. 

For the US, the chief concern is the extent to which uncertainty around the impact on growth and inflation influences policy easing. In our view, the FOMC will now hold off on delivering further policy relief until 2026. For Europe, likely tariffs coupled with a weaker starting point for growth should still see the ECB follow through with rate cuts to a slightly expansionary level. China’s efforts to diversify its export base over recent years should help ride out trade flow disruptions with authorities also well-positioned to deliver additional domestic stimulus. 

The bottom stocks are Yancoal and Beach, both off around 5%.

Thanks for the question, Cooper.

I was actually there at Myer's special meeting last month where its shareholders voted overwhelmingly for the department store to buy up most of Premier Investment's fashion stores, including Just Jeans and Dotti. (But not Smiggle or Peter Alexander.)

At the time, Myer chair and chief executive Olivia Worth said the merger was "one of the most important transactions in the corporation's history".

The brands officially joined the Myer stable on January 27.

And it seems since then shareholders have had a rethink. 

After initially rising on the deal to 96 cents, Myer's stock is now off to 86 cents a share and is overall off 27% in a month. A lot of that big loss actually happened before the deal was done, when both Myer and Premier put out notes saying sales were down.

Speaking of Premier, it is down only 1% in the last month and its up 5% this week. Showing that its shareholders aren't hugely phased by the loss of those 700+ stores.

You can see an interview I did with Premier's Solomon Lew at the time of the deal. He's set to re-join Myer's board later this year as part of the deal and is now its biggest shareholder.

"There's a big challenge there, big opportunity," he said about Myer.

This is a great interview by my colleague David Chau.

This great piece is by my ABC colleague Kate Ainsworth.

As she explains, the two Chinese websites will not just be impacted by the new 10% tariffs on Chinese goods into the US, but an extra 10% one after a loophole was closed quietly.

And that could benefit its American rival, Amazon.

Some more analysis from AMP.

There is a lot of confusion around who actually pays for the tariff, with Trump saying that the foreigners pay the US government this levy. This isn’t accurate. A tariff is a tax. The tax is levied on the importer who pays the tax to the government. The importer may ask the exporter for a cheaper price or decide to fully or partially pass the cost down the supply chain until it reaches the consumer. Higher imported goods prices are meant to push consumers to substitute to cheaper (perhaps local) products. But often local products are more expensive than imported alternatives. The foreigner “pays” if their revenue and goods sold declines.

The issue for markets is that tariffs lead to consumer and business uncertainty, weaken trade channels weighing on GDP growth and lift consumer prices which could prevent interest rate cuts. Sharemarkets have not fully factored in potential tariff risks because this is up to Trump and his team! In the near-term expect more volatile moves in equity markets off tariff news, risk of moderate falls in shares and a higher US dollar from the risk of tariff-driven inflation.