From ABC News:
Australia’s current account deficit blew out to a seasonally-adjusted $17.459 billion in the December quarter.
Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show the deficit deteriorated from a downwardly revised $14.731 billion in the September quarter.
The result is worse than the market expected.
Tony Abbott also sees the danger signs that so many are warning of:
The danger for Australia, as we enter what could turn out to be a long period of 70s-style low growth and high inflation, is not just that the Rudd government has saddled us with debt and deficits but that it’s undoing the reforms on which a golden age was built.
Rudd Labor have tried to smear Tony Abbott’s economic credentials too, trumpeting that he thinks “economics is boring”. Whether that is true or not is beside the point – just because a subject is boring, does not mean you do not understand it.
Tony Abbott is a Rhodes Scholar, with a degree in Economics. The Rudd Labor economic team, by comparison, are all uneducated imbeciles. Compare their credentials here.
Barnaby is right. Tony Abbott is right as well.
Thank goodness that at least two people in our parliament are aware of the serious economic problem that lies ahead.
Tanner - "We were not in debt under Whitlam"
Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner recently defended the Whitlam legacy on the ABC’s Q&A program, claiming that the Whitlam Government had no debt:
“In the period when the Whitlam government was in office, most people would be surprised by this, Australia had negative net debt,” Mr Tanner told ABC Television on Monday night.
“We were not in debt under the Whitlam government.
Note carefully: that’s not one, but two intriguing claims. That Whitlam had (1) Negative Net debt, and (2) no debt.
I’ve done a little digging in the RBA Statistics archives, to see if Tanner was telling the truth. The results so far suggest that he lied…
China’s rapidly overheating real estate bubble cannot be cooled, lending further weight to predictions that the Chinese economy will bust inside ten years:
Even among Western analysts who live and work in China, the major role played by municipal governments in fueling China’s increasingly speculative real estate boom is underappreciated. The actions of those local authorities are at the heart of China’s property bubble, and they explain why the central government’s attempts to cool lending and construction are failing.
The key difference between China’s current real estate bubble and the U.S. bubble that popped in 2007 is this: In the U.S., it was individuals and lenders who made overleveraged, speculative bets via subprime mortgages. In China, explained Northwestern University researcher Victor Shih to NPR, the leveraged debt fueling the speculation comes from local governments, which have borrowed trillions of dollars worth of funds from China’s banking system to develop real estate projects in their jurisdictions.
Rudd Labor, Treasury Secretary Ken Henry, RBA Governor Glenn Stevens, and a lazy, blinkered mainstream media can no longer try to blame Barnaby Joyce’s warnings for scaring off the Sino-cyclical angel on which they have pinned all their hopes for economic prosperity.
After all, there is a growing chorus of leading international economists and financiers all around the world who are warning of a China implosion. Perhaps our talking-head economic commentators, and the EPIC FAILURES currently in charge of the Australian economy, would like to start ridiculing and smearing all of them too?
The Greek debt crisis represents a threat to the entire Eurozone, and ultimately, the global economy:
Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Center for European Reform in London, says the Greek crisis reflects a larger economic problem in Europe. EU members like the Netherlands and Germany have spent too little and their economies are driven by exports. Meanwhile, southern economies like Greece and Portugal have spent too much and amassed debts as a result.
Now that sounds familiar – “…economies are driven by exports… spent too much and amassed debts as a result”. One could be forgiven for drawing a logical conclusion – that the Australian economy, far from being a shining beacon of fiscal prudence, actually encapsulates the worst of the Eurozone’s economic dilemma.
Greece’s problems are also spilling beyond Europe’s borders. The value of the euro currency has plunged for example, which makes American exports – key to the U.S. economic recovery – less competitive.
Ultimately, Tilford says, the Greek problem reflects a world economic problem.
“The eurozone s really just a microcosm of the global problems we see. So unless we see the big countries in East Asia rebalancing away from exports and toward domestic demand, we are not going to generate a self-sustaining global economic recovery,” he said.
But Tilford does not believe Europe is ready, or willing, yet to undertake fundamental economic reforms he thinks are needed to right these imbalances. The region may rescue Greece, he says, but it will only be putting a bandage on a far bigger problem.
Could it be that, as with every other global trend, Down Under Australia has not “escaped” the GFC at all, but is simply running a few years behind everyone else?
Barnaby is right.
Barnaby Is Right 
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