Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Links Oct 20: Policy chaos

US QEII fail. Joseph Stiglitz
US QEII fail. II. Stephen Roach
BOE QEIII fail. Bloomberg
RBA fail. Stephen Bartholomeusz
China raises interest rates. Bloomberg
A good idea. Michael Pettis
QEII bad for China says Yu Yongding. Bloomberg
The political economy of QEII. The Economist
China still buying Treasuries (hint for Gotti). Economipic
ForeclosureGate gets serious. Zero Hedge I, II
Risk off: I, II, III
Great news: RSPT deal in trouble. SMH
Wine catches Dutch Disease. The Oz
Universities already have it. (h/t The Lorax) ABC
Ore ramp done? Reuters
China ore demand to slow in 2011. Reuters
But not for copper. Mining Weekly

4 comments:

The Lorax said...

The "BOE QEIII fail. Bloomberg" link is broken.

Oh and did you see this? Universities get the Dutch Disease

Torchwood1979 said...

Dutch Disease is definitely taking hold of the Higher Education sector (we need to remember this includes TAFEs and private colleges as well as universities). Last week the directors in our division were asked to prepare reports detailing how their sections would handle budget cuts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, should the need arise. Thank goodness I'm now permanent. Spent over five years as a contract staff member during the good times but I wouldn't feel too safe right about now if I was still living quarter to quarter on whatever contract came my way.

David Llewellyn-Smith said...

Sorry to hear that, Torch. Can I suggest you buy your colleagues a hard hat as they depart. Perhaps one like mine...

Torchwood1979 said...

Nobody knows just how bad it will get, but they're preparing for the worst if the international student market drops 50% or more in the next few years. The loss in income is somewhat offset by the purchasing power of our dollar, however. For example the IT department can purchase software and hardware for less, service charges to some vendors are in $USD so there's more left in those budgets to purchase new products and the library is subscribing to almost every online database they possibly can. So while the university's income takes a hammering on the income side of our balance sheet we can handle cuts to certain budgets on the expenses side because the high $AUD improves our purchasing power. I don't know if anyone has done in-depth number crunching or econometric modelling of exactly how such a high dollar will impact our business, but we're sure the net result will be very bad for the University.