Archive | March, 2010

Budget Oversight Office Needed For Australia

6 Mar

From Bloomberg:

Obama Budget Underestimates Deficit Over 10 Years, CBO Says

President Barack Obama’s budget proposal would generate bigger deficits than advertised each year for the next decade, with the 10-year shortfall totaling $1.2 trillion more than the administration estimated, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The nonpartisan CBO, in an annual analysis of the White House budget proposal, said today that under Obama’s plan deficits would never shrink below 4 percent of the economy between now and 2020. The cumulative deficits would total $9.76 trillion, and debt held by the public would amount to 90 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product by 2020, the CBO said.

By 2020, the federal debt would grow to $20.3 trillion under Obama’s budget, according to CBO.

Those figures are all higher than the administration estimated last month…

On March 3rd I drew attention to how Rudd Labor has doctored the 2009-10 Budget numbers, to show both a higher GDP, and lower government spending, in the current year and in the forward projections.

It is high time that Australia had an independent, nonpartisan Budget Oversight Office, to forensically examine and then alert the public to the highly dubious accounting practices employed by the government to make itself appear far more fiscally responsible than it actually is.

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$127.68 Billion and Rising

6 Mar

From the Australian Office of Financial Management:

Total Commonwealth Government Securities on Issue – $127,682m

*As at 5 March 2010
Updated weekly
Face value amounts rounded to the nearest million

How much further into debt will Rudd Labor take us next week?

Forthcoming AOFM Tenders

Treasury Bonds
On Wednesday, 10 March 2010 a tender for the issue of $700 million of the June 2014 Bond line is planned to be held.

Treasury Notes
A tender for the issue of $600 million of Treasury Notes maturing on 11 June 2010 and $300 million of Treasury Notes maturing on 23 July 2010 is planned to be held on Thursday, 11 March 2010.

That’s right. Another $1.6 Billion in debt, next week alone.

These are the debt numbers that Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner does not trouble himself to know.

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Premier Wen: ‘Latent Risk’ In China’s Banks

5 Mar

From Bloomberg:

Premier Wen Jiabao warned of “latent risk” in China’s banks and pledged to crack down on property speculation as the government faces the consequences of flooding the economy with money to drive growth.

“The domestic economy still faces some prominent problems,” Wen, 67, said in a speech in Beijing to the National People’s Congress, similar to the U.S. State of the Union address. He also cited excess capacity in manufacturing and weak support for rural-income growth.

Wen’s comments reinforce concern that loans made in last year’s record 9.59 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion) credit boom may go bad. Harvard University Professor Kenneth Rogoff has said growth could slide to 2 percent from Wen’s 8 percent target within a decade as a debt-fueled bubble collapses..

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Digging A Hole For Ourselves

5 Mar

From The Age:

In a series of speeches in recent days, senior economic officials from Reserve governor Glenn Stevens down have spread the same message: the brief interruption of the global financial crisis is over, and Australia has gone back to where it was – into a resources boom so big it will dwarf the booms of the late ’60s and early ’80s.

The Reserve Bank’s best and brightest argue that this will be good for Australia because it will allow us to earn more income now than we would if the minerals stayed in the ground for a few more years.

With the greatest respect, I sharply disagree. I think we need a national debate on whether it really is in our interests to try to sell off our mineral wealth as rapidly as possible, as our economic leaders believe…

We need to think hard about this. The implicit argument from our officials is that we should allow otherwise-viable industries to be put down in the interests of making room for us to extract as many minerals now as possible.

This is wrong: not just because they are picking winners, or just because China, too, has its vulnerabilities and could fall, but because you don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

We need to keep a mix of strong, diverse industries to guarantee our future. We need to debate how we do that, and learn from how others do it.

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Rain For Henry, Stevens’ Parade

5 Mar

From Business Spectator:

Today’s commentary is all about lessons learned and not learned in the GFC.

ABARE has rained on the commodity bulls’ parade with forecasts of falling commodity prices in the medium term, and a falling dollar from next year. This is no surprise to this column, which has argued consistently that the prices of the last cycle will not be repeated because that cycle’s global building boom – from Shanghai to Dubai – was a once-in-a-lifetime event, characterised in the worst cases by massive empty buildings. Mine supply has also now caught up.

The commentary then goes on to critique Michael Stutchbury’s recent article regarding the Australian housing bubble:

Heavens to Betsy. This column will simply observe that house prices reached unprecedented multiples of income in the last cycle and are now threatening to go higher still. And even in Stutchbury’s own terms the boom is based upon easy money – this time fiscal – the First Home Buyers’ Grant (FHBG). We might also note that it was coupled with the lowest cost of mortgages in fifty years. Let’s call a spade a spade. The FHBG was, in the long run, a calamitous policy. It has re-inflated the great Australian housing bubble, underpinned it with moral hazard and badly compromised monetary options… A historic opportunity to de-risk the Australian economy was missed.

If we learned anything form the GFC it is not to trust financial advice, and John Durie of The Australian analyses where new regulation to protect small investors is headed. “Myriad studies have revealed that 50 per cent of Australian adults don’t understand what 50 per cent means.

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Britain Grapples With Debt of Greek Proportions

5 Mar

From the New York Times:

Suddenly, investors are asking if Britain may soon face its own sovereign debt crisis if the government fails to slash its growing budget deficits quickly enough to escape the contagious fears of financial markets.

“If you really want a fiscal problem, look at the U.K.,” said Mark Schofield, a fixed-income strategist at Citigroup. “In Europe, the average deficit is about 6 percent of G.D.P. and in the U.K. it’s 12 percent. It is only just beginning.”

Since the Labour government’s intense fiscal intervention in 2008 and 2009, yields on British government debt have soared to among the highest in Europe. And on a broader scale, which includes the borrowing of households and companies, the overall level of debt in Britain is the second-largest in the world, after Japan’s, at 380 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to a recent report by the consulting company McKinsey.

Britain is not in the 16-nation euro zone and, unlike Greece and other struggling countries that use the currency, it retains control over its monetary policy. As a result, it has benefited so far from a huge bond-buying program undertaken by the Bank of England — proportionally, the largest in the world — that has kept mortgage rates and gilt yields at unusually low levels.

That means the government and its citizens have been able to continue to borrow at interest rates that do not reflect their true financial situation.

Indeed, the increase in private and government debt here contrasts sharply with the deleveraging that has been going on in the United States.

British household debt is now 170 percent of overall annual income, compared with 130 percent in the United States. In an echo of the United States’ rush into subprime mortgages with low teaser rates, millions of homeowners in Britain have piled into variable-rate mortgages that are linked to the rock-bottom base rate.

As for the British government, it has been able to finance a budget deficit of 12.5 percent of G.D.P. — equal to Greece’s — at an interest rate more than two full percentage points lower only because the Bank of England bought the majority of the bonds it issued last year.

Sound familiar?

In Australia, household debt is over 150 per cent of income. And in an echo of the British rush into US-style sub-prime mortgages with low teaser rates, some 250,000 homeowners in Australia have piled into variable-rate mortgages that are linked to the rock-bottom base rate, until recently the lowest in 50 years. Many highly ‘marginal’ borrowers who could not previously even raise a deposit, were lured into mortgage debt by the Rudd Government’s First Home Owners Boost, plus additional state-based grants.

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Japan PM: Nation’s Fiscal State ‘Quite Severe’

5 Mar

From Reuters:

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said on Thursday there is no doubt that the nation’s fiscal state is quite severe.

“There is no doubt that the current situation is quite severe,” Hatoyama said in a parliamentary committee meeting.

Japan is Australia’s second largest trading partner.  In the December 2009 quarter we sold $38.2bn in exports to Japan. China is our largest trading partner – we sold $42.2bn in exports to China in the same quarter.

A further deterioration in Japan’s ‘quite severe’ financial situation, and/or the predicted bursting of the China real estate bubble, would have disastrous impacts on the Australian economy.

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Official: China Bubble ‘Undisputable’

4 Mar

From China Daily:

China’s real estate industry is in an “undisputable” bubble with its skyrocketing property price fermenting an imminent structural inflation that might hijack the country’s booming economy into violent fluctuations, a high-ranking official said on Wednesday’s Beijing News.

“The over-speedy price hike is evident of an undisputable bubble in the property market, which is a major propeller behind the current inflation,” said Yin Zhongqin, deputy chairman of the Financial and Economic Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress.

Famous international financier George Soros has said that he is “very cautious” on China.

Last week, former IMF chief economist Professor Ken Rogoff predicted that the China bubble will bust “within ten years”, sparking a regional recession and hammering commodity exporters.

Despite measures being taken by the Chinese central authorities, leading authorities on Asian economics say that the China real estate bubble cannot be cooled, as it is being driven by trillions of dollars borrowed for speculative, leveraged investments by local municipal governments.

In Australia, our economic authorities are again asleep at the wheel, having confidently predicted a “Golden Age” of “unprecedented prosperity” from a multi-decade mining boom.

Barnaby is right.

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Markets Chief: No Escape For Australia

4 Mar

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Australia is unlikely to avoid an imminent economic downturn caused by excessive government debt, a top European markets regulator says.

”Prepare for a very difficult economic time, which you will not be able to escape,” Netherlands Authority for Financial Markets chairman Hans Hoogervorsttold the Australian Securities and Investment Commission summer school yesterday.

The debt taken on by governments around the world to bail out banks and stimulate domestic economies would take ”a tremendous toll on the world economy for a long time to come”, he said.

”The problem is that there is now too much on the shoulders of government. They have basically taken on all the problems caused by the financial crisis, with the effect that most of them are in really, truly horrible budgetary shape.”

He said the only way out was for the public and private sectors to tighten spending and repay the debt.

”The problems are so serious there are no easy ways out any more,” he said. ”It is simply inevitable that economic growth for a long period will be very meagre.” And Australia’s economic luck during the financial crisis would run out, he said, because the stimulus programs running in Asian countries, which had fuelled demand for Australian resources, could not last forever.

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Another Financial Crisis Coming

4 Mar

From ABC News (America):

Even as many Americans still struggle to recover from the country’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, another crisis – one that will be even worse than the current one – is looming, according to a new report from a group of leading economists, financiers, and former federal regulators.

The report warns that the country is now immersed in a “doomsday cycle” wherein banks use borrowed money to take massive risks in an attempt to pay big dividends to shareholders and big bonuses to management – and when the risks go wrong, the banks receive taxpayer bailouts from the government.

“Risk-taking at banks,” the report cautions, “will soon be larger than ever.”

According to data from the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Australian banking system has $13 Trillion in Off Balance Sheet business, compared with only $2.59 Trillion in On Balance Sheet business.

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