The ANU professor would rather be right than popular.
He says when he worked with the former Prime Minister Bob Hawke in the 1980s to bring about the cuts in industry protection that have helped deliver our present prosperity he examined the opinion polls in order to find out what the public thought about protection.
“They loved it,” he told the Press Club yesterday.
“And those polls didn’t
...is unstoppable.
Australia's Rio Tinto used to find it hard to give away some of the iron ore it pulled out the dirt in the Pilbra. This week it scored a near doubling in its iron ore selling price - on top of the doubling it has enjoyed since 2004. Its critics say it could have got even more.
On the outskirts of Melbourne Australia’s biggest tyre factory this week declared that it had to
As fuel gets more expensive the transport costs associated with international trade get larger and trade diminishes. By how much? Paul Krugman cites a study (by Nuno Limão and Anthony J. Venables) that deals with transport costs and geography as factors determining trade. It implies that a doubling of fuel costs will contract trade by 45%. Current fuel price hikes if sustained would reduce trade by 17%. Read more »
The prices we are getting are skyrocketing:
Boosting our trade position so far that the ABS has had to break the trend !!!
Yet our spending in shops is diving:
And we are not building much at all:
Go figure.
More graphs here.
The forecasts out today (big pdf) from the Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics are stratospheric.
Our income from coal should double in the year ahead, our income from iron ore should increase 72 per cent in one year.
This is the upside, for us, or the worldwide oil and food price boom.
It is what the Reserve Bank and the Treasury have been worried about.
It makes talk of recession
Perhaps you were expecting Glenn Stevens to relent. To call off his talk about the need for high rates. He hasn't.
The head of the Reserve Bank has acknowledged that the Australian economy is slowing down but says it may have to slow more.
The speech, delivered to the American Chamber of Commerce in Melbourne yesterday, is seen as confirming that interest rates will remain high well into the
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