thursday's trading, page-63

The only people struggling in Australia are those who had lots of money in the share market. Outside that unemployment is near historical lows, house prices are declining ever so slightly, interest rates are the lowest in years, petrol prices dropping. There's not much to complain about in the real economy outside the resource sector. All this commodity income has been great but people forget we had a healthy domestic economy before the resource boom.

Of course it could get worse and probably will to some extent, but how much of an economic catastrophe does the market want to price in at this point? There's just too much irrationality out there - banks paying double digit yields - fully franked, resource companies with twice as much cash as their market cap. I shudder to think what would happen if we ever had a real recession.