Good news on economic front

[Hebe]

I think people have underestimated the effect of confidence in keeping the economic woes at bay. If only the bloody media and the Opposition would help instead of trying to beat up panic.

[Leftofcentresalterego]

Yes, de nile river is where Frogen is floating blissfully along

And you're right Hebe, the stimulus packages are stimulating the animal spirits, which is helping prevent the situation from becoming worse. Even the right-wing cheerleader The Australian has admitted as much. But we need to get that infrastructure started quick because the cash-splash effect has a limited lifespan!

[Jovial Monk]

The schools stuff has started, that is good. Some of the big stuff too.

The National Broadband Network needs to get goiing ASAP, will generate a whole new raft of software, services & content industries along with itself.

Silly fluffy bunnies talking about "Oh, we don't know if people will take it up" oh yeah, Australians are so reluctant to embrace new technology that we were the fastest to take up color TV and mobile phones. How fucking stupid, these faggots just hated that Ruddy took excellent advice and cut the gordian knot and bypassed Telstra and all its monopolistic attitudes and saw to it that we will be like number 2 or 3 in the world in adopting optic fibre to the home.

"Oh it will be too expensive" the faggots further minced, $100 or $200 (based on ill informed hasty calculations) what crap! People will jump at the NBN and the services available, jump in such numbers, for so many services that the cost of combined phone line rental (phone & fax) plus paying for expensive and slow ADSL will be higher than putting all these services on the NBN, plus you can then make high quality phone calls via the web saving on call costs. Nope, no probs with the NBN. Get on with it Ruddy!

[Sappho]

And then along came the big bad "Unemployment Figures" to tell us the unemployment rate had climbed and that there are more people working less hours than preferred.

[Jovial Monk]

Yes they climbed, yes, businesses are hanging on to staff but cutting their hours to be ready when the recovery takes place. Worse still Sapho are school leavers who will have a hard time entering the workforce. But we are so much better placed, despite all those miners out of work, due to prompt action by the govt, action opposed by Turdbull & crew.

The NBN will need so many workers for itself and the new industries feeding it employment will rise big time. 21st century style jobs too.

[Jovial Monk]

Morgan conducted a phone poll this week and found a 57.5/42.5 TPP to the ALP:
There’s no primary vote figures as yet.

21 May ALP 45 L-NP 40.5 TPP 55/45 sample 873 moe 3.32

5 June ALP 43 L-NP 39.5 TPP 55/45 sample 805 moe 3.45

12 June ALP tba L-NP tba TPP 57.5/42.5 sample 715 moe 3.67

“In good news for the Rudd Government, the latest telephone Morgan Poll conducted on the nights of June 10-11, 2009 with 715 electors shows the ALP (57.5%, up 3% from the telephone poll of June 3/4, 2009) ahead of the L-NP (42.5%, down 3%) on a two-party preferred basis. Of all electors, 4% (down 1.5%) didn’t name a party.”

http://www.roymorgan.com/news/polls/2009/892/

Poor old Turdbull, shoudda stuck with Debt & Deficit, we'll be rooned, polls were switching (well, a twitch anyway) but nooooo had to change to jobs jobs jobs pushing the old discredited tax carryback (costing $5Bn) so D&D died.

So did the twitch, with first Essential Research and now Morgan phone polls showing a swing back to the natural order of things.

The govt has not made that much of the fact that most of the deficit is due to the structural deficit Tip's budgets were always in, made glaringly obvious when the mask of high tax revenues from mineral exports were ripped away. Probably keeping that ammo dry should Pouty Pete get enough backbone together for a leadership challenge.

[Jovial Monk]

If this works out in real life (and stats on Chinese economy recovery been good a while now) the unemployments will soon decline, debt & deficit will not be so large:

http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0 ... 62,00.html

THE International Monetary Fund has revised its 2010 growth forecast sharply upwards, a source said overnight, while surging Chinese investment in May also fueled hopes of a global recovery.

The IMF raised global growth estimates for 2010 to 2.4 percent from 1.9 per cent, and confirmed its April forecast for a 1.3 per cent contraction in 2009, a G8 source who has seen the latest figures said.

But underscoring the opacity of the outlook, World Bank President Robert Zoellick said the global economy is set to contract by close to 3 per cent this year, worse than the IMF figure and its own previous estimate of a decline of 1.75 per cent.

"I personally believe you might be able to see some aspects of recovery in 2009 and 2010, but from a policy point of view, that isn't the core question because we have a large degree of uncertainty," Zoellick said.

These latest forecasts highlight the difficulty of predicting the timing of recovery, but investors are keen for further signs the economic slump is abating.

[Leftofcentresalterego]

Some more informative stuff for Frogen the denier. Here was Ben Bernanke admitting as to how such spending is conducted

If you listen to the interview (the link will take you to the video and the transcript) you will realise that at around the 8 minute mark Bernanke starts talking about how the Fed (the US central bank) conducts its “operations” (in this case, how it conducts government spending).

Interviewer Pelley asks Bernanke:

Is that tax money that the Fed is spending?

Bernanke replied, reflecting a good understanding of what we call central bank operations (the way the Fed interacts with the member banks):

It’s not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It’s much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing.

Here is Micheal Sutchbury in today's The Australian

The US Federal Reserve effectively is printing money as it buys $US1trillion of US government bonds and mortgage securities

Of course, after correctly outlining the process, both retreat into the complete and utter neo-liberal psuedo-economic horse shit that they are famous for.

There will be NO additional tax burden automatically placed on future generations by Rudd's defict spending.

[JW Frogen]

Some more informative stuff for Frogen the denier. Here was Ben Bernanke admitting as to how such spending is conducted
Bernanke replied, reflecting a good understanding of what we call central bank operations (the way the Fed interacts with the member banks):

It’s not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It’s much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing. There will be NO additional tax burden automatically placed on future generations by Rudd's defict spending.

You are confusing government spending with federal reserve monetary policy. Government outlays do have to be paid or serviced by tax dollars, (future production) federal reserve expanstion of money supply that exceeds productivity rates has to be paid for in a future inflated currency. (Currency that is worth less and less). And this can have nasty long term side effects, in the US case a possible large scale dumping of the dollar by China.

There is no such thing a free money.

[JW Frogen]

As for public sector spending increasing spending in the economy at large that economic capacity already existed and was produced by the private sector, it would have been spent or invested there as well, the public sector simply redirects that capacity. Now if it does so in a way that produces economic utility at large, say intelligent infrastructure spending, it can increase future productivity, but so much public sector spending is on bureaucracy with no utility to future productivity that excessive public sector growth in the long term hampers economic productivity.