At last, some serious discussion, if not yet debate, on the China syndrome.

The syndrome under discussion is China's rapid growth and development, with Australia 'feeding the blast furnace of the biggest industrialisation in history.'

The quote is from Michael Stutchbury's main article in today's Oz.  Stutchbury is leading the charge for a 'bigger Australia', in opposition to our political leaders who are both running a 'smaller Australia' campaign. This is inevitable, really, as the battlers in marginal seats respond understandably to populist dog-whistle causes.  Among these, high immigration, increasing numbers of asylum seekers and road congestion are all issues that worry Australia's battlers.

Australia's trade surplus for June set a new  record as export earnings from iron ore and coal surged, lifting the local Australian dollar and acting as a reminder of why the next move in interest rates is still likely to be up.

The surplus of $3.54 billion was almost twice the market forecast and far outstripped the previous record of $2.5 billion.

The surplus for the three months to June amounted to $6.6 billion, a turnaround of almost $10 billion from the first quarter's deficit and laying the base for strong economic growth.

The gloom at slow retail sales reminds us that wealthy owners of retail malls are doing it tough, and can be expected to continue to lobby - as they always do - for low interest rates and some 'healthy inflation'.  Why retailers or owners of retail malls are allowed to sit on the Reserve Bank board, given their blatent conflict of interest, escapes this writer.

But I digress.  The main point about sluggish retail sales is that it represents a new and welcome frugality.  As we said bank in May, 'Good news, fellow Australians, consumer confidence is falling'.

Similar points apply to the housing market.  The latest quarterly ABS house price figures show a sector almost in bubble territory.  The June month numbers provided by a private group suggest a substantial slowdown, confirming evidence from lower anction clearance rates, low building approval data and slow growth of lending for housing.

Vehicle sales, however, are still booming so the old consumerist habits have not yet been fully replaced by the new frugality.

The Oz also has a feature article in the subject of the geopolitical waning of the USA and the gain of China, at least so far as the Pacific region is concerned.

'BENEATH the radar, almost by stealth', writes Cameron Stewart, 'the tectonic plates of power are shifting in the Pacific Ocean.

'A resurgent China is baring its teeth at the once indomitable US Pacific fleet. The certainty of US hegemony over this vast ocean, which Australians have taken for granted since World War II, is being challenged.

'But this steady transformation of our security outlook has failed to capture public attention in Australia precisely because it has been so steady and does not lend itself to an easy headline in a world of 24-hour news cycles'. 

Stutchbury's main point is that Australia needs to 'make the most of our China wealth without becoming too beholden to Beijing.  We must surely use our China bounty to become bigger and stronger by the middle of this century'.

Amen to that. A small remote capitalist nation like Australia - alone and friendless - needs sturdy independence and the ability to stand on its own two feet.  This is especially important now that the USA is in serious financial strife and likely to be tempted to revert to its traditional isolationist policy, which expert opinion sees as highly likely.  A major risk for America's allies, a big opportunity for its enemies.

Posted on The Australian's website.

We also recommend a paper by Colin Tease delivered at Melbourne University earlier this year.

And also Ross Garnaut's Hamer Oration, August 2010.

The late Joan Robinson, a Cambridge economist, once wrote, “the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all”. Her quip, written in 1962, was inspired by underemployment in South-East Asia. Since then, capital has busily “exploited” workers in that region and its giant northern neighbour, much to their benefit. Now it is time for capital to invest in them.  Thus The Economist ends its lead article on the rise of China's workers.

China's workers get a small slice of the national cake: 53% in 2007, down from 61% in 1990 (and compared with about two-thirds in America). Letting wages rise at the expense of profits would allow workers to enjoy more of the fruits of their labour and help with the necessary 'rebalancing' of the global economy. The Economist estimates that a 20 % rise in Chinese consumption might produce an extra $25 billion of American exports and create over 200,000 American jobs.

China's workers have been behaving like workers in the west, going on strike for higher pay, and the government has allowed this, especially when the strikes are at foreign-owned factories. Workers are scarce in the dynamic coastal areas and internal migration is drying up. The best evidence is the wage increases of China's internal migrant workers, which rose 17 % last year.  As the graph shows, this is a break-out compared with previous experience.

  Courtesy The Economist

Experts say that the country’s villages still contain perhaps 70m potential migrants. 'But the supply of strong backs and nimble fingers is not infinite, even in China. The number of 15- to 29-year-olds will fall sharply from next year. And although their wages are increasing, their aspirations are rising even faster. They seem less willing to “eat bitterness”, as the Chinese put it, without complaint'.

As costs rise, some economists (including Henry) worry about a new Chinese export: inflation. Between 1997 and 2005 the price of Chinese exports to America fell by more than 12%. What if that trend is now reversed? asks The Economist. In principle, the China price can rise or fall without any effect on inflation. As long as the central bank remains vigilant, other goods will just get cheaper or dearer, leaving overall prices unchanged. In practice, however, Chinese competition made it easier for the Federal Reserve to contain inflation, back when containing inflation was the biggest thing on its mind. For now, though, it is low on its list of worries.

Australia's immigration debate
 
The consensus amongst the great and good, says Tiresias of Canberra, is that Australia needs more people, especially to settle the remote but underpopulated north-west and to ensure that there are enough workers to replace the baby boomers, and that an immigration policy heavily biased towards skilled immigrants is the way to go. 
 
Some caution is needed since one expert has concluded that America’s long reliance on overseas born scientists and engineers (including ones that had migrated to the US from the newly industrialised world as students), had created perverse incentives for US institutions to hire academics from poorer countries rather than raise the incentives for US nationals to undertake careers in academic science and engineering, creating continued reliance on immigrant workers.
 
More recently, critics of skilled immigration in the US have begun pointing out that many of the supposedly skilled IT workers from India in fact frequently lack the skills for which their visas were issued.  The reliability or probity of immigration is a particularly relevant issue for Australia, as most of the work on our immigration programmes is performed by locally engaged staff overseas, most of whom belong to cultures where the receipt of baksheesh in exchange for favours is entirely acceptable.
 
The essential thing with skilled immigration is to balance the need to fill genuine vacancies in strategically significant industries with the need to ensure that we do not either get played for suckers by opportunistic would-be migrants or create perverse incentives for our institutions to neglect their duty to patiently develop native-born human capital.  Like all matters for judgement, this cannot by decided by an ideological calculus or any amount of spin-doctoring. 
 
Tiresias presents some ideas for the basis of a future  immigration policy:
 
Firstly, we need to identify strategic pools of human resources that we want and actively target them. Forget everyone else.
 
At the moment one million native born Californians leave the economic turmoil and racial transformation of their state every year for resettlement in the largely white areas of the Pacific north-west, the inter-montane West and central Texas.  Why not develop an immigration policy designed to capture the cream of this crop, one that aimed to convince 20,000 to 50,000 Californians a year to come to Oz?  Special preference could be made for those with three to five years experience managing a high-tech start up or with experience in the venture capital markets, avionics, mining or advanced horticulture/agriculture.    
 
Australia is soon to experience a critical shortage of mechanical skills in the air transport sector, which the airlines will doubtless use as an excuse to move maintenance off-shore to China.  Why not solve this in one swoop by importing a thousand or so Californians with backgrounds in avionics?  Australia has trouble manning its submarines, so why not recruit a couple of hundred ex-submariners from the many thousands of ex-Navy men in Southern California? Australia’s universities are soon to experience a labour shortage, as the tenured baby boomers cash in their superannuation.  Why not replace the boomers with the cream of the US graduate schools?  This would do more to raise the intellectual value of our universities than a thousand gassy ministerial media releases about ‘world class universities’.
 
Similar opportunities exist in abundance in Europe too.  Back in 2006 George Walden, UK Minister for Higher Education under Thatcher, published a book that explained why the UK cannot offer the majority of its people a decent life and why they should consider leaving – Time to Emigrate.  Identical books could be written for most of Western and Northern Europe.  To take advantage of this situation we need to make permanent residency easily available to any Dutch, German, Scandinavian (of for that matter Japanese or South Korean) nationals under the age of fifty with valid trade qualifications from their homeland (ditto any of these with a degree in something of substance like medicine, engineering, mathematics or languages).

Secondly, we need to get serious about the refugee issue and learn to say ‘no’.  I am the son of a Czech DP who married a British woman and then went on to raise his two children with English as their native language, but I can think of no credible reason why Australia should continue to take in any refugees for permanent settlement, given the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Australia has no moral obligation to turn over its mineral wealth for the relief of the Third World poor and Anglo-Australians would be fools to follow the example of the white Americans, who will soon enough find themselves a minority in their own land, surrounded by rival, often hostile, minority groups easily aroused to violence by their real or imagined wrongs. 

Thirdly, if Australian still feel the need to exorcise the much-dreaded ghost of the White Australia policy, there is a simpler, better solution, than filling Australian cities with unemployable, crime-prone, welfare recipients from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia: make permanent residency available to all Singaporean citizens with enough capital to buy their own home in Australia.   Simple and painless.  Elitist too and a deep affront to the NGOs and Julian Burnside QC, but what is wrong with that?
 
Finally, whatever we do we must close off access to the courts to non-citizens contesting the outcomes of adverse immigration decisions.  The courts are there to administer justice, not offer one roll of the dice after another for disgruntled people we wish to exclude.  Leaving the legal system to decide our future population and citizenry is insanity, given its demonstrated indifference or hostility to the public interest.  Any party that is not prepared to do something about this is not truly fit to form a government.
 
Given the economic down-turn in Europe and North America and the Muslim related mayhem and violence sweeping the former, Australia has the exceptional good fortune to be able to offer sanctuary and useful employment to whomever we are prepared to take.  There is no good reason to settle for a second or third best migrant intake.  Provided that we are prepared to pick winners and exclude losers immigration will have no trouble attracting popular support in abundance. Australians are no more a nation of fools than they are nature’s racists.  We deserve an immigration policy that aims high, but which also aims to preserve the quality of life and civility of this astonishingly tranquil society.  It is about time that our politicians learnt to stand up for an immigration policy that did both.

And, we add to further radicalise the debate, Australia could sell places to the highest bidders, after allowing a quota for genuine refugees.  As a fine economist visiting Australia, Lord Desai of St Clement Danes, said in 2002: 'The world needs to make the movement of people as free as the movement of capital, as was the case in the second half on the nineteenth century'.

The Reserve Bank met today and no doubt engaged in deep thought about the economy and the risks facing us all.  As widely predicted - even by Henry! - no rate hike, providing great relief to the government, the battlers and the Reserve itself.  At last a better than expected inflation number and a slight fall in house prices.

The case for deep thought was clear and stated clearly in Henry's usual advice for the board and his readers - available here.

Those paid to guess at (or learn via other channels) the outcome were in furious agreement.

No economic time series go in one direction without abberent moves that can confuse even very careful watchers.

Geopolitical risks include a return of global inflation, just as domestic risks include inflation pressure from the renewed rise in the terms of trade and the return of the mining boom.

A world facing warmer northern summers - despite Melbourne's old-style wet and cold winter - will be a world short of food.  Australia's likely large wheat crop comes in a year when Russia, the world's third largest exporter of wheat, is suffering drought and bushfire, and the price of wheat is rocketing up.

This adds more pressure to our terms of trade and  the Reserve needs to remain alert but not alarmed and to raise interest rates again later in the year.

By then, of course, we shall have a new government.  Julia Gillard with her own mandate will keep Kevin Rudd's hectic, mistake-ridden big spending ways, adding new sources of domestic inflation to the global pressures.

Tony Abbott has pledged to cut Labor's bureaucrats, saving a lot of taxpayers' money in the process.

Either party would be wise to develop a serious strategy to gain the most from the renewed resource boom.  Our concern is that almost all the major geopolitical risks facing Australia require a far more effective defence capability.

The risk of the USA returning to its traditional isolationist strategy as it grapples with unsustainable budget pressure underlines the need to boost spending on defence.

We invite readers to consider likely future Megatrends and Megashocks, and to see if you agree with this diagnosis.

See also RBA Statement on monetary policy - August 2010

Inflation (underlying) is within the Reserve’s target range for the first time since 2007.  House prices have stabilised. Equity prices are volatile but nowhere near the bubble territory that should worry central bankers.  The Reserve Bank can congratulate itself - briefly and modestly - on its timely tightening of monetary policy while continuing to monitor the global and domestic challenges Australia faces.

The short-term (‘cyclical’) news has two main themes: the US and Eurozone economies are recovering very slowly from the great finance freeze of 2008; and the ‘developing’ nations of Asia are running so strongly that some are now battling inflation.  This disjunction cannot last forever.  It is a tangible sign of the global ‘imbalances’ that economists wring their hands over without producing  real advice to offer  governments of the major nations that stand on either side of the development divide.

Australia is in far better shape than every other 'developed' nations, although of course highly dependent on the continued success of our great mining and agricultural industries for the bulk of our export revenue and our ability to service what is a large volume of international debt.  The fact that this debt is largely owed by private companies, including our banks, means we have effectively no sovereign debt problem, but there is no doubt we have substantial debts to service.  It is important not to forget that Australia's banks needed a government guarantee for deposits and overseas loans during the global credit freeze.

The board of the Reserve Bank has a primary duty to keep inflation under control, do its best to maintain the stability of the financial system and contribute to the welfare of all Australians.  Inflation has been rising in Australia since the low (zero in ‘headline’ terms) in the late 1990s.

Inflation has most recently turned down, after a series of six 25 basis point increases in cash rates, for which the Reserve must be commended.  In November 2007, when the previous Federal election was underway, the Reserve Bank was playing catch-up.  This time it is more nearly on top of a potentially difficult situation.  (David Uren today provides a more detailed take on the events of 2007. His conclusion: 'IF there is one thing that will make the RBA board uneasy about keeping rates on hold it will be a fear of repeating the 2007 experience'.

But any celebratory moment needs to be limited.  There are many risks in the current global outlook, and of these global inflation is the most likely. Tomorrow's paper on the issues for monetary policy will focus on these risks. 

Apologies, dear readers, for the lateness of this edition of 'Saturday Sanity Break'.

Dame Thornton, who must be obeyed, decided we had to get our first new barbeque for 20 years, and Henry was required to arise with the sparrows and accompany the lady to the local Bunnings.

This was the experience of the decade - Henry's life, as readers know, being gentle and not full of surprises.

The assemblage of BBQs was extraordinary, including an item with granite work surfaces.  One could also buy rotary devices sufficiently large to cook a small steer, and a variety of devices to provide heating for a cold winter's night.  One has to acknowledge that Bunnings, of all the businesses Henry experiences, has the greatest faith in a stable climate with no overt warming.

But it was the peripheral equipment that boggled Henry's aging mind. Giant umbrellas, for example, four of which placed together would make a reasonable small house. To go with this was a 'Chimea' - a cast iron stove-thing that would provide heating in winter, as the cooling breezes would provide relief from the elements in summer.

One's choice of tables and 'sun lounges.'  No doubt elsewhere in this Bunnings store there would be plates and mugs, knives, forks and spoons.

Henry is ready to explain to the kids that for a few thousands they can kit themselves out in a quiet corner of a park, with no mortgage and all the freedom to move on in the night before the creditors nab them.

But wait, Henry espied an item that made everything clear. The 'Sun God' Firepit.  Handmade in Mexico, this sturdy item features 'Volcanic Clay Pottery with integrated capillaries for improved durability'.

It was obvious that the various BBQ items are brilliantly designed for celebrating Australians' worship of the burnt chop.  But the 'Sun God' Firepit takes one's worship to a higher level.  Perfectly designed for roasting the hearts of sacrificial politicians, having ripped them out with a cheery yell to the god Qvyexzaqqottal. 

Our new BBQ has been brought to help feed the masses on Saturday 21 August, at the election night party that is a tradition in our family.  If only we can entice the new, inexperienced, somewhat naive local member to join us at midnight, then the real fun will begin.

The polls and the footy

The Age, with we imagine, considerable angst, reports today 'Abbott takes the lead'.

'The Gillard government would be swept from power according to the latest poll, which shows Labor trailing the Coalition 48 to 52 on a two-party vote.

'In a dramatic turnaround, Julia Gillard’s approval has plunged and her lead as preferred Prime Minister has been sharply eroded during a week when  government division was exposed by  an anti-Gillard leak of cabinet secrets.

'The Age/Nielsen poll shows Labor’s two party vote fell six points in a week. The primary vote also fell six points, to 36per cent,  an unwinnable level'.

Such a shame, really. 

And did you know, dear readers, that if you buy the Women's Weekly at the right store you will receive a free unbrella?  Henry's quip 'Probably paid for by our taxes' was not well received by the scruffy looking bloke in the queue behind us, which just goes to show some of them feel bad about all the waste and mismanagement.  But one has to acknowledge what a good job can be done with makeup and lighting. Nicholson gets it right again with today's Cartoon of the Week, below.

They know we're coming (Caaaarlton!, also the Libs, perchance)

At least equally important, The Age  has a deep inquiry into Caaaaarlton!'s inconsistent form this year.

The Blues' 2009 slogan 'They know we're coming' is mocked with post-it notes saying '... We might be running a bit late . Sorry' and 'Has anyone seen the map?' and 'It's ok. We know where we are now ...'.

Read on here, Blues supporters.  You may feel a little better when you have done so. 

Later: Today's match against the old enemy, Collingwood, sadly, has defined the rest of Caaaarlton's season.  A real flogging, showing we are at best going to be making up the numbers (and not for long) in September. Bring back Satanta and Thornton, they'll both have a red-hot crack, and Satanta's little helpers will play better with their minder.

House prices

'THE first monthly fall in house prices in 17 months has signalled that aggressive RBA rate increases have successfully cooled the market.

'Economists said falls in capital city house prices would ensure the Reserve Bank of Australia kept interest rates on hold over coming months, with some saying the pause could extend into 2011 as inflation pressures were now also muted.  More here.

Coming on top of goods and services (CPI) lower than expected and in 'underlying' terms within the RBA's target range of 2 to 3 %, this probably seals the 'no rate hike' case, a small victory in a sea of defeat for Australia's most incompetent government.

Cartoon of the week.

Readers from two weeks ago have suggested our headline 'Can capitalism survive ...' was somewhat alarmist.

We were of course discussing the enormous fiscal deficits in the 'developed nations', including crucially the mighty USA.

Our star provocateur was the historian Niall Ferguson, who has been visiting Australia.  Extremely odd that he has not received more attention in the mainstream press.

Henry travelled to Sydney to attend Ferguson's Bonython lecture, run by the Centre for Independent Studies, on the basis of being on the top of the waiting list. Sadly when it came to it there was no room at the feast, gentle readers, so I had to go searching in cyberspace. I found a modern classic - 'An Empire at Risk' - posted just before Christmas 2009.

Ferguson in that fine contribution presented forward estimates of USA deficits and debt, which were alarming enough. The numbers have in fact deteriorated since late 2009.

History strongly supports the proposition that major financial crises are followed by major fiscal crises says Niall Ferguson.  Financial crises create debt explosions, usually producing either a debt default (when the debt is in a foreign currency), or a bout of high inflation. The history of all the great European empires is replete with such episodes. Indeed, concludes Ferguson, serial default and high inflation have tended to be the surest symptoms of imperial decline.  We suggest that the great inflation of the Age of Aquarius (the 60s and 70s) was the harbinger of such decline.

The U.S. is unlikely to default on its debt, which is in its own dollars, meaning the choice it is facing is serious fiscal consolidation or the Fed printing money—buying newly minted Treasury bonds in exchange for even more newly minted greenbacks—followed by the familiar story of rising prices and declining real-debt burdens. It's a scenario many investors around the world fear. That is why they have been selling dollars and buying gold. This is Henry's prediction also, but not Ferguson's, who is by any standard a far better historian.

The inflation solution must be questioned with U.S. unemployment close to 10 percent, weak labor unions, huge quantities of unused capacity in global manufacturing and people’s expectations of inflation very stable, so far as can be judged from poll data and the difference between the yields on regular and inflation-protected bonds.

Another possibility is a rise in the real interest rate, which is the actual interest rate minus inflation. This can happen in one of three ways: the nominal interest rate rises and inflation stays the same; the nominal rate stays the same and inflation falls; or—the worst case—the nominal interest rate rises and inflation falls.

There are a number of past cases (e.g., France in the 1930s, Japan recently) when nominal rates have risen even at a time of deflation. Foreign investors might ask for a higher nominal return on U.S. Treasuries to compensate them for the weakening dollar. And inflation might keep falling, to the surprise of most forecasters.

Whether rising real interest rates is worse than a burst of inflation depends on the precise circumstances  For a heavily indebted government and an even more heavily indebted public, rising real interest rates mean an increasingly heavy debt-service burden. The relatively short duration (maturity) of most of current US debts means that a large share has to be rolled over each year. That means any rise in real interest rates would quickly hurt government, business and household budgets.

Even without rising real interest rates, large deficits mean rising debt service payments. There is also immense pressure for spending on health. Like debt service payments this is virtually certain to keep rising in the USA, short of some Thatcherite revolution. To avoid default, it is typically spending on defence that has to be cut, as already assumed in the USA's forward budget estimates.

‘This is how empires decline’ says Ferguson. It begins with a debt explosion. It ends with an inexorable reduction in the resources available for the armed forces. US voters realise this and the US leaders have soon to produce a credible plan to restore the federal budget to balance over the next five to 10 years.  If it does not there is a real danger that a debt crisis could lead to a major weakening of American power.

There are many precedents. Habsburg Spain defaulted on all or part of its debt 14 times between 1557 and 1696 and also succumbed to inflation due to a surfeit of New World treasure. Prerevolutionary France was spending 62 percent of royal revenue on debt service by 1788. The Ottoman Empire saw interest payments and amortization rose from 15 percent of the budget in 1860 to 50 percent in 1875. By the interwar years, interest payments were consuming 44 percent of the British budget, making it intensely difficult to rearm in the face of a new German threat.

'Call it the fatal arithmetic of imperial decline' Ferguson concludes. 'Without radical fiscal reform, it could apply to America next'.

One assumes the USA would remain a capitalist nation despite its decline as a great power.  But with severely reduced defence spending, continued crippling debt burdens and perhaps also inflation, it would be far less able to fend off attacks from countries or ideologies opposed to capitalism, or at least opposed to the democratic variety.

Furthermore, in the postulated situation, the USA would be forced to revert to its natural isolationist stance.  This would leave small capitalist nations at great risk of being attacked, or indeed invaded by a flood of refugees from geopolitical or physical upheaval.  (See 'Australia - alone and friendless' for our take on this vital matter and our attempts to spell out the challenges facing the capitalist world and our small part of it.)

There are many issues to think about in the extraordinary world we now inhabit.  Niall Ferguson deserves a wider audience, and we sincerely hope he has met with Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott.

Posted today on The Australian's website.

You can apparently watch Ferguson's Bonython lecture here, if you have the right software.

Australia's goods and services (CPI) inflation was 0.6% in the June quarter 2010, compared with 0.9% in the March quarter 2010. See the full ABS report here.
 
The measure was 3.1% through the year to June quarter 2010, compared with a rise of 2.9% through the year to March quarter 2010.

These measures were below the rate expected by Australia's economists.  Henry was grateful to Mr Swan for informing us on the 5 PM Sky news that 'underlying' goods and services inflation was 0.5 % for the quarter and 2.7 % for the year., This confirmed Henry's 12 noon guess that this measure too might be below the expected level. This is unambiguous good news for Julia Gillard, Australia's battlers and the Reserve Bank in that order. Not all bad news for Tony Abbott either, now that is looks as if he has a chance of becoming the next Prime minister.

The most significant price rises this quarter were for tobacco (+15.4%), hospital and medical services (+3.8%), automotive fuel (+2.1%), rents (+1.1%) and house purchase (+0.6%).

The most significant offsetting price falls were in domestic holiday travel and accommodation (-6.0%), fruit (-4.8%), audio, visual and computing equipment (-6.3%), vegetables (-3.0%) and overseas holiday travel and accommodation (-1.9%).

Some clever journos have found in these figures evidence of the two speed economy, like physicists pouring over the results of collisions in one of those costly particle smashers. The two-speed economy theorists need to remember RBA deputy-chief's view - there are two speeds, fast and very fast.

Politics

Tony Abbott is looking Prime Ministerial and Julia Gillard is lookin g a lot less relaxed than in this well-lit, well made up Women's Weekly pics. 'It's gotta be Rudd who's leaking said Henry's best mate in the Labor Party. 'Can't stop 'em' says Treasurer.

Mark Latham is spending 30 minutes on Sky News at 9.30 PM tonight and some more colorful insight is sure to be provided.

And Belinda Neal - remember her - is deciding today if she will run as an independant.  Ambassador to Antarctica perhaps, but Julia will have to move fast.

Game on, indeed.

Was it Labor's fiscal stimulus or the dramatic fall in the Aussie dollar and interest rates that saved us from deep recession?

Did you see Nobel Prize winning economist George Stiglitz on the 7.30 report last night?

He has no doubts - it was Labor's stimulus spending.

'There was a lot of waste and mismanagement' said Red Kerry O'Brian, echoing Henry's criticism, though he gave Henry no support at the time.

'There would have been even more waste if the government had done nothing' said Mr Stiglitz. 'Unemployment involves great waste also'.

Sadly, O'Brian did not pursue the point. What if the benchmark was not nothing, but useful spending that helped make Australia a more productive economy?

Spending more on Research & Development (R&D) or suspending payroll tax for small enterprises?

I am prepared to bet that Mr Stiglitz would have said spending to raise productivity would have been far better than handouts to consumers, dangerous insulation batts and rorted amounts on school buildings.

Meanwhile, local economist Tony Makin has a different line of attack.  During the global financial crisis the Aussie dollar fell by 30 % and cash interest rates roughly halved thanks to fast action by the independent Reserve Bank.

Makin claims these two changes in key prices within a market system boosted the Australian economy far more that Labor's botched stimulus program with virtually no connection to the market system.

Now we also learn, though it is denied by the gummint, that Labor's spending was biassed toward marginal seats and away from safe coalition seats.

What a surprise.  Was it Ros Kelly and her whiteboard brought back from Labor's attic?  At least the Addams family are upfront and honest about their gruesome activities.

Henry is in Sydney waiting to see if he gets a seat at the CIS Bonython lecture by historian Niall Ferguson tonight, having failed to book in time.

It is cold and wet and the traffic is gridlocked.

Just a normal winter's day in the Labor-run premier city of the South Pacific.

 Henry ... one of the most damaging cultural ideas of the contemporary world is the idea that we in the West (including Australia) should not/cannot resist our own extermination and exit from history. This is a widespread basic idea among the Left media commentariat, university intellectuals, public servants, unthinking elected officials, Ph.D students and very many ordinary folk who pay a greater or lesser degree of attention to our public life. Of course this idea is not put as bluntly as I am putting it here. However, it is firmly established in our national psyche via the unchallenged notion :'Australia is an aging nation'.
 
This sentence is uttered regularly in 'debates' on population and is accepted as casually true as is the statement 'the Melbourne Cup will be run in November.'
 
The median age in Australia is, as I have seen, around 35 years and rising. This means half the country is 35 and below and the other half is older than 35. We need to properly debate this issue and arrive at a desired median age. When we pick this age, all the other questions to do with population/immigration will solve themselves. All issues/decisions surrounding population would be compared to how such a decision helps (or doesn't help and is thus rejected) meet the stated desired median age.
 
The desired median age for Australia should be 25 years. There should be 7 persons (over 15 years) in full time work/study for every one person in fulltime retirement. We need our parliament to arrive at these figures. When that crucial decision is made we can then use basic mathematics to tell us how we go about reaching these desired levels from where we are now. These three vital figures (25 ..7 ..1) will help guarantee our national safety and historical continuity for the 'Australian tribe' which has formed itself into a nation state and currently stands in possession of 7.7 million square kilometres of this continent and the attendant resources.
 
Henry, to age is to die. This is obvious. To avoid death one needs to 'youth-ify'. As individuals we cannot do this but as a tribe in competition with 195 other national 'tribes' around the world we can do it. Making the decision to do so is a cultural decision, not an economic one. Unfortunately we have 'leaders' who seem to think that what we have now by way of a reasonable standard of living and quality of life is ours by right and is not the result of great and prolonged high quality work and social discipline over 200 years. We were always able to find the high quality workers (First World people) needed to run an economy which has given us what we have today. We will need to keep doing this or our standards and quality of life will crash.
 
To keep what we have we need to keep our economy/society young and agile. We are blessed with a capitalist economy but this system functions best when it is easy to enter into the  business end of the system and the entrepreneurs (tiny and gigantic) can always find young, agile and flexible workers 'to have a go'.
 
We are told by the enemies of Australia's future (most of whom work here in Australia) that NOTHING can be done to lower the median age of the nation; nothing can be done to avert our fate and place on the historical scrap heap ... along with the Etruscans, Sarmations, Canaanites and Neanderthal Man.  All sorts of statistical models are paraded out as proof. All these 'proofs' are based on the assumed continuation of the current 'Me' culture which has got us into the problem in the first place.
 
The adoption of a sensible world view which places Australia sustainably and confidently in the top ten of nations in the world in the list of standard of living and quality of life will require a return by us to a complete sense of our nationhood. It will also require a cultural and political understanding of ourselves as a special people who have a vast good resource fortune (unearned) in this world and thus must use this fortune well and properly, for others as well as ourselves. Such 'particularist' ideas revolt the Australian Left. Such ideas are repulsive to them as they ruthlessly push the still poisonous cultural/economic/social remnants of the shattered and murderous 'Socialist Project 1917-1991'. They use their institutional positions to see that such ideas cannot be published easily in Australia today. Henry, the 'freedom of speech' Left are super keen and enthusiastic censors of these and similar ideas. We all know this but no one mentions it.
 
Any Australian public elected official who started talking about these issues would be supported in a stampede by the ordinary Australians. These ordinary Australians today have a collective sense that all is not well with our 'emerald city on the hill' ... the Paradise of OZ. They are right (as they usually are in matters to do with the nation) and still nobody says anything. This election campaign grinds forward like some sort of appalling and dreadful home movie which we are required to watch. No issue of worth or importance is mentioned sensibly or with any intelligent idea attached.

More here including links to a number of important articles on the population issue.

Wall Street liked the fact that only seven Eurozone banks failed the stress tests, and US shares had a good Friday last week..

This was despite the fact that none of the tests included a sovereign debt default.

The bigger news is that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has told central banks to 'prick asset bubbles'.

The 'Executive summary' begins: 'The crisis brought the financial system to the verge of systemic collapse and raised the prospect of depression and deflation. Central banks helped defuse these threats, including through exceptional measures. Considerable efforts are now under way to draw policy lessons from the crisis. For central banks, the crisis seems to provide three important lessons for policy frameworks—mainly concerning systemic financial stability'.

Financial stability should be addressed mainly using 'macroprudential policies'. They can 'mitigate the procyclicality of systemic risk and the build-up of structural vulnerabilities' - head the problems off before they become too great.

'Macroprudential tools' include capital requirements and buffers, forward-looking loss provisioning, liquidity ratios, and prudent collateral valuation'.

This is all good sense, but the key assumption is that asset booms should be prevented, or at least should be opposed - 'don't just stand there, do something'.

The IMF also maintains its position that central banks ought to retain goods and services price stability as the 'primary objective of monetary policy'.

There is also the question of 'moral hazard' and the need for 'more flexible operating procedures' - the bail out issue.

I have been re-reading Kindleberger's classic book on Manias, Panics and Crashes. 

This discusses the financial crises of  several centuries.  There is always a tendency in periods of optimism for credit to expand to meet the demands of trade.  In times of euphoria, credit can become very flexible indeed, even including the invention of new forms of credit such a bills of exchange in the nineteenth century, borrowing from the central bank to fund share purchases in the 1920s or 'subprime loans' in the early 2000s.

I suspect the truth of the matter is that no amount of diligent and flexible leaning into the wind of euphoria can totally head off an asset bubble, though central banks and 'prudential regulators' like Australia's APRA have in current times to do their best and be seen to be doing their best.

Organisations, like individuals who wish to keep their jobs, must be seen to be doing their best, even if what is to be done varies over the decades.

In his analysis of the great asset bubble of the 1920s, JK Galbraith makes the point that the US Fed did not want to be blamed for stopping the boom.

‘Action to break up a boom must always be weighed against the chance that it will cause unemployment at a politically inopportune moment’.  And ‘the immediate death not only has the disadvantage of being immediate but of identifying the executioner’. (Quoted in the conclusion to the linked article about the crash of 1929.)

Clearly we are in a period of renewed policy activism.  Banks will be more cautious for a decade or two, and regulators more diligent.

But there will be future periods of asset boom fuelled by euphoric animal spirits.

The trick is to educate one's children and grandchildren so they can take advantage of the next asset boom by investing early and cashing up before the bubble bursts.