Tag Archives: stimulus spending

McKibbin For PM 2010

23 Jun

Long something of an outsider – the lone outspoken voice of reason and commonsense on the otherwise “reserved” board of the Reserve Bank – Warwick McKibbin has again spoken out.  He has accused Rudd of panicking, and wasting huge sums of taxpayer money.

Who’d have thought!

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

A prominent university economist and member of the Reserve Bank board has delivered a scathing critique of Kevin Rudd’s response to the global financial crisis, saying his government ”panicked” and ”rammed through” decisions fraught with risk.

Warwick McKibbin, of the Australian National University, accused the government of overspending on its stimulus package, and then coming up with ”a really badly designed resource tax” to try to compensate.

And he described the government’s planned $43 billion national broadband network as ”a gigantic white elephant waiting to happen”.

It gets better.

McKibbin also attacks Treasury secretary Ken Henry.

Readers of this blog will know our scathing views of Henry’s “performance” before, during, and after the GFC.  We have been calling for him to be sacked… a call that is only now just beginning to resonate in the Opposition ranks.  And in the economic commentariat too. Highly esteemed business leader and commentator Robert Gottliebsen recently said this:

The position of Ken Henry as the head of Treasury is not sustainable.

Here’s what Professor McKibbin had to say about Henry:

Professor McKibbin also took aim at fellow Reserve Bank board member and Treasury secretary Ken Henry, accusing him of not only failing to consult experts on economic issues, but of trying to silence them…

(Professor McKibbin)… has told The Age he was stunned by Dr Henry’s call this week for academics to ”put down their weapons” and stop nitpicking over government proposals such at the emissions trading scheme.

”The ETS was a flawed scheme. Had the government got it through it would be dead by now because of the financial crisis,” Professor McKibbin said. ”I have enormous respect for Ken Henry, but he can’t believe that you should have consensus because it is better to have bad policy that everyone agrees with than eventually get good policy that will work.”

Enough of Henry. Really … enough!

Back to Rudd / Henry’s rushed and bungled “economic stimulus”:

And in a damning assessment of the government’s stimulus package, he (McKibbin) said: ”It wasn’t evidence-based policy, they panicked. They put the money into school buildings, they put it in insulation, they put it in stuff they could never reverse.

”The government rammed those decisions through the economy even though they were fraught with risk,” Professor McKibbin said. ”No one was consulted about an alternative view, and if you did say anything you were attacked by the Treasurer and the Prime Minister in public.”

He also accused the government of overspending on the stimulus package and then deciding that ”because of politics they had to get their spending back so they could claim they had fiscal surplus – for which there is no economic basis, by the way.

”So they come up with a really badly designed resource tax to try and get the position to look good three years from now and, in the middle of a sovereign risk crisis, exposed the economy to a reassessment of sovereign risk.”

Warwick, we need you in politics.  You have my vote.

McKibbin For PM 2010!

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China Brakes, Australia Breaks

14 May

From Business Spectator:

In an ominous sign for Australia, the Chinese sharemarket is slumping on worries that the Chinese government will soon lift interest rates in response to rising inflation and surging property prices. Such a move would slam the brakes on Chinese growth, and deal a cruel blow to Australia, which is counting on Chinese growth to keep commodity prices high.

Although it rebounded by 2 per cent yesterday, China’s Shanghai Composite Index is down more than 20 per cent from its peak in August 2009, which means that it is still technically in a ‘bear’ market.

The market’s gloom has been deepened by signs of mounting inflationary pressures in the Chinese economy. Inflation figures released this week showed consumer prices rose by 2.8 per cent in April from the year before, an increase from the 2.4 per cent rise in March. Meanwhile, home prices in 70 large and medium-sized Chinese cities rose by 12.8 per cent from a year earlier in April, picking up pace from the 11.7 per cent rise in March. There are also worrying signs that the property price bubble is spreading beyond the major cities and into the country-side.

So far, the Chinese government has held off raising interest rates – which are currently negative after allowing for inflation – in order to cool the super-charged economy. Instead, its ordered banks to hold more deposits on reserve, as well as lifting the minimum deposits that home buyers require to make to get access to home loans, and raising mortgage rates for second and third home buyers.

But there are intense worries that these steps won’t prove sufficient. Earlier this week, the Chinese central bank reported that banks lent 774 billion renminbi ($113 billion) in April, which is about 30 per cent more than in the same month last year. Lending for the first four months of 2010 has now reached 45 per cent of the total quota of loans for the year.

This explosion in Chinese bank lending has led to worries that the country will eventually be saddled with a mountain of bad loans. These concerns were heightened after China’s National Audit Office reported that it had uncovered lending irregularities amounting to tens of billions of renminbi in its latest audit of the Agricultural Bank of China.

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BIS: Western World Spending Its Way To Disaster

13 May

From the UK’s Globe and Mail:

The Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the oldest international financial institution in the world, has functioned as the central bank of central bankers for 80 years. In a working paper written by three senior staff economists (“The future of public debt: prospects and implications”), released in March, BIS warns that Greece isn’t the only Western economy with hazard lights flashing.

Indeed, it names 11 more: Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Britain – and the United States. Without “drastic measures,” BIS says, all of these countries will hit a wall of debt.

When the senior economists at BIS warn 12 of the richest countries on Earth that they must take drastic action to reduce debt, you know that it’s time to check the air bags. The only thing you don’t know, that you need to know, is the precise time of the crash. The lesson is already obvious: Governments can’t drive recklessly, use only the accelerator for braking and not eventually crash.

By the end of 2011, the BIS economists calculate, U.S. government debt will have risen from 62 per cent of GDP in 2007, not quite three years ago, to 100 per cent. Britain’s debt will have risen from 47 per cent of GDP to 94 per cent. Italy’s debt will have risen from 112 per cent of GDP to 130 per cent. All together, the public debt of the 12 countries will have risen from 73 per cent of combined GDP to 105 per cent.

At this debt level, the risk of sovereign default rises rapidly. But the BIS analysis says this unprecedented debt level will itself increase “precipitously” in coming years. It will not, as each of these countries separately insists, fall.

For one thing, the BIS report says, countries that proclaim spending restraint generally do not actually do it. Normally, they hold the line – temporarily. Normally, they slow the rate of increase – temporarily. All pronouncements aside, the BIS report says, these 12 countries have made such grandiose spending commitments that they are predestined for higher debt. The U.S. debt-GDP ratio will hit 150 per cent in the next decade. Britain’s debt-GDP ratio will hit 200 per cent. Japan’s debt-GDP ratio will hit 300 per cent.

These increases in debt, the BIS report says, are untenable. The financial markets, of course, won’t permit them. The only mystery, the BIS report says, is exactly when the markets will intervene. History shows, the report says, that when the markets do rebel, they often do so instantaneously and decisively – often without much warning.

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Barnaby’s Reminder Of The Obvious

13 May

From AAP:

Nationals Senate Leader Barnaby Joyce said he would leave it to Mr Abbott to outline the coalition’s response to the budget.

But he did take a swipe at the government’s debt position, which he said was in the range of $141 billion.

“I know this is obvious, but you have to tell the Australian people this, just because you get a surplus, doesn’t mean you’ve paid off your debt,” Senator Joyce told reporters.

Barnaby is right, of course.

You need to achieve budget surpluses – lots of them – in order to pay down your debt.

I wonder how many mainstream reporters actually know that this is obvious?  And I wonder how many reporters will heed Barnaby’s advice, that “you have to tell the Australian people this“?

Few if any, I’ll wager.  I would happily bet that a poll taken now would show that most Aussies have been thoroughly hoodwinked by the Rudd Labor and media ‘spin’ lies campaign… and think that a (claimed) return to surplus in 2012-13 means that the debt wil be all paid off.

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‘Til Debt Do Tear Us Apart

11 May

Senator Barnaby Joyce writing for The Punch yesterday:

Well, I hope you all feel comfortable that you now owe $140 billion. If you take our population as approximately 22 million, that means you owe in excess of $6300 for each man, woman and child in Australia.

I will keep talking about debt until people realise the dangerous position it puts us in. We are borrowing in excess of $1 billion each week. We see every night on the news the problems of other countries that have not dealt with their debt but have waited for the inevitable when the debt deals with you. How could we be so foolish as a nation to be mounting up debt the way we are?

Then, to all intents and purposes, nationalise half of the sector of our economy which has actually kept us from the jaws of recession – the mining sector. This is something that would be more appropriate for Hugo Chavez or Evo Morales or Castro in Cuba. Australia hasn’t experienced this sort of insanity since the failed approach by the Labor party when they decided to nationalise the banking industry in 1949.

The actions of our Government of late have been quiet bizarre – ceiling insulation, resource tax, BER, 2020 summit, fuel watch, grocery watch, war on obesity and the response to the Henry tax review that only accepted a few of the 138 recommendations.

The government has labelled these measures as a “revolution” or a “war” but really, it’s just been pandemonium.

People are genuinely getting worried that the Government has gone rogue and lost the plot.

Anyway, back to the debt. When will the Government come to the conclusion that as it keeps borrowing in excess of $1 billion a week that inevitably something is going to go “snap”?

The Government no doubt will tell us we should say “hip hip hooray” that our record deficit is not quite as big as they thought it was going to be.

Then they are going to tell us that at sometime in the future, when they cannot be pinned down, it will all get better, like the child who is going to clean up their room in three years’ time.

If there is one thing that Australians can do for themselves, it is not to get into excessive debt. There are no tricks in how you pay it off – it is just very hard work and lots of sacrifices and pain, where pain never needed to happen.

It’s always the same – the pain of paying it off is five times the joy of getting it and when you look at what the Labor Party has got us, they’ve really got us nothing, except for getting us into a lot of trouble. The resource profit tax looks like the last pill of insanity after a huge night on the town.

This budget will determine that either the Labor Party are going to start turning around the debt or it is going to confirm our worst fears about them. I clearly spelled these out at my National Press Club speech where I stated that the Labor Party has no respect for money, no capacity to handle money, and no knowledge of money.

All these fears have crystallised in their inability to grasp the nettle and immediately start turning around the debt – not in two or three years’ time, but now.

Barnaby Is Right.

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Eurozone Faces Bankruptcy, Disintegration

10 May

Could the Eurozone go bankrupt? One of Germany’s leading newspapers believes so.

From an excellent major article in Der Spiegel:

Huge National Debts Could Push Eurozone Into Bankruptcy

Greece is only the beginning. The world’s leading economies have long lived beyond their means, and the financial crisis caused government debt to swell dramatically. Now the bill is coming due, but not all countries will be able to pay it.

…

The euro zone is pinning its hopes on (IMF negotiator) Thomsen and his team. His goal is to achieve what Europe’s politicians are not confident they can do on their own, namely to bring discipline to a country that, through manipulation and financial inefficiency, has plunged the European single currency into its worst-ever crisis.

If the emergency surgery isn’t successful, there will be much more at stake than the fate of the euro. Indeed, Europe could begin to erode politically as a result. The historic project of a united continent, promoted by an entire generation of politicians, could suffer irreparable damage, and European integration would suffer a serious setback — perhaps even permanently.

And the global financial world would be faced with a new Lehman Brothers, the American investment bank that collapsed in September 2008, taking the global economy to the brink of the abyss. It was only through massive government bailout packages that a collapse of the entire financial system was averted at the time.

A similar scenario could unfold once again, except that this time it would be happening at a higher level, on the meta-level of exorbitant government debt. This fear has had Europe’s politicians worried for weeks, but their crisis management efforts have failed. For months, they have been unable to contain the Greek crisis.

There are, in fact, striking similarities to the Lehman bankruptcy. This isn’t exactly surprising. The financial crisis isn’t over by a long shot, but has only entered a new phase. Today, the world is no longer threatened by the debts of banks but by the debts of governments, including debts which were run up rescuing banks just a year ago.

The banking crisis has turned into a crisis of entire nations, and the subprime mortgage bubble into a government debt bubble. This is why precisely the same questions are being asked today, now that entire countries are at risk of collapse, as were being asked in the fall of 2008 when the banks were on the brink: How can the calamity be prevented without laying the ground for an even bigger disaster? Can a crisis based on debt be solved with even more debt? And who will actually rescue the rescuers in the end, the ones who overreached?

So, the GFC is ‘over’, is it Ken?

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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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Rudd Ruins Businesses

7 May

Media Release – Senator Barnaby Joyce, 7 May 2010:

“I still have a distinct vision of Mr Rudd earnestly going to the front of Parliament House with a brand new note book and pen as props for the media grab at the one-on-one with the ceiling insulation industry representatives and the press gallery. He said something about fixing it all up himself, before zipping off. The news our office is getting is that this mess is far from being fixed,” says Senator Barnaby Joyce.

“Not happy with upsetting the resources sector in Australia and slashing millions of dollars off the share market, the Rudd Labor government has not just upset, but sent to the wall, hundreds of legitimate insulation companies. Yes, there needs to be recourse against shonky companies, who, let’s face it, took advantage of a sloppy government scheme, but where is the compassion for the “working Families” Mr Rudd likes to be seen to champion?”

“We have been contacted by many of these honest people who are beginning to have telephones disconnected, locked out of businesses premises, losing motor vehicles to finance companies and some have had mortgagee possession notices on their family homes, because the government will not pay them what is legitimately owed. Minister Combet’s media release on the 20th of April 2010 stated GST deferral was to be made available to insulation companies, yet the Australian Taxation office has sent debt collectors after these same debts. According to industry sources, you Mr Rudd, Mr Combet and Mr Garrett, have ruined a whole industry. So much for the stimulus package sent to save us.”

“Come on Mr Rudd. Where is the fair play you claim to have for “working families”? Why is this insulation program continuing to be such a debacle? Fix it now!”

More Information- Jenny Swan 0746 251500

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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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China May ‘Crash’ In 9-12 Months

4 May

Noted investor and publisher of the fabled “Gloom, Boom and Doom” report, Dr Marc Faber, warns that the Chinese economy may crash within the next 9 to 12 months.

From Bloomberg:

Investor Marc Faber said China’s economy will slow and possibly “crash” within a year as declines in stock and commodity prices signal the nation’s property bubble is set to burst.

The Shanghai Composite Index has failed to regain its 2009 high while industrial commodities and shares of Australian resource exporters are acting “heavy,” Faber said. The opening of the World Expo in Shanghai last week is “not a particularly good omen,” he said, citing a property bust and depression that followed the 1873 World Exhibition in Vienna.

“The market is telling you that something is not quite right,” Faber, the publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom report, said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Hong Kong today. “The Chinese economy is going to slow down regardless. It is more likely that we will even have a crash sometime in the next nine to 12 months.”

Faber joins hedge fund manager Jim Chanos and Harvard University’s Kenneth Rogoff in warning of a crash in China.

China is “on a treadmill to hell” because it’s hooked on property development for driving growth, Chanos said in an interview last month. As much as 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product relies on construction, he said. Rogoff said in February a debt-fueled bubble in China may trigger a regional recession within a decade.

For those who doubt that China is currently experiencing the global mother of all real estate bubbles, take a look at these pictures from Time magazine, showing just how massive speculative over-investment in property construction has left China with literal ‘ghost cities’.

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