Just for my benefit as well as yours, here are some useful pieces on the current financial crash:
Roger Altman in the Financial Times
John Gapper in the Financial Times (who believes AIG should not have been bailed out)
A New York Times column here.
What I want to know is this: if Australia's financial position is so much better, how come our dollar is dropping so much against the US dollar (and Japanese yen?)
Thanks for the legwork and the links. I have an awful lot of trouble with economics and this stuff beggars the imagination.
ReplyDeleteThe amount of leverage is truly astonishing and I suppose driven by the incentive systems in play. The sort of profits a Macquarie Banker (rhyming slang) could make had to be based on something fishy.
I hear today the privatise the profit socialise the loss manoeuvre is in motion in the US and I should be happy to see classic social democracy in action but it is a shame that it appears only after discovering that allowing the financial industry to regulate itself is found, astonishingly, to be invalidated by greed.
On the subject of appearing niave, when McCain notes with some surprise that there are greedy people on Wall St he must be mis-speaking.
Is Australia in any better shape? You'd know better than I if our financial sector is more highly regulated. I suppose a global recession effects commodity prices and our dollar falls with that. I knew it was going to drop a month ago when a pundit said that parity with the US dollar was inevitable.
Of course with either the second coming or global warming tipping points or the atom smashing apocalypse it is probably all small beer and best kept in perspective. The cricket season starts soon and all will be well.