We’re drowning in debt, credit is squeezing, and the RBA is just taking it all one rate rise at a time, writes Alan Kohler.
Current account deficit
Bearish Kohler meets McCrann’s bull
Alan Kohler and Terry McCrann, are heading in starkly different directions in their punditry, writes Stephen Mayne.
Foreign reserves in freefall as private bank safety valve gets jammed
Today’s Reserve Bank statistics contain grim news. Since May 2007, Australia’s Official Reserve Assets have fallen 64% - down from $84bn to $30bn in December. They now cover a mere eight months of our chronic current account deficit, writes Robert Townsend.
Centro crash: Is this part of the tsunami that Cossie predicted?
What we’ve learned recently is that, yes, it might be wise to have a few sandbags at the ready, Michael Knox, Chief Economist and Director of Strategy at ABN AMRO Morgans, told Crikey:
CPI to fall: nice one John, nice one Peter
The government skated over a number of amazing figures in the mid-year economic and fiscal review, but none more amazing than the claim that inflation is going to fall this year, writes Michael Pascoe.
The Spice Girls approach to economics
The Spice Girls line pretty much sums up what economics is all about: “Tell me what you want what you really, really want”. In the early period of the previous ALP government, Accord partners decided the one or two things the economy really really needed at any one time and built everything around that. It’s a great, pragmatic tradition we’ve lost sight of, writes Nicholas Gruen.
Yet another Future Fund accounting rort from Cossie
The Future Fund is already being obsessively secretive about its activities as we still don’t know exactly how much of its $50 billion-plus in cash has been deployed and in what asset classes, writes Stephen Mayne.
Week in words, week in numbers
We’ve taken the ‘most viewed’ stories from The Age and The SMH websites from the last week and crunched them into this tag cloud. Note that killers rate highly, as does the moon. Ditto Aussies. No dwarves this week though, more’s the pity…
$17 billion is okay, but we’re no world leaders
Peter Costello was back at his fiscal fibbing best yesterday when he unveiled the government’s healthy cash flow for 2007-08 and declared “this would be the strongest fiscal position probably in the developed world”, writes Stephen Mayne.
The Economy: Market correction and interest rates
Wall Street fell again on Friday night - with much of the fall occurring in the last half-hour of trading. Many people, including Henry, have been calling for a correction and urging caution by investors.
