Sorry about the very long delay in my reply.

It seems like I had a shocker!! China’s Non performing Loans are now nothing like the 40% I quoted, they now claim about 1.6%. Sorry the 40% came from a link I clicked on while reading a current article but took me to one that was over 10yrs old. The Chinese have already taken all this off their books or put them in a “special investment vehicle”.

It looks like Bill Evans has had a “boat to Iceland” moment, too bad it took him 33 er sorry 50 years too long. He has beaten all the others to this realisation however.

I too saw Henry and Stevens on the TV last night and I tend to agree that Stevens was probably wishing that he was somewhere else.
Only neoclassical economists could make claims like that and have the MSM broadcast the garbage.

Did you see Simon Crean crowing about how close he is to a free trade agreement with China? China which has pegged its currency at least 1000% too high! He is pleased that the Chinese want to “invest” in Australia! He wants Australians to invest in China. “Yeah right” who brought him?

We can’t produce real products for our own consumption, they have destroyed that capability. We need to borrow at least $40,000,000,000 pa to cover the CAD (it has fallen from the previous year), and the government is taking on this burden aswell as bank foreign debt rollovers by quietly issuing treasury notes (this self censored by the MSN).
If the economy did “recover” whatever that might mean, will we still be able to sell these notes on the foreign market to keep the show on the road I think not. It would have been interesting to ask Stevens and Henry to explain where the foreign credit would be comming from in the future, but then again “loose lips sink ships er dodgy economies”.

Ken Henry justified the predictions in his speech yesterday. Fair dinkum, does it take a whole overpaid Dept to reproduce a graph from the 1960’s and say “this is the future”. What do they do all day? Drink tea? Henry should resign and donate all his Superannuation to those who have lost all their savings through his, either, stupidity, or deliberate lying over the past two years.

Further, watching Lateline last night it is apparent that Ken Henry still has not noticed a single difference between this recession those that have gone before.
Glen Stevens is just still singing the same ’spin’ tune he instructed all the other “experts” to sing a month ago. Mind you, watching Glen’s face, and carefully weighing his words, I don’t think he was too happy about publicly backing these Treasury GDP estimates!!!!

On another note, I attended the Post Budget talk given by Bill Evans of Westpac in Brisbane. I was prepared to rip his ears off for his stupid predictions over the past two years. He beat me to the punch by putting up his predictions of earlier years and comparing them to reality. His predictions and reality had nothing in common! Interestingly, Bill put up our Foreign Debt levels and informed the audience we are in the worst situation in the world other than Iceland, which has collapsed, and NZ which is on the verge.
He did not expand on the difficulties this is going to cause going forward, particularly with our Govt trying to finance it’s deficits in the coming years. He was scaring the audience enough already, I think, and, as I have become aware over a long period, most people don’t even know that Foreign Debt exists or that there is such a thing as a Current Accout. So it is a bit difficult to suddenly raise it, and explain the significance in a few short minutes, during a speech about the Budget.
Nevertheless, he is the first one of the MSM ‘experts’ I have seen to publicly acknowledge there is a serious problem there. I thought it was significant.