Jonathan Green » RBA

Do you want the bad news or the tabloid pap?

Jonathan Green — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:22:00 +0000

The economy is in a dire place, the RBA is feeling compelled to act as best it can to apply CPR to the twitching patient. Every cut in rates is just another clue to the depth of despair around the RBA board table. Of course, that’s not how they see it in tabloid newspaper land. Oh no. From each according to their capacity to pay, to each according to the newspaper they read. Here’s today’s Herald Sun, battler’s friend:

INTEREST rates may drop another 1 per cent in an early Christmas spending present for households as the RBA aims to avert a recession.

There’s only one way rates are heading, and that’s down down, deeper and down, as Francis Rossi might have put it. And that’s no Christmas present, that’s a grim portent. Readers of papers that couch grim news in such dissembling pap, should rise up and demand something closer to the truth. It’s a measure of just what a cynical exercise in faux camaraderie tabloid publishing is.

Mr Henry goes to estimates

Jonathan Green — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 22:51:56 +0000

Just watching treasury secretary Ken Henry copping the best that Helen Coonan has to offer in Senate Estimates …. it’s a clash of worlds, Coonan and Abetz grappling for points of pure politics, Henry struggling to keep his feet on a higher plane of policy and decisions. Coonan persists, Henry slaps down … ‘While I would not normally tolerate questions such as this one and in my 24 years of appearing at these committees I never have …’. The Governor of the RBA and the Secretary of the Treasury were on “one mind”. Abetz and Coonan won’t let it go. It’s unseemly. And not much to do with anything beyond a cynical piece of nitpicking in pursuit of advantage. It’s King Kong v. the bi-planes, says the learned Mr Keane. Quite so.

1% cut! This is serious mum

Jonathan Green — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:37:50 +0000

If you’d been quick this morning you would have made double figure money from the bookies on a RBA cash rate cut of 1%. Surprise, surprise … Glenn Stevens you old fox. The commentary seems to have been a bit slow off the mark. The usual gaggle of spotty herberts in bad, fat ties on Sky news/business have been flummoxed, 1% being well outside their range of expectation/experience/capacity to extemporize. So 1% feels good momentarily, until you pause to consider just how bad the RBA thinks things might actually be …

Rudd has spoken this afternoon, a moment notable for his dextrous employment of the expression “pass through”. This is either a: what banks might do in applying the full RBA cut to their own retail products, b: what happens when pensioners eat cat food or c: what a camel does vis a vis the sewing implement prior to its entry to paradise. Wherein it will presumably find 72 virgin camels, so it’s worth it. Things are not so good for pensioners on that score. They will probably find a 72-year-old virgin. Thank you very much. Try the veal.