Today’s labour force data revealed the the world recession is starting to impact directly on jobs in Australia. Last month’s data surprised people because it suggested the labour market was resisting the global trends. At the time I indicated that the inaccuracy in the data due to the large sample errors was likely to be a factor. Today’s data also carries some surprises although the trends it is indicating are clear enough.
Today I heard that our Federal Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner is suffering from insomnia because of the growing Government debt burden. Poor thing. Why is he worrying himself sick? Well I have the cure. If he reads this blog and understands it I think he will back in slumberland sooner rather than later.
One of the advantages of running the economy at “high pressure” – that is, with low unemployment is that some of the more malevolent aspects of human behaviour are suppressed. We know that when the economy goes into a downturn, firms increase their hiring standards because they have the upper hand – lots of workers are unemployed and so the firms can pick and choose more readily. One of the worst aspects of these adjustments is that pure prejudice begins to reveal itself more openly. The most recent data from the US suggests this is the case.
Senior journalists often do more harm than good when they write about technical issues that they clearly do not understand. In many cases, they rely on the technical knowledge of their favourite economist or the flavour of the month economist and they are not skilled enough to know when their “economist” is also talking rubbish.
My RSS feed came down with a problem recently and began returning the following xml error:
“XML parsing error: :1:1: xml declaration not at start of external entity”
How do you deal with this? This blog gives a short tutorial on how to proceed to fix it.
Yesterday, the Opposition leader published his reply to the Prime Minister’s grand attack on neo-liberalism. He claims that the apart from hypocrisy, the PM’s other failing is that he is mimicking a “corrupt police officer” because his essay attempted to blame the former Federal regime “for crimes it did not commit”. It is time that we understood just how bad the previous Federal government was.
Its that time of the year … so a nice day for me today. Among the gifts I received … a hose that will never kink. Essential for an urban farmer.
Australian governments have not yet understood that privatisation was yesterday’s strategy to abrogate their legitimate responsibilities. Today it has no place in a return to a viable sustainable and balanced mix of public and private activity. Privatisation was part of the swing to market-based allocations and a blurring of public interest with private profit. The two rarely go together if ever. While the NSW Government is still trying to push the sale of the electricity generators, the other major privatisation push is to extend the private ownership and operation of our prison system. There is no way that we should ever give monetary incentives to imprison people. Here is what happens …
The global recession is presenting a new dilemma for the first world which will have significant impacts long after growth has returned. We saw in recent years that the price of oil rose sharply as the demand of energy from emerging nations skyrocketed. While we clearly have a short-term incentive at least for China to redirect its economic energies into domestic growth to give our export sectors a boost there will be implications of this that we might not have bargained for. Do we really want an extra 1 billion or more people to be as rich as us? It is a case of being careful what you wish for …
The long-awaited National Account data was released today by the ABS and shows that the Australian economy is now sliding along the zero line. The headline result was that the measure of overall economic activity, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) decreased by 0.5 per cent in the December quarter. This is the first negative result since December 2000. So one more negative quarter and we will all cry recession. For the 12 months December 2008, the economy grew by the very modest 0.3 per cent but this was driven by agriculture. Non-farm GDP did not grow at all over that same period. What are the signs for employment and what is the government doing? Here are some of my thoughts …