Selling season?, page-38

Thanks matie - whatever you wish to believe - the facts are simple and the facts are these:

The extent of Australia’s economic lie has now been laid bare with the National Accounts figures showing the economy grew by only 0.2% in Q4-18 well below the official forecasts of 0.6%. More telling, GDP per capita fell to negative 0.3% on the back of a fall of 0.1% in the Q3-18. Two consecutive quarters of negative GDP per capita - the first time this has occurred for 13 years.

Let's look at GDP - a useful index when there isn’t much population growth, but in Australia GDP is an optical illusion; useful to politicians and lazy business leaders. High immigration figures enables businesses to report constantly expanding sales figures without making any effort to increase local market share or expand exports, while immigration enables tax revenues to grow whilst hiding the increased social security costs in the State budgets - but it's an illusion...

At 1.6% a year, Australia’s population growth is roughly double the OECD average, which is why you hear politicians say “Australia continues to grow faster than all of the G7 nations” but the truth is high immigration depresses GDP per capita. - dishonest government doesn't want anyone to look at this as adjusting for population growth produces a small - or as we have at present - negative GDP results

And in any case GDP itself is not a useful measure of the standard of living. It is little more than a consumption index the fails to account for the debt build-up that’s fuelling consumption. A better measure is net disposable income - which also capture terms of trade. If export prices increase faster than import prices the overall standard of living begins to climb - and this is reflected in the real net national disposable income figure.

In Australia the facts are simple - household savings have plummeted to an all time low: household debt is at an all time high while real wage growth is stagnant. This is against a background of falling house prices in all the capital cities and a crisis in the rural communities with near population collapse become apparent in some regions, particularly in NSW . The fundamentals of the Australian economy are poor and deteriorating. Little wonder Gosh! Fightenedburgh is beginning to feel a little like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis….

and that's my view

We'll see who's right