As expected, government debt levels exhibit a marked up-swing. What is striking, however, is that the levels of household debt have not yet fallen. While US and the UK are consumers “deleveraging”, Australian households are showing no signs yet of reducing their debt.
Ever since they joined the European monetary union and adopted the Euro as their currency, they lost the power to create their own money. The Euro is the real reason Greece finds itself facing a debt crisis.
About two months ago, I tried to bring some perspective to concerns about growing government debt in Australia. Last week the opposition has rolled out the “debt truck” to add to the hysteria about growing government debt, so I feel compelled to return to the subject for another attempt. Last time I looked at net […]
Two guest posts in one week! On this occasion, the Mule is yielding the soapbox to an anonymous and unqualified cynic who wants to talk about tax (his own words). In particular, he looks at tax and property markets in Australia and the US.
A few weeks ago, I had a preliminary look at Australian property prices. That post focused on rental yields and argued that the fact that property prices have consisently outpaced inflation over the last 10-15 years can be associated with a steady decline in rental yields which has been matched by a decline in real […]
Today a tweet from “Australia’s most idiosyncratic economist” Christopher Joye caught my eye. I followed the link and found a scaremongering article trying to whip up concerns about Australia’s levels of government debt. A key part of Joye’s argument is to accuse the government of creative accounting by including Future Fund assets in the calculation […]
Once again a misconception is gaining currency. There is increased talk of a build up of cash just waiting to be converted into equities or other assets. I wrote about this years ago in cash on the sidelines, but apparently the financial commentariat did not read the post, so it is time to revisit the […]
Dr John Carmody of the Department of Physiology at the University of Sydney, recently appeared on the ABC Radio National program, Occams Razor, speaking about John Graunt, a man many years ahead of his time. For those of you preferring the written to the auditory format, he has kindly provided his talk as a guest […]
migNow that Labor has scraped their way back into power, it looks very likely that the National Broadband Network will go ahead in some form or another. Debates on the merits of the scheme continue apace, not least on Twitter, conveniently labelled with the #nbn hashtag. One frequent twitter on this topic, @pfh007, is also […]
With Australia’s Federal election looming, the opposition has today proudly announced a new policy to fund infrastructure without actually increasing Government debt! What are we to make of this? It’s hard to determine the details from a media announcement, but based on the text posted by Peter Martin on his blog, it would seem that […]