Maybe if Macquarie Group’s Rory Robertson and his other economist chums (Westpac’s Bill Evans was riding the bandwagon at the weekend too) become disillusioned with their current BAK economic theory, they could give Pauline-Hansonomics a try.
We’ve received a few emails recently from Money Morning readers drawing our attention to former politician, chip-shop owner, and jailbird, Pauline Hanson’s monetary policy when she was heading up One Nation.
To be honest, your editor doesn’t recall the comment she made early on in her political career, so we have to rely on secondary sources. The best and closest we could get is this snippet from the UKs The Independent newspaper in 1998:
“She is calling for high tariffs to protect Australian producers from foreign competition, and the establishment of a “People’s Bank” to lend to farmers at just 2 per cent interest. Her most fanciful proposal is to fund such a bank by printing more money, the classic recipe for hyper-inflation.”
Substitute “Ruddbank” in place of “People’s Bank” and you could almost say Ms. Hanson was years ahead of time.
And as for the last sentence about printing money being a “fanciful proposal” and the “classic recipe for hyper-inflation,” well The Independent seems to have changed its tune. And not surprisingly they’ve got themselves a pro money-printing article from… you guessed it, a major bank.
In this case it’s Stephen King, managing director of economics at HSBC. He wrote:
“While I think the Bank is doing the right thing by moving towards quantitative easing [printing money], it needs to offer more details of how the policy is meant to work.”
Does he really need to know more about how it works? Seriously, this is the managing director of economics at one of the world’s largest banks.
No wonder the global banking system is stuffed.
Other Stuff on the Markets
The S&P/ASX200 gained 1.75% yesterday, while overnight on Wall Street the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 82 points. In Europe the FTSE100 dropped 1.04% and the CAC40 lost 1.67%.
The price of gold in Australian dollars is trading at $1,152.28, while in US Dollars it trading at $928.28.
The Aussie dollar remained steady versus the US dollar and Japanese Yen, trading at USD$0.8053, and JPY77.69.
Crude oil lost some ground overnight, closing at USD$70.58.
For the biggest movers on the market yesterday click here…
And today on the economic calendar we have Retail Sales and Building Approvals.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
so……..if its possible to be entering a hyper-inflation period ..whenever that occurs
wont house prices rise even more?
etch