All Posts Tagged With: "global financial crisis"

But is there really going to be a round two? Well, if the first incorrect assumption was that Australia didn’t have a bad debt problem, the second assumption is probably even more dangerous. It’s more dangerous because it’s the single most unexamined assumption behind much of Australia’s economic prosperity. The assumption is that we’ll always have China.

But first, why are companies hoarding cash? Bloomberg reports that companies in the S&P 500 have increased their cash holdings to an aggregate US$1.18 trillion dollars. The big blue chip multinationals have cut spending, frozen new hires (not literally), and generally kept cautious until more details emerge about the economic landscape.

The weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review has gold on the cover, incidentally. You can see a picture of it a few paragraphs down. Underneath the giant golden letters it reads, “Why you shouldn’t laugh about gold hitting $US2000 an oz.” But if anyone’s laughing, it’s a nervous laughter.

For investors, it means gold is going to have a good solid run at US$1,000. It’s in the neighbourhood already. But in the lead up to the G-20 leader meeting in Pittsburgh later this month, we wouldn’t be surprised to see gold price in a lot more fiat money creation.

Last year’s spike is the biggest since the Medicare prescription drug benefit was added in 2003. According to the rag, the government garnered $6.8 trillion in “new obligations” in 2008, bringing the total US tab to $63.8 trillion.

Last week we repeated John Robb’s idea that while the regulators are stress testing the banks (something the market has already done, if you look at the price of bank stocks) the regulators themselves are being stress tested. Or, more to the point, if GM and Citibank and AIG are failing because they are too large, complex, and poorly managed, then what about even larger organisations with even poorer structural finances like, say, the United States government?