In February the government raised its borrowing ceiling from $75 billion to $200 billion. Last week, Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner said the bleak IMF report highlighted the big revenue gap in Australia’s budget. He said Australia might have to raise its debt ceiling to $300 billion. This is the nice thing about being a sovereign government. A household cannot arbitrarily vote itself the power to go deeper into debt…
April 27th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 7 comments | ContinuedAll Posts Tagged With: "credit"
Policy Makers and the Depression
The upside of a severe and painful depression is that the much needed adjust in the economy would finally happen. The flow of credit to productive enterprise and real risk-taking (value creating) activities could resume.
April 23rd, 2009 | Dan Denning | 25 comments | Continued
Planet Death Star
Kevin Rudd is headed over to America next month to speak with Barrack Obama about climate change, the global financial system, and others ways to save the world and improve on human nature. Perhaps he might ask him if America’s US$1.75 trillion annual deficit for next year should cause global investors to worry about America’s credit quality.
February 27th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 4 comments | Continued
Bunch of Turkeys
A bunch of turkeys have hijacked our monetary system and all they know is how to print money. Rather than let the market clear itself out, central banks continue to use taxpayers’ money to bail out insolvent institutions. This brilliant strategy has NEVER worked in the past and it will not work this time around. Instead of robbing innocent people of their savings, the establishment must allow the weak banks to go bust…
February 26th, 2009 | Puru Saxena | 3 comments | Continued
What We Face Now Is a Depression
What happened to Thomas L. Friedman? Did he drop the hair dryer in the bathtub…and give himself a jolt? Suddenly, he’s saying something that is modest and sensible. But his brush with intelligence lasted only three paragraphs. Then, it’s back to the old simpleton Friedman…with a solution to every crisis…and a fix for every problem his last solution caused. But you can’t fix a depression. And what we face now is a depression…
February 3rd, 2009 | Bill Bonner | 3 comments | Continued
The Permanent Portfolio
Today’s Daily Reckoning begins with an outsider’s look at the Australian banking sector. Then we’ll take a Prime Ministerial look. And finally, a Gallic technical trader’s look. All three perspectives suggest that Australia’s banking sector is a lot less insulated from the global crisis than its advocates have suggested. But don’t take our word for it…
January 21st, 2009 | Dan Denning | 17 comments | Continued
Playing the Tax Credit Card
One of Obama’s prime campaign planks has been his promise to mercilessly raise taxes on the “rich,” a group initially defined as those making more than $250,000 per year. This was later dropped to $200,000 per year, and more recently has been defined as those Americans making more than $150,000 annually.
November 6th, 2008 | The Daily Reckoning | 1 comment | Continued
Artificially Created Credit by the Federal Reserve System Got Us into This Crisis
We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy – all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment…
October 3rd, 2008 | United States Congressman Ron Paul | 4 comments | ContinuedBank for International Settlements Report Looks at Origins of Credit Crisis
We spend so much time trying to figure out what’s ahead that we forget a simple fact: what’s happening now has its causes in previous actions and decisions. That is a fancy way of saying that maybe it’s a good time to stop prognosticating and take a look back at the origins of the credit crisis. Instead of guessing what each piece of news means, let’s just look at the facts. Fortunately, the Bank for International Settlements has done it for us!
July 8th, 2008 | Dan Denning | 2 comments | Continued
Falling Interest Rates and Increasingly Accessible Credit
Consumers are still spending money, too. And since they don’t really have any money to spend, they’re still borrowing. A report in yesterday’s news tells us that one in ten baby boomers has to borrow money just to pay everyday expenses.
May 15th, 2008 | Bill Bonner | 0 comments | Continued
