My Comment on the Green Paper

Sen­a­tor Nick Sher­ry, as Min­is­ter for Super­an­nu­a­tion and Cor­po­rate Law, has released a Green Paper Finan­cial Ser­vices and Cred­it Reform: Improv­ing, Sim­pli­fy­ing and Stan­dar­d­is­ing Finan­cial Ser­vices and Cred­it Reg­u­la­tion (June 2008)

This is a very apt time for such an enquiry. It is now over a decade since the Wal­lis Com­mit­tee sup­port­ed fur­ther dereg­u­la­tion of the finan­cial sys­tem, and the con­se­quences of that dereg­u­la­tion are now evi­dent.  I doubt that a com­plete rever­sal of pol­i­cy is polit­i­cal­ly fea­si­ble now, but this inquiry may set the high water mark in the belief that the less reg­u­lat­ed finan­cial mar­kets are, the bet­ter.

Nouriel Roubi­ni is one of the world’s fore­most experts on the finan­cial sys­tem, and like me, was warn­ing of poten­tial crises while most oth­er com­men­ta­tors could only see ros­es bloom­ing. He is Pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics at New York Uni­ver­si­ty’s Stern School of Busi­ness, and found­ed the RGE Mon­i­tor, a high­ly suc­cess­ful com­mer­cial intel­li­gence web­site. He has recent­ly estab­lished a new blog with a focus on Asia, and has kind­ly asked me to be one of the con­trib­u­tors.

Nor­mal­ly I will sim­ply cross-post my Debt­watch blog, but on occa­sions I’ll write spe­cial pur­pose entries there. Nouriel has also assem­bled an inter­est­ing team of non-ortho­dox com­men­ta­tors from the aca­d­e­m­ic and busi­ness sec­tors.

Sec­tion One on ” The future of the Aus­tralian econ­o­my” starts with the fol­low­ing pre­am­ble:

“The Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment is com­mit­ted to mod­ernising our econ­o­my so that we can com­pete with the lead­ing nations in a world econ­o­my that is being trans­formed by glob­al­i­sa­tion, new tech­nolo­gies, and the rise of Chi­na and India. While we take full advan­tage of the min­ing boom, we must also build long term com­pet­i­tive strengths in the glob­al indus­tries of tomor­row — indus­tries that will pro­vide the high-pay­ing jobs of the future.

The Aus­tralia 2020 Sum­mit will exam­ine:

This blog entry first appeared as a fea­ture in the Dai­ly Tele­graph on Wednes­day April 9th 2008. If you’re a new­com­er to it cour­tesy of that fea­ture, and you want to look at this issue in more depth, there are links below to more detailed analy­sis.

The Dai­ly Tele­graph lived up to its nick­name of “The Dai­ly Ter­ror” last week, with a front­page attack on Reserve Bank of Aus­tralia Gov­er­nor Glenn Stevens enti­tled “Is he Aus­trali­a’s most use­less?”, and an edi­to­r­i­al that was no less provoca­tive: “RBA boss is los­ing inter­est”.

I’m giv­ing a talk on sub­primes to the “Mon­ty Pel­i­can Soci­ety”:

• Date: Wednes­day April 2nd
• Venue: Syd­ney Mechan­ics School of Arts, 280 Pitt St, Syd­ney NSW 2000 (near Town Hall)
• Time: 6.30pm-8pm
• For more infor­ma­tion, con­tact Troy Hen­der­son (troyh@search.org.au), or just rock up on the night.

At Last, the 1975 Show?

My main top­ic this month is a com­par­i­son of the eco­nom­ic events of today to those of 1973–75, but the most recent Case-Shiller data on US house prices sim­ply has to be “the Chart of the Month”. Last *month* the index dropped by 2.3 percent–implying an annu­al rate of decline in the realm of 25%! US house prices are down 13% from the peak in mid-2006, and in free-fall now.