All posts by Bryan Kavanagh

I'm a real estate valuer who worked in the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) before co-founding Westlink Consulting, a real estate valuation practice. I discovered, by leaving publicly-generated land rents to be privately capitalised by banks and individuals into escalating land price bubbles, this generates repetitive recessions and financial depressions. We need a tax-switch: from wages, profits and commodities onto economic rents/unearned incomes, if we are to create prosperity and minimise excessive private debt.

LOVE TO HEAR HIM SING THIS (Originally Wed 25 Feb 2009)

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Blowin’ in the wind

Why must we be fined with tax, for workin’ for the nation?
Yes, ‘n’ how many years will it take before … we’ll quit our occupation?
Why won’t we turn where the tax breaks are … in real ’state speculation?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.

How many times can pol’ticians cry tears, ’bout housing ’ford-abil-ity?
If they can tax everything else, but let our land rent go free?
Why let economic rent escape, though it is stup-id-ity?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.

How many times can real estate busts bring on social disjoint?
And why is it that ‘conomists keep on missin’ the point?
Yes, ‘n’ how many times must the tax system fail – before we a land rent appoint?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Why do they bail out all of the banks, when they killed off effective demand?
Henry George showed how to remedy boom ‘n’ bust – what’s to understand?
Let people keep what they have earned, and take the rent of land,
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Britain’s landlords in 1909, killed off “The People’s Budg-et”,
But promoted war in 1914 …. lest – we – forget,
So The Powers That Be’d rather go to war, than the public’s land rent collect?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.

YOU’VE GOT TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE PROBLEM IF YOU WANT TO FIX IT! (Originally Sun 1 Feb 2009)

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WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM – DAVOS

Early this  morning (Sunday), I listened as the BBC World Service featured a well-credentialled panel commenting on the World Economic Forum in Davos. Of course it was discussing the GFC. No one on the panel had a workable solution, as they hadn’t ‘seen the cat’, the real estate bubble that precedes every recession. This one, too, was apparently painted in camouflage against the background of the global economic meltdown.

Each of them nevertheless provided useful insights: Nouriel Roubini merited a congratulatory pat on the back for having called the downturn.  Laura Tyson, an advisor to Barack Obama, made sense when she said it’s pointless seeking scapegoats when there’s a systemic problem that needs to be urgently addressed. But no effective solution was provided, because participants wouldn’t get to the root cause of this unfolding economic depression.

They generally accepted that central banks failed us by not turning back the credit spigot before the real estate bubble began to develop. And, by golly, if we had our time over again we’d soon fix that! That’s nonsense, of course, because easy credit may have exacerbated the real estate bubble, but it certainly didn’t create it. It would have occurred even under a tighter credit regime – because that’s where the capital gains and tax advantages are to be found, the cost of money notwithstanding.

They skimmed over the real problem, our double standard on real estate monopoly and speculation. Although property bubbles precede and underpin virtually each and every crash, politicians know that many of us get a warm inner glow when the value of our property increases – so they’re not about to interfere by telling us there’s a line to be drawn in connection with rapidly escalating land prices: at least, until it self-corrects in a recession or depression. After all, a man’s house is his castle, right?

Real estate monopoly, speculation and rampantly escalating land price increases may only be condemned by politicians and economists after the event.  Even at that point nothing must be put into place to ensure that these events will never occur again!  Why not go for regulation and interest rates, instead?

It is not only politicians and economists who praise property price increases as one of the ‘benefits of home ownership’ while condemning the lack of affordable housing out the other side of their mouths. Most people have also now come to regard real estate as ‘private property’, and charges on the value thereof as something akin to blue murder.

Even the law used to distinguish freehold land from ‘private property’ (produced by individuals) and ‘quit rents’ paid on freehold titles. But our laws seem to have experienced a one hundred and eighty degree turnabout: black has become white, and both the monopoly of land and the pathology of the creation of bubbles in land prices is rarely questioned.

The vagaries of the role and responsibility of landholding, speculation and monopoly in modern society are compounded by the theory of real estate valuation having been written out of the study of economics so that we don’t become too condemnatory about the excesses of real estate markets. Devastating boom/bust cycles have come to be regarded as ‘the natural business cycle’ about which we can do nothing substantial – ‘cept the ever reliable ‘regulation’ and ‘central bank interest rate policy’, that is!

It is not generally understood that the value of a piece of real estate may be established by capitalizing its net rent at the yield (rate), indicated by the market. Were valuation theory widely understood, it would be known that a market return of 3% or often less (that is, greater than 33 years’ purchase) on residential property is entirely speculative at any location. It follows therefore that a bursting must necessarily follow such a bubble in the capitalised price in order for returns to resume commercial viability.

In valuing real estate over 38 years, I’ve noted that many real estate agents and valuers (assessors) will develop a feeling about an impending economic recession well before economists will. Whereas real estate professionals have some understanding of the theory of valuation, most economists don’t, because it’s no longer part of their neo-classical training. More than a few real estate people will have had an ironic guffaw at last week’s announcements from the IMF and Access Economics that economic growth might tail off during the course of 2009! That was some ‘prediction’!

Adam Smith’s once formidable Science of Political Economy has been reduced to the modern embarrassment, ‘Economics’. Chaos rules, as individuals and the various schools of economics drag out their latest ‘solution’ or the latest form of tax. Throughout this chaos, every government remains assured and confident that recovery is ‘ just around the corner’. Why, just look at all those stimulus packages they’re rolling out for us! None of them perceive that they’re slavishly following the ineffectual 1930s script.

But we can’t expect salvation from within the real estate industry.  As long as real estate professionals’ fees are based upon the value of properties with which they deal, they’re unlikely to blow the whistle on the destructive effects of real estate bubbles on the economy either.  You’d think that an ongoing healthy and vibrant real estate market would be more preferable to them than one characterised by repetitive boom and bust conditions. Valuers and real estate agents pose the defensive question whether it’s their role to second-guess our economic ‘experts’ anyway – and “our professional institutions shouldn’t get ‘political’ [read ‘honest’?] about real estate’s effects on the wider economy?”

Politicians, policymakers and theologians need to find the gumption to get out of the pockets of landed interests because the tax privileges dispensed to real estate monopoly and speculation have harmed societies since the days of ancient Rome. (Latifundia perdidere Italiam.)  Until they do so, the chances of remedying the current economic depression are zero. Taxing thrift and industry and inflating land price bubbles have created recessions and depressions over the millennia, and Fred Harrison’s “The Power in the Land” provides data confirming this thesis over the last two centuries . So, it’s beyond time, instead of sweeping the issue under the carpet, they acknowledged it.  From whence in their ranks shall emerge the next Richard Cobden, the next William Wilberforce?

Utilising land rent as an alternative to taxation – the one thing necessary for a swift recovery from the GFC – remained a remote possibility as I listened to the BBC’s expert panel in Davos this morning. They were still dutifully playing the game of avoiding the real problem.

SIMPLE SOLUTIONS V. ‘MORAL RELATIVISM’? (Originally Sat 10 Jan 2009)

William of Occam
William of Occam

NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMIC SOLUTIONS: REDUCTIO AD ABSURDAM?

Reductionism in medical science has provided DNA sequencing of the human genome that will lead to positive breakthroughs for humanity. Its practitioners however acknowledge the necessity to keep an eye on overarching ethical issues.

But economists haven’t challenged the reduction of modern economics down to mathematical models which fail to reflect the real world.  Economics has been given no superstructure to retain perspective, keep it on track to be able to forecast economic events scientifically. Accordingly, it has descended into a mathematical art in which the issue of balancing supply and demand has become paramount. Economic life can’t be reduced so ridiculously without major repercussions. But there are solutions.

How is it that a real estate valuer such as I could forecast the financial collapse and economists couldn’t? Could it be that I consider that Ricardo’s Law of Rent (i.e.  ‘Location, location, location!’) does matter? Maybe the economy needs to be understood in terms of time and place?

When economic analysis can’t see the forest for the trees as in the case of the financial meltdown, it’s surely time to apply the blowtorch of Occam’s Razor to the private debt-bloated carcass of the US economy? Whilst hopelessly labyrinthine people will suggest “There are no easy solutions“, we do need to ask some pretty fundamental questions to arrive at a sound conclusion.

What exactly is the problem? Why did such tremendous levels of unsustainable mortgage debt arise in the first place? Monetary theorists say that money was too cheap. The argument may have superficial merit, but what is the proper rate of interest that would have obviated the real estate bubble? Interest rates still don’t cut it in terms of Occam’s Razor [poor pun!] of getting to the simplest, obvious explanation.

Let’s first confirm what assets are mainly offered as security for financial loans or leverage.  It’s usually real estate; either the value of the particular piece of real estate being purchased, or other real estate held in the borrower’s name.

OK then, but the price of real estate security consists of two components:

  • 1) the value of the buildings which tends to depreciate in real terms over time, and;
  • 2) the value of the land which escalates faster than other aggregates, such as wages, population and GDP.  [Australian Bureau of Statistics Catalogue 5204 (table 61) tells us that from 2000 to 2008 the value of Australia’s land increased 2.5 times (from $1.258 trillion to 3.148 trillion) while GDP increased by a factor of 1.74  (from $0.646 trillion to $1.130 trillion) ].

The value of buildings is easily assessed. The current replacement cost of a particular building is ascertained and a level of depreciation applied if applicable after analysis of sales evidence.

But how do we assess the value of the piece of land on which the building is constructed? It’s to be found either by looking at sales of comparable vacant land or by deducting the assessed (depreciated) value of the improvements from the value of the property following sales analysis.  While US economists still argue that the land component can’t be separated accurately, valuers in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa have done it expertly for more than a century.

But what if the price of land were to escalate ridiculously? Against what criterion are we to measure this? Isn’t land price the capitalisation into perpetuity of the estimated net rent? Yes it is … into perpetuity. But can’t political or economic discontinuities intervene (between now and forever) that might throw the capitalised value of the land right out the window? Yes, and these events do occur regularly – every 18 years or so in fact, often accompanied by some mid-term (9 year) economic event, but our brothers and sisters in banking are prepared to lend against the dynamically volatile price of land, together of course with the more stable depreciating value added by the improvements, and are then happy to nominate the composite value as ‘security’. That’s usually OK – but at quite regular intervals it’s definitely not OK.

I’m not an economist, but I do know one BIG thing that economist don’t seem to – that when real estate yields get down to 3% or less, as in recent years, it’s time to start running for the hills!

Although a few economists may have had an uneasy feeling as a benign boom turned into an incredibly inflated real estate bubble, none but a handful had any idea of the implications of excessive privatisation of the economic rent in such fashion, and proper risk management went out the window.

The land price component of real estate usually does go up in real terms, but every now and then it doesn’t, correcting with a massive thud. So, in granting loans against real estate asset prices without understanding the cycles of economic rent, banks take an enormous gamble on what’s going to happen to the land component of the assets that they’ve accepted as security for the loan. This time they lost: big time! That’s the current state of play of risk management, folks, and stricter monetary policy and re-regulating bank lending practices won’t remedy this!

Apart from all the debt brought about by skyrocketing land prices, we tend to forget the extent to which the government is in our pockets. We’ve become inured to the perverse forms of taxation (some say legalised robbery) that subtracts not only from our earned incomes and purchasing power, but which cascades throughout the economy to increase prices of our goods and services.

Therefore, taxation itself can be seen as a pathology, equally damaging as land price bubbles. Combine the two and we develop perfect storms for recession, or occasionally for a financial depression: i.e. land prices escalate into a bubble because we’ve not sufficiently taxed away publicly-generated land and natural resource rents. All other taxes not only add to prices but also reduce purchasing power. We respond to the worsening scenario by taking on impossible levels of debt, in an effort to simply to keep up with an impossible situation.

Let’s use the principle of Occam’s Razor to summarise USA private debt, poverty, lack of housing affordability, taxation, the excessive privatisation of land rent, and financial collapse in a few sentences, in words of one syllable, so that even a neoclassical economist may understand it:-

  • If the new Pres gets no land rent, he will still have both high tax and high land price. That’s what brought the big debt and the crash in the first place.
  •  But if the Pres gets more land rent and less tax, with both low tax and low land price, he will keep debt down and not have a crash. Is this not E-Z!   (Sorry!)

Of course, no government has come close to applying this bold solution since the Progressive Era, when Henry George solutions were boldly, if a little tentatively, applied, as in Australia with the introduction the federal land tax in 1910 and the Australian Capital Territory being founded on a leasehold system in 1913.

So, it can be see that things don’t augur well for us finding solutions for exiting this global financial collapse properly, in such a way that we will avoid the bursting of increasingly worsening real estate bubbles.

Centenary of “The People’s Budget” (Originally Mon 5 Jan 2009)

NEW YEAR INSIGHTS

David_Lloyd_George_1915There’s synchronicity in the centenary year of the “People’s Budget”, delivered in the UK under the Liberal prime ministership of Herbert Asquith by Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, that we again need a People’s Budget if we wish to extricate ourselves from this particular global financial crisis.

Although the principles behind land tax, the keystone of the 1909  People’s Budget, were overwhelmingly supported by the British people and better understood than they are these days, they were opposed by the House of Lords, despite the fact that it had become accepted practice since the 17th century that the Lords would not reject House of Commons budgetary measures.  They nevertheless vetoed the chancellor’s ‘land tax’ budget …. the government be damned!

The land tax proposal finally being withdrawn to ease the political impass that developed, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George quickly used the people’s wrath to curb the power of the Lords from being thus misused again.  Preparations to devise a land tax valuation base meanwhile proceeded.

Militarism was in the air a century ago. Germany had begun to overtake Britain industrially and pose a threat to her markets. The aristocracy of both countries considered a war was needed: maybe a good war would resolve failing economies and finally fix vacillating imperial boundaries.

Lloyd George wouldn’t accept such twisted, fatalistic logic. He tried to countervail the militaristic bravado by proposing a cut in expenditure on Britain’s new Dreadnought battleships, reducing their planned number from six to four. However, the Tory opposition, with closet support from the First Sea Lord, mounted a formidable campaign (“We want eight and we won’t wait!”) which saw Lloyd George defeated on the matter within his own cabinet. War was ensured.

In the tinderbox setting, the killing of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Bosnian-Serb student Gavrillo Princip on 28 June 1914 provided the convenient excuse for the outbreak of war. It served other purposes for The Powers That Be, both in England and Germany.  The British aristocracy believed it all to the good that it would also put paid to any suggestion of a national land tax. So they were not unhappy when Germany declared war on Britain’s ally Russia on 1 August 1914. Britain and France invaded the German protectorate of Togoland in Africa within the week.

The tactics employed against the People’s Budget serve a useful warning of the lengths to which The Powers That Be are prepared go to resist the capture of publicly-generated rent. They preferred to wage WW1 rather than allow labour and capital to be freed from their throttling rentier grip.  Incredibly, things haven’t changed one hundred years on; politicians and policymakers still remain in the thrall of the lords of the land and the people again take it in the neck.

The question now arises whether a collapsing Pax Americana will also gear up for hostilities in order to try to resolve its economic collapse. In a scenario of deepening depression, does America’s biggest creditor, China, have reason to be alarmed for its future?

obamaPortents for the new President

There’s much goodwill at the moment for Barack Obama. The world is ready for a cooler, more thoughtful approach to international relations than was conducted by President George W Bush and his colleagues. A lot of the goodwill for the new President will dissipate rapidly when his newly-announced $1 trillion infrastructure program fails to turn the economic tide. Although Keynesian pump-priming would assist the US economy greatly as it emerges from economic depression, it will be found wanting during the initial deflationary phase as the economy tries to deleverage from the financial fiasco. The economy has seized control of events, and President Obama and his economists must accept the fact.

And instead of handouts to the FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate), posterity would owe a vote of gratitude to Barack Obama were he to direct the attention of Congress to repairing the structural fault that brought about the collapse, namely, dismantling the pernicious tax regime that rewards real estate monopolists, financiers and speculators whilst fining labour and capital.  When the integral role of taxation systems in the collapse are recognised, so will the unreality of the US financial system be exposed to public scrutiny. Taxation does indeed destroy!

The sorry fact, however, is that the new president is at the mercy of economists, 99.0% of whom are clueless about remedying the financial meltdown. They’ve been trained in the same way as those who presided over the collapse in the first place and don’t understand that there is an alternative to taxation.

Economists of the Austrian School might be nonplussed at this point, because although they do understand that taxation is indeed theft from labour and capital, most of them have not yet discerned that land revenues drawn from the holding of real estate are not taxes in nature but rents. Nor do they recognise that publicly-endowed real estate values do not in any sense connote ‘private property’. Without this understanding, they are merely a measure of degree superior to Marxists at the other end of the political spectrum.

The USA has reached this low point in economic history because taxation and land price increases were permitted to whittle away the purchasing power of its citizenry and, as a consequence, astronomically inflate debt levels. Fuel to the fire over the last 30 years has been the remorseless winding back of land-based revenues at the insistence of a rampant real estate lobby.

Mason Gaffney, professor of economics at the University of California (Riverside) long ago documented the decline in the fortunes of California following Proposition 13 putting a lid on its property tax in 1978. He noted, contrariwise, the superior economic performance of New Hampshire the highest property-taxing state in the US. It seems that many people other than most modern economists (‘mules packing a library’?) are starting to comprehend the extent of the Californication of America. It is becoming more apparent that in order to wake from the financial nightmare, the US sorely needs to capture more of its publicly-generated rent for necessary revenue, instead of fining the producers of wealth. But neo-classical economics still remains the stumbling block.

cover-front(small)Meanwhile Back in Oz

Despite the need for taxation to be reduced and public capture of rent to be increased worldwide, “Australia’s Future Tax System” (AFTS) seems destined to tinker around the edges. The panel of economists, comprising Ken Henry, Jeff Harmer, John Piggott, Heather Ridout and Greg Smith have retrieved the situation from Treasury’s early ‘slip’ in its basic outline of Architecture of Australia’s Tax and Transfer System wherein it said that revenue may be derived from three sources – from land, labour and capital – to produce its preliminary Consultation paper Summary in December 2008 which now appears to see only two potential revenue sources, labour and capital. Land seems to have disappeared, rendered invisible once again by the spin and prestidigitation of economists.

We can assume the scrapping of a number of taxes and be expected to fall for the latest fashionable (hopefully diverting?) tax.  But we’ll be asked to overlook the damaging role played by the taxation of labour and capital in fostering the development of Australia’s soon to burst bubble in land-prices.

The AFTS panel has been handed an extremely critical brief, made all the more important by world economic events. We must hope over the course of 2009 that it can raise itself above the mediocre to offer the solution to our times.

Ineffective demand = economic depression (Originally Fri 12 Dec 2008)

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SUPPLY PROBLEM?  NO, IT’S INEFFECTIVE DEMAND!Earned Incomes

What’s wrong with the above picture?

There’s nothing wrong with it – except for what it portrays. It depicts Australia’s descent into an economic depression because a badly-designed tax system has virtually choked off effective demand. The unique chart disaggregates incomes within our GDP, and possibly approximates the picture within other economies.

Why ‘unique’? Because it assesses once and for all the extent of land rent within the economy, both that which has been privatised and that which has been captured for the running of government. In economic terms, rent is the annual value of a nation’s land. It’s literally the natural source for revenue, because no individuals have created it. It’s the value that the public and community infrastructure give to land as we work away at our jobs each year. Although it is a surplus value – because it’s community-generated, not a production cost – in Australia we capture only 12% of it to the public purse (less than $40 billion of $325 billion). The graph shows that rent is sufficient to replace taxation at all levels of government. i.e. If we were to collect it all, there would be no need to tax (or fine) labour and capital for working. And this would obviously act to regenerate employment.

We currently allow owners, speculators and monopolists to retain 88% of our land rent even though they’ve done nothing to earn it. And, of course, those who get the greater part of it are those who own not only the most land, but also the most valuable land.

People who rent their homes receive no rent from society at all,  even though their presence as a group did assist to create it. So, it is unfair in the extreme that rent, being generated by the community as a whole, is collected largely by wealthier segments of society.

Therefore, as Australia allowed its public rent to become privatised, it has become necessary to tax labour and capital more heavily for working, in order to make up the increasing amounts necessary to finance government. As can be seen, the effect has been to reduce the returns of Australian labour and capital severely. Were we to capture more of our land rent, wages and capital would obviously retain a greater share of their earnings – nearer to the full $675 billion to which in 2007 they were entitled.

Net wages and interest have grown only 677 times since 1911 as their proportion of GDP declined from 85% of GDP to 39%. Taxation meanwhile grew by a factor of 7000.  Herein lies another hidden economic truth: every part of the increase in taxation was added into the costs of Australian producers. There is one thing on which economists do agree – that, unlike taxes, rents cannot be passed on in prices in a competitive economy. Therefore, to claim that Australia can’t compete with China, or other ‘low wage’ countries, is nonsense. We could become cost competitive overnight simply by cutting counter-productive taxation and increasing land-based revenue.

Unlike labour and capital’s share of GDP, Australia’s land rent grew by a factor of 5400 between 1911 and 2007, from $60 million to $325 billion; because most of this was privatised, we get an insight into the process that enriches the wealthy at the expense of the Australian community as a whole.  They leech parasitically off its rent.

That’s not the entire story from our chart. While rent has always grown strongly with the community and its infrastructure, it climbed particularly rapidly since 1980, during the period of so-called ‘economic rationalism’, as it became popular to ‘pooh pooh’ community values and to sell off public assets to rent-seeking companies. Rent represents community, insofar as it is generated by the existence of the community, but we permitted the greater part of the increases in land rent to flow into a few private pockets, including those of major companies who have majored in the art of claiming the community’s rent to themselves. In the process, massive increases in rent were capitalised into sharply escalating land prices, bigger mortgages, and impossible levels of household debt.

It consequently became necessary for many Australians to replace purchasing power lost with greater debt, merely to exist. Whereas Charles Dickens’ character, Wilkins Micawber, came to learn that this was an unsustainable position, the point seems to remain lost upon the framers of taxation policy.

Caught in the jaws of the rent-seekers’ vice, that is, between a declining share of GDP and higher and higher taxes and land prices, Australia will now grind to a halt as labour and capital are denied effective demand.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, the Australian taxation system has emitted a glowing green signal to property monopoly and speculation and a red light to labour and capital. The current depression therefore becomes an entirely logical outcome of a pathological revenue system, and the economy has finally succumbed.

It is said that we live in ‘the computer age’ and ‘land doesn’t matter anymore’, but this ignores that every product emanates from land, even the computer chip. It’s pretty basic stuff, but if we want to re-establish cheaper access to land, so that labour may more readily combine with land to generate capital and wealth again, we need to capture a far greater proportion of rent for public revenue.

Despite the graph’s portrayal of an inverse relationship between the private capture of rent and the returns to labour and capital, there has been no analytical recognition that the greater part of our deepening economic woe flows from the excessive privatisation of Australia’s land rent. Consideration of Ricardo’s Law (‘location, location, location’) is dismissed as taxes penalise regional and rural areas on an equal basis with our capital cities.

Instead of the government sacrificing huge sums of money into a deflationary vortex in the forlorn hope of resuscitating the economy, Ken Henry’s review of Australia’s Future Tax System needs to provide leadership by suggesting the slashing of taxes on labour and capturing a greater share of our land rent for revenue.

Real estate speculation and monopoly can no longer be permitted to remain the sacred cow.  Coupled with taxation, these are responsible for the system grinding to a halt, for excessive debt and ineffective demand.

RESERVE BANKS EASILY ASTONISHED! (Originally Thurs 4 Dec 2008)

RBA

LOWY INSTITUTE LECTURE

At last night’s Lowy Institute lecture in Sydney, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Ian Macfarlane, said that he found the events of the last year to “have been quite astonishing”.  Maybe for some, but three and a half years ago in THE AGE of 15 June 2005 I warned the RBA not to increase interest rates because Australia was “primed to tank into a deflation” and “in the current deflationary environment … the next adjustment of Australian interest rates would more properly be down.”

The RBA chose to ignore the looming asset price drop, ratcheting interest rates up seven times by 25 basis points over the next three years. Now, the RBA’s “seeing is believing” approach has witnessed it move into panic mode to lower interest rates an amazing 3.00% in just three months! Surely this hopelessly dilatory action is the really ‘astonishing’ event, Mr Macfarlane? It is a damning indictment of the very body whose raison d’etre is to maintain full employment and to protect Australians and their currency.

The Bank took no cognisance at all of the real estate bubble that I quantified and defined, prefering to listen only to its approved ‘experts’, any of whom I would challenge to match my forecast of the global collapse in the British Journal Geophilos in 2001.

In “Secrets and Lies” in the Business Spectator of 2 December, Alan Kohler noted that Goldman Sachs admits to tailoring the truth a little in delivering its economic prognostications, because it is a commercial organisation, and, well …. it just has to!  My colleagues and I at the Land Values Research Group and Prosper Australia are not such a commercial organisation and don’t have to ‘doctor’ and spin any of our studies.  We’ll simply stick to providing the facts about what they reveal, because once these are known and  understood it will be seen there are workable solutions to the financial implosion.

OK, so Ian Macfarlane seems to agree with Christopher Joye of RP Data Rismark and other crash-deniers that although our real estate bubble is some 1.7 times larger than the US’s, ours isn’t about to burst. Want a bet? Astonished?

Here comes “THE DEPRESSION”!

THE CURRENT ECONOMIC DEPRESSION

When you’ve seen this socio-economic collapse coming from a long way off, you need to get the absolute frustration with public policy out of your system – especially as it relates to the damaging effects of taxation!

Each of my ‘commentaries’ up to and including May 2009 was e-mailed to all Australian federal politicians – until I saw the pointlessness of that!

So, this commentary will be my catharsis. If others are interested, that’s great!

There’s been a hiatus since May, but as of 26 August 2009 The Depression is up and running!

– Bryan Kavanagh

Depression2