Thursday 16 October 2014

Australia’s addiction to private debt


Macrobusiness.com have just posted a crackerjack article on the misreading of the Australian government budget emergency  and the errant path they have elected to follow.
 
"A perennial and divisive issue in politics and economics today is the matter of public debt. It is commonly asserted that rising public debt threatens the economy and needs to be reined in. Governments are often portrayed as ‘irrational’ actors when they incur a fiscal deficit, causing unnecessary inflation and interest rates to rise by borrowing to meet the shortfall.

Private sector lending is supposedly ‘crowded out’ by lifting the cost of money and limiting access to a finite lending pool by government actors. A large stock of public debt and chronic deficits are considered economically harmful, due to increasing the interest payment burden on taxpayers. A centrepiece of the Abbott government’s economic policy platform is its strident warnings about growing public debt: Australia’s ‘budget emergency’.

This specious claim remains unchallenged, for commentators are generally unfamiliar with the long-term trends in debt and its composition. This analysis fills that void by examining the long-term trends in public, private and external debt. Unsurprisingly, the conclusions arrived at are diametrically opposed and differ sharply to those stemming from the established political and economic narrative."

Sunday 5 October 2014

The last of Shree


Shree Minerals’ problems are pretty evident from a glance at the 2014 financials issued late in September 2014.