MY ITALICISED COMMENTS FOLLOW PART OF (a) ITS EDITORIAL (b) ROSS GITTINS’ BRAINLESS OPINION PIECE
(a) “Reasons to resist the financial panic”
“Confidence and psychology play a nebulous but massive role in the real economy, as they do in financial markets. Australia long ago embraced global markets for goods and services and capital. Thus we are not immune from the turmoil wiping hundreds of billions of dollars from financial assets the world over, including some $55 billion here in several hours yesterday.
….. But there are fundamental reasons, too, why Australians ought to have greater confidence than is suggested by the plunge in the local sharemarket. Our economy is not shackled by debt. Nor is it highly taxed relative to other industrialised nations. The federal budget is headed towards surplus. This is the result of prudent public policy over the past quarter of a century. ….“
Oh, good, the government’s doing fine, but what about the astronomical level of debt Australian households are carrying (and trying, with mixed success, to reduce)? Generated, of course, by record land prices and, yes, by respective governments’ excessive taxation! That private debt doesn’t rate a mention, Mr Editor? Isn’t the fact that the Australian public doesn’t have a dollar to spend just a little bit worrying, you great pillock!
As for the “prudent public policy” of both Liberal and Labor governments presiding happily over the reduction of Australians’ real wages and their spending into a real estate bubble of $2.8 trillion between 1999 and 2010 ….! This includes some $805 billion we are somehow going to have to manage writing off, by the way.
Australia’s position is, in fact, far WORSE than anywhere else in the world, Mr Editor, whilst you, are off in la la land, away with the fairies!
Oh, I get it! Maybe making soothing noises will patch over the structural financial mess that surrounds us! Fat chance!
(b) “Importing gloom belies burgeoning national economy “
“While Europe and the United States are struggling, our budget deficit isn’t particularly big and our level of government debt is laughingly small, writes Ross Gittins.
Is it possible for a country that’s the envy of the developed world to talk itself into a recession? I don’t know. But it seems we’re about to find out. …. Mining boom (blah blah) …. Pay rises are few (blah blah) …. Not because the media are putting a negative spin on all the news, reveling in the bad news and forgetting to mention the good.“
Now, Ross, please tell me you’re not a neo-liberal economist; a blinkered high priest for the status quo?
You didn’t write THE AGE editorial, did you. Ross?
Hey! Fairy stories some other time, you guys! Australia meanwhile has a serious structural problem of household debt with which we have to contend!
THE AGE can be much more forensic. It can surely do much better than that sort of crud.
Poem-: We fight over raising the ceiling while ignoring our washed away foundations.
Is it a glass ceiling they want to raise? When we know we should be raising a bill for Glass stegal. In the bitter darkness of night they state cold through the ceiling, they can see the stars the limit, and their great mansion floats as if by some miracle.
Our sub prime is just getting started here in OZ, as we have a two year delay on the rest of the world, Without sounding like a complete ‘Git’, the red treasury book said their was no more leverage in private debt to household spending. Were maxed-out. But the Neoliberal lame-stream media always reports in terms of a little more leveraging left, always looking for loop-holes or what’s left to distort in economics to make the leveraged ponzi last a little longer, instead of keeping within the correct classical paradigm, this makes the longevity of this bubble look like Baby-Boomer understanding classical economics, but its another foul poo-sandwich dressed-up as prime beef steak as the latest offerings by the press-titutes of the mainstream media. I would expect the ‘Marduk’ press, you know the Marduk the dragon of the book of revelations who gives voice to the beast. The headlines shout-: 120 billion wiped off the stock market in an hour, but we gotta clamp down on people living on $10,000 dollars a year on benefits. Now you know how sick and hollow rings advance Australia Fair line is. And business say ‘we will be passing it on to consumers’, but may I suggest the consumer will be leaving the costs with you, because they have slammed their wallets shut in disgust