1. Boom, boom baby!

It’s been another big weekend for property prices, with the FOMO effect driving buyers to the biggest sales showing in three years. There were 3,800 properties for sale over the weekend and a huge 84% were sold. This is the strongest result in three years and reserves were smashed, as the fear of missing out (or FOMO) keeps driving buyers to pay crazy prices. CoreLogic says Sydney sold 89% of properties up for grabs, Canberra 86% and Melbourne 84%. With interest rates so low, the only way this price boom can be slowed down would be a rising supply of properties for sale, but the AFR quoted Ray White’s MD, Dan White, who said demand levels were “astonishing”. Although more listings are expected, he said, “we don’t expect these records to last long.” That means he expects bigger sales weekends ahead!

2. Hang on, dividends on the way

The local stock market looks poised for a big start to the week as President Joe Biden’s stimulus spending starts to help US companies. It was a big record-breaking end of the week for US stocks and it means our share market is expected to open up 0.72% higher today. While the tech-heavy Nasdaq index, which has companies like Facebook, Google and Tesla in it, is on the slide with tech stocks out of favour for the moment, demand for more traditional businesses and their shares has pushed a company like Victoria’s Secret to announce a profit upgrade. And it comes as Australian investors will pocket huge dividends from their shares this week totalling $6 billion. But this is only half the $12 billion sent out last week by listed companies to shareholders. This money has to be good for both more share-buying and products sold by our major retailers.

3. China hungry for our iron ore

China might be picking on some of our exporters but not our big miners, as booming iron ore exports are tipped to deliver a huge $136 billion windfall. Last week we learnt our Budget Deficit, which was expected to be a massive $213.7 billion, was shrinking towards $150 billion. And while our beating of the Coronavirus has helped the economy grow faster than expected (this brings down the deficit) so does tax collections from BHP, Rio and Fortescue — our big iron ore exporters. Last year we saw a record-breaking $100 billion worth of iron ore exports but The Australian says forecasts out of Canberra say this year we will see $136 billion worth of exports, with China our biggest customer hungry for iron ore. These rising exports, along with a bigger-than-expected iron ore price, could give the Budget an extra $15 billion or more!

4. French monks stuck with 2.8 tonnes of cheese

Cîteaux Abbey, located south of Dijon in France, has had to turn to online sales to clear excess stock of 4,000 cheeses with a total weight of 2.8 tonnes. The cheese is usually sold to local restaurants or visitors to the abbey, with sales reportedly down almost 50%. "We tried explaining to our 75 cows that they needed to produce less milk but they don’t seem to have understood," brother Jean-Claude told AFP.

5. Positivity returns to Wall Street

The Dow Jones ended last week up 1.36% to 33,072.88 and the S&P 500 was up 1.36% for the week to 3,974.54. Despite a strong gain on Friday, the Nasdaq was still down 0.58% for the week at 13,138.72 points.