Tag Archives: keynesianism

Barnaby’s Quick Quiz

14 Apr

Media Release – Senator Barnaby Joyce, 14 April 2011:

Q. Who am I? Two weeks ago there were 183.8 of me, this week there is 187.3 of me.
A. Billions of dollars in gross debt.
Is there any way we can get the penny to drop on why this is not healthy for the Australian people? Look at it this way; we had all those demonstrations on Tuesday because of a prospective $400 million loss in medical research funding; in two weeks we dropped almost 9 times that amount. We could have built the Toowoomba Range Crossing twice, or we could have completed the required sections of the inland rail for this amount. We could have put slightly more money, than $1.4 million towards myrtle rust, an introduced direct threat to eucalypts in Australia.
Something smells. Ken Henry has left, Julia Gillard is panicking, and our gross debt is tearing through the roof.
Seeing as Mr Swan always talks about net debt, maybe he would like to find some of these funds he used in netting off this $187.3 billion and use it now to pay off some of the debt. I will tell you there are two things, he won’t be able to tell us where the money is and secondly, if he did know where it was, he would be terrified of what would happen if he actually used it to pay off the debt. For example, the largest section of the money used in the netting process is for public servants’ superannuation.
I have been banging on about this for about two years and I am not going stop till Wayne stops borrowing and starts paying the money back.
We have found ourselves in this position because we have got a government that spent like a person who should have been swabbed. We will look back in history and cringe as to how on earth we got ourselves into such strife. $2.5 billion on ceiling insulation, $16.8 billion on school halls and random $900 cheques, for who only knows what purpose followed by a little home cooked policy cake to cool the planet. Australia asks where do these manic ideas come from, and how on earth are you going to repay this debt?

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Barnaby Rips Into Swan On Live TV

23 Aug

The highlight of the election coverage.

Wayne ‘Goose’ Swan is torn to shreds by Michael Kroger during Channel Nine’s live election broadcast.

As he lays on the mat spitting out his teeth, Barnaby lays the boot in.

If only the Coalition had got stuck into Swan like this months earlier.

Highly entertaining viewing.

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Complete And Definitive Guide To The Sovereign Debt Crisis

30 Jun

Professor Niall Ferguson, of the acclaimed book and ABC documentary series “The Ascent of Money“, has recently published a brilliant guide to the global sovereign debt crisis.  Click here to read it.

Back in February, Professor Ferguson had this to say in the Financial Times:

… it would be a grave mistake to assume that the sovereign debt crisis that is unfolding will remain confined to the weaker eurozone economies. For this is more than just a Mediterranean problem with a farmyard acronym. It is a fiscal crisis of the western world. Its ramifications are far more profound than most investors currently appreciate…

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The GFC Is ‘Over’, Ken?

8 May

From The Australian:

Debt and taxes a recipe for economic chaos

The Australian sharemarket lost a massive $95 billion in a five-session horror streak this week, as the European debt crisis and the proposed resources super profits tax severely dented investor confidence.

It was the worst run for local equities since the peak of the global financial crisis, and the meltdown appears far from over, as the second phase of the global financial crisis takes hold.

Wait a minute?!  A “second phase”?  As recently as February this year, the Treasury secretary Ken Henry – architect of Rudd Labor’s massive “economic stimulus” spending, and the Henry Review with its resources super-profits tax that this week resulted in billions wiped off the value of Australian mining companies – publicly declared that the GFC was ‘over’:

“What people have called the global financial crisis, that has passed, I think it’s safe to say,” Dr Henry said. “But that isn’t to say that there will not be further adverse shocks for financial markets down the track and some of those shocks … could be of some significance for individual countries, but I don’t imagine (they would be) shocks of the sort that would be globally significant.”

Really Ken? You clearly do have a disturbing lack of “imagination”:

The local market tumbled a further 2 per cent yesterday, taking its loss for the week to 6.8 per cent, leaving the benchmark S&P ASX 200 index at its lowest point in 17 months.

Yesterday’s sell-off came after an extraordinary lead from Wall Street, where the Dow Jones sent shudders through the world, experiencing its biggest intraday move in history after another drubbing on European markets.

Asian markets also tumbled, with Tokyo’s Nikkei falling another 3 per cent, forcing the Bank of Japan to mount its biggest one-day injection of cash since 2008.

There was no sign of a let-up in Europe last night, with major markets opening as much as 2 per cent lower.

CMC Markets analyst David Taylor said markets were fearful the Greek debt crisis would spread globally and jeopardise growth.

“The sheer fact there is a possibility of a second global financial crisis or a second massive credit crunch inspired by a sovereign debt default, markets are . . . terrified about that,” he said.

Ken Henry completely and utterly failed to foresee the onrushing first wave of the GFC in 2007-08.

His “go early, go hard, go households” economic stimulus advice to Rudd Labor has resulted in massive wasteful spending, rorts, fraud, house fires, deaths, and a Budget thrown into an unprecedentedly huge hole.

He preemptively declared that the GFC is ‘over’.

And as recently as February, he could not even imagine any further “shocks of the sort that would be globally significant”.

How much is this arrogant, demonstrably incompetent clown receiving from MY taxes?

Sack Ken Henry now!

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History Repeating

5 May

From the Chicago Tribune, 1934:

Note carefully the title at top, and the ‘plan of action’ in the lower left corner.

Rudd’s borrow-and-spendathon – playing straight from the old Marxist playbook.

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ECB: Stark Warning of Eurozone Debt Crisis

17 Mar

From BusinessWeek:

European Central Bank Executive Board member Juergen Stark said the euro region may face a sovereign debt crisis unless governments reduce budget deficits.

There is “a clear risk that we will enter a third wave,” which is “a sovereign debt crisis in most advanced economies,” Stark told lawmakers in the European Parliament in Brussels today.

In Australia, our government is continuing to increase our budget deficit, by refusing to withdraw its woefully incompetent and wasteful “stimulus” spending.

Even though we had no recession, and RBA Governor Glenn Stevens recently referred to 2008-09 as “the mildest downturn” we have had since WW2.

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Rudd’s Interest Bill – $48.49bn to 2013

6 Mar

How much will Rudd’s spending spree cost Australian taxpayers… just in Interest-only?

$48.488 Billion to 2013. With more to come.

That’s enough to buy a No-business-plan-No-cost/benefit-analysis National Broadband Network.  With $5.5 Billion left over in loose change for, let’s say, a disastrous home insulation scheme plus the costs of fixing it afterwards.

Need proof?

I made the chart below using the data from the Government’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) 2009-10 Budget statements. It shows the government’s projections of Interest on debt for this financial year, and the following three years. These are the Total Interest* (not principal) repayments that Kevin Rudd has incurred, and we-the-taxpayers must pay back –

Interest on debt - Total $48.488 Billion

Interest Expense - MYEFO 2009-10, Appendix B, Note 10

Note:  This is only the “Estimates” (2009-10, 2010-11) and “Projections” (2011-12, 2012-13) for Interest-on-debt, as at November 2009 when the MYEFO was published. With the Rudd Government still borrowing well over $1 billion a week, who knows just how big the Interest-only bill is now.

One thing we do know.  We cannot pay it back.

* Total Interest includes $5.49 Billion in ‘Other financing costs’ – What exactly is that, and who gets 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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Labor Borrowing A Billion A Week

2 Mar

Abbott tells it how it is:

QUESTION:

Interest rates are expected to go up again, um… Who would you blame?

TONY ABBOTT:

Well, if you’ve got the government out there borrowing more than a billion dollars a week that puts a lot of pressure on interest rates. Now, plainly interest rates will always be higher than they otherwise would be when you’ve got the government out there in the market borrowing as dramatically as this government is.

Keep informed of Australia’s sovereign debt level… unlike Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, who doesn’t bother.

See for yourself just how much this wastrel Government is borrowing every week, by clicking here. To see how much they intend to borrow in the next few days, click here.

Already, you are better informed about Australia’s debt than the Finance Minister.

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Abbott: Low-Growth, High Inflation Future

1 Mar

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.

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