All Posts Tagged With: "reserve bank"

Stock markets are fixing to make their highest highs since September of 2008. The Dow nearly closed at a post-Lehman high of 11,000 overnight in New York trading. And here in Australia, the ASX/200 looks to break out of a long channel of indecisiveness and close above 5,000.

Surely those numbers indicate that people feel good about the economy.

But we do know that financial markets are getting more volatile in recent years, not less. Is it globalization? Is it the digitalization of trading data and continuous, algorithmic trading models? Does the pursuit of an informational advantage (or the belief that one is possible) drive people to trade more?

First off, house prices are still rising in Australia, but for the second month in a row sales are falling. Here in Melbourne, the average house price is now $510,000 according to the RP Data Index. Melbourne prices are up 15% since January. Granted, that’s not quite as good as the stock market this year. The All Ords is up nearly 30% year to date. But it’s not bad for houses is it?

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…

Your editor spent last night in a discussion with a querulous and drunk Aussie over the stimulus. “It looks like it worked to me,” he said. “Only world economy still growing. GDP up. We’ve got China. Looks like Ruddy and Swanny know what they’re doing. You’re just a hack. You’ve never run a country. And you’re a Yank!”

What’s more, the emergence of the gold exchange traded funds (ETFs) has put a huge portion of the gold market in a very small number of hands. If the ETFs sell…who will they sell to? Or more succinctly, a lot of the gold demand is coming from a few institutions. If other institutions (central banks and sovereign wealth funds) don’t pick up the slack, there will be more sellers than buyers and prices will fall.

The “wipeout” in the sector was especially bad news for Babcock & Brown, Rubicon Asset Management, and Record Funds Management. These heavily leveraged firms didn’t survive the steep rise in global borrowing costs. It didn’t help that asset values began tumbling when the leveraged dried up.

The market begins the month of August trying to prove that the Great Recession is over and the earnings recovery has begun. On Friday, US GDP data came out and seemed to confirm that just maybe the worst is behind us. According to the cryptic figures, US GDP is shrinking at annualised pace of just 1% – considerably less than the 6.4% from late last year.