my silly brother, page-3

jgunter

You brother has a very good point. Normally I am totally opposed to the Greens, but the sale of our assets at bargain basement prices is absurd, especially since we cannot buy the farms and mines in China and India while they are buying up ours.

If the mines are owned by us then we will employ the same number of people, and retain the massive profits in Australia. There is risk everywhere, including real estate, so why not invest in our mines instead of finance ponzi housing.

Bascially once the mine has been built the profits are used to fund more acquisitions in Australia. In addition the foreign companies get a tax deduction for all sorts of things including supposed interest payments on loans (in the case of China it would be a very cheap loan from the government but they would claim it is much higher). There is also the issue of tax avoidance - a recent example was an Xstrata deal involving $600m, in addition to transfer pricing arrangements that reduce local profits but transfer them overseas.

In addition they also want to bring in their own labour to cheapen our wage rates, particularly China, which is for whom Gina Rhinhardt is working for in her partnership with Chinese companies that are seeking special concessions.

In essence we are funding the takeover of our own assets, which is really stupid. Xstrata is just a parasitical company that ran a very smart takeover campaign. So did Billiton in that crazy merger with BHP.

Your brother is right about this issue, but he may not fully understand the economics of how it works out.

loki (yeah, I have economics/accounting/finance quals)