what do you make of this? We topped the list, switzerland 2nd....

what do you make of this? We topped the list, switzerland 2nd. Hard to believe. I'm growing veggies...esp after my last trade. hopeless. will have to pull out metastock again.sh!!T

http://business.smh.com.au/business/deep-in-foreign-debt-20081112-5msv.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

Michael West
November 12, 2008

Merrill Lynch put out a global economic report last week in which it dubbed Australia the riskiest economy in the world. Counter-intuitive as it seemed, Nigeria was rated the safest.

The blogosphere went wild: "ridiculous'', "nutty, "what a joke'', said some. A few broadly agreed with the findings.

Titled "Everything you wanted to know about the world'' the Merrill economics team drew on 62 indicators from the 60 countries.

Australia was ranked riskiest on a table of rankings deduced from seven indicators. These were the current account financing gap, foreign exchange reserves/short-term external debt ratio, exports to-GDP ratio, private credit-to-GDP ratio, private credit growth, loans-to deposits ratio and banks capital-to-assets ratio.

As this country has zero national debt, a stable government and an apparently well-capitalised banking system we can take the Merrill report lightly. In any case, the nature of these things is a complete stab in the dark.