B
BigBlackCock
Re: Carbon tax
I stand corrected. It's the ex-Governor of the Reserve Bank - ta for the PMs folks about the peabrain. Don't you just love nitpicking peabrains?
It's also hilarious how this fuckwit is obsessed with me despite his being on my iggy list. This sad gelding also relishes making personal comments about people but whimpers away when he gets it back - he can't take it (and can't dish it out either when you assess his intellect or lack thereof). Then again, that is a trait of a wimp in an industry renown for shouting capitalist when times are good and crying socialist and pleading for government help when times are bad. This village idiot with a disability (he lacks a brain) can barely string a sentence together let alone a string for that matter. Yes, I do agree he suffers from other conditions such as penile envy brought on by years of inadequacy.
I stand corrected. It's the ex-Governor of the Reserve Bank - ta for the PMs folks about the peabrain. Don't you just love nitpicking peabrains?
It's also hilarious how this fuckwit is obsessed with me despite his being on my iggy list. This sad gelding also relishes making personal comments about people but whimpers away when he gets it back - he can't take it (and can't dish it out either when you assess his intellect or lack thereof). Then again, that is a trait of a wimp in an industry renown for shouting capitalist when times are good and crying socialist and pleading for government help when times are bad. This village idiot with a disability (he lacks a brain) can barely string a sentence together let alone a string for that matter. Yes, I do agree he suffers from other conditions such as penile envy brought on by years of inadequacy.
IAN MACFARLANE, the recently retired Reserve Bank Governor, has strongly endorsed economic policy during the recession Paul Keating said we had to have.
In the latest of his Boyer Lectures, published and broadcast this weekend, Mr Macfarlane defended interest rate policy at the time of the economic slump in 1990-91.
While policy mistakes were made during the period of financial deregulation in the second half of the 1980s, the actual recession was handled "excellently" and interest rate policy at the time was "optimal", Mr Macfarlane told the Herald in an interview to coincide with the Boyer Lectures.
As the economy overheated in 1989 official interest rates reached 18 per cent, the standard variable mortgage rate 17 per cent and many business loans more than 20 per cent. The economy subsequently fell into recession and the unemployment rate rose to 10.8 per cent. Mr Macfarlane was an assistant governor of the Reserve Bank at the time.
Mr Macfarlane explains in the lecture that the Government did not react in the same way as in the previous recession by pump-priming the economy.
Instead, when the recession was in full swing, interest rates were reduced in "a measured fashion" to make sure Australia grasped the once-in-a-generation opportunity to return to being a low-inflation economy. This has been the foundation for a record period of expansion which is now heading into a 16th year.
"I think the actual handling of the recession was handled excellently; I think that the policy was optimal policy," Mr Macfarlane said.
"The handling of the previous four or five years of financial deregulation - we were all very naive there." Mr Macfarlane notes that the level of interest rates in 1989 was not even unusual at the time.
"They were higher in December 1985, even higher in April 1982, and briefly so in May 1974," he said. "Thus, if we judged the tightness of monetary policy by the level of short-term interest rates, 1989 was the fourth time that we had been in this position."
Nearly all developed economies fell into recession in the early 1990s and it was "inevitable" Australia did too, Mr Macfarlane says.
"Of the 17 [developed] economies that had a recession, 10 had a larger fall in GDP than Australia," he says.
The early 1990s recession was less deep than the slump in 1982 and similar to the recessions of 1961 and 1974.
Even so, the Coalition has used the high interest rate levels of 1989 and the subsequent recession to attack Labor. Mr Macfarlane said the Government has been "very good at demonising" the recession for political gain.
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