All Posts Tagged With: "rba"

One quick note about this: there is obviously plenty of inflation in the prices you pay every day. But most consumer price indices are rigged to understate inflation, as our colleague David Evans pointed out yesterday in Canberra at the Gold Standard Institute conference in Canberra. Trimmed medians…hedonic adjustments…

What we make of it is that dividends used to account for a much larger percentage of your total return in stocks than they have in the last twenty years. Times change. There’s no rule that says the future has to be just like the past. But if stocks beat inflation, should you invest in stocks for income or capital appreciation? That’s the second question.

On 21 September I provided testimony to the Senate Economics References Committee on the damage done by the government’s “stimulus” package. The submission was broken into five separate sections.

The bad news is that existing shareholders took a hit on their shares when NAB discounted the offering to the current share price. It probably had to do this to incentivise buyers. But that was the hidden cost, and it was born by existing shareholders. And in any event, we’re still not convinced that capital raised to buffer against further loan losses is the kind of event a shareholder would be bullish about.

Bonds, however, are looking rather infirm. Prices fell and yields rose on U.S. Treasury bonds. This is easy enough to dismiss as a natural consequence of the recovery theme gaining traction. But might also have something to do with the fact that the U.S. Treasury will auction another $140 billion in bonds next week. That amount tops the $104 billion amount auctioned last week. It’s a lot of borrowing, isn’t it?

The Aussie gold price is fighting its way up despite the fact that the Aussie dollar keeps gaining on the greenback. While the Aussie gold price is up just $1.71 in the last 30 days (0.14%), the U.S. gold price is up nearly nine percent. We reckon the Aussie gold price will begin moving up closer to $1,500 again on a combination of events (weakness against the greenback for one.)

How to Make a 979.2% Return in 43 Years… Embrace inflation, that’s how. In some newer dictionaries the term “Inflation” is beginning to be revised as a phenomenon of rising prices. But I prefer the traditional meaning where “Inflation is the Increase in the money supply”. I’m sad to say, the Keynesian economists and other money printers are in effect encouraging this change of the financial lexicon. If you read from the RBA’s mission statement you’ll read the expression “targeted inflation.”

If you were drawing up a plan for your dream economic recovery, this is how you would draw it up. The weakness emerging in the Australian housing sector (the fastest decline in prices in six years) would be made up for by resurgent Chinese demand for Aussie resources, led by the first growth in China’s manufacturing sector in nine months.