Michael Pascoe - Business Today, SMH

Look beyond the doomsayer's cry

While we’re now officially crap at cricket, we remain the World Champion of economics, albeit champions with challenges ahead. It’s not possible to deal rationally with those challenges without first being able to rationally understand where we’re at and what is possible in the short term.

That’s why the RBA will leave interest rates unchanged at its meeting today – not because there’s an election on Saturday. Last month’s board minutes and the August 9 monetary policy statement spelt out the challenges and encouraging signs.

Since the last meeting, the international picture has remained volatile but, on balance, no worse. The trend building approvals figures along with APRA’s figures for new housing loans, among other sources, indicate the dwelling investment bet is coming off.

You can continue to get a better grip on what’s really happening by reading the RBA board minutes than listening to politicians and commentators caught up in that misled national mood.

Hockey closes campaign with a joke

Excerpt from Michael Pascoe's article from the :

The rhetoric about the Coalition “always being better economic managers” is likely to provide a honeymoon  business confidence boost, but it doesn’t actually mean anything - as inane as the claim that “interest rates will always be lower under a Liberal government”. The big drivers of the Australian economy have generally been outside the control of whatever party was in power. The government of the day can make matters better or worse, but they can’t do a King Kanute.

Which is why the Joe Hockey who made the Age of Entitlements speech nearly 17 months ago needs to be resurrected, or at least writer of that speech needs to be put in charge of the soon-to-be Treasurer. What we’ve been promised during this miserable election campaign is actually no improvement at all, just slightly different priorities – more entitlements for some new car buyers, maternity leave takers and the makers of Cadbury’s chocolates, fewer entitlements for the parents of school children, “clean energy” proponents and small businesses.

But sometimes you have to trust politicians to lie. Hopefully Joe Hockey is still joking, not telling the full story today. Whether that will turn out to be a good or bad thing probably depends on what entitlements matter most to you.