And that’s the point. It is all money in the bank. There is, according to the press, a difference of opinion between Treasury and the Reserve Bank over interest rates and their proper direction.
November 3rd, 2009 | Dr. Steven Kates | 79 comments | ContinuedAll Posts Tagged With: "reserve bank"
Inflation is Evident If You Just Follow the Money
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…
November 2nd, 2009 | Dan Denning | 5 comments | Continued
IMF Report Concludes Aussie Banks are “Very Sound”…
The Guv also said he would not be too timid about raising interest rates. He believes the threat [of global financial calamity] has passed and that the bigger threat may well be inflation. That kind of tough talk sent the Aussie dollar right up to over 92 cents against the greenback. If it weren’t late fall, now might be the perfect time to take a trip to America and see how cheap things really are.
October 16th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 13 comments | Continued
A Flawed Theory on How to Manage an Economy During a Recession
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!”
October 13th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 100 comments | Continued
Aussie Dollar is Crushing Long-time Rivals Like the Pound and the U.S. Dollar
One way to view a currency, we read somewhere recently, is as a national obligation secured by national assets. Those “assets” are loosely defined as economic growth (GDP) or the tax revenues a government can generate. A growing economy generates royalties and income taxes and demonstrates to international bond investors Australia’s ability to service interest and principal on debt.
October 9th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 18 comments | Continued
Will Gold Make Higher Highs From Here?
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.
October 7th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 3 comments | Continued
Underlying Demand During a Housing Shortage
That is clever to suggest that when rates rise people will have to find another way to say that houses are affordable. But we reckon when rates rise, as they eventually must, a lot of new home buyers will find out that access to cheap credit does not make a house affordable. It just makes the amount of debt you owe to the bank a lot larger.
September 30th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 41 comments | Continued
Property Sector Has Seen the Value of its Assets Wiped Out
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.
August 17th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 1 comment | Continued
The Cash Flows Are Coming
National governments are demanding a larger portion of global savings. Government welfare transfer schemes and bailouts have to be funded from borrowing (unless from money printing), which also makes capital harder for private companies to get. Corporate cash flows will revert to the mean in the absence of huge infusions of credit to finance the growth of the balance sheet.
August 10th, 2009 | Dan Denning | 13 comments | Continued
This Reflation is Not Yet a Monster Hyper-inflation
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.
August 3rd, 2009 | Dan Denning | 0 comments | Continued