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April 14, 2008
This is the image I have as I leave Australia for two weeks in NZ. Wayne Swan, the Treasurer, sure has changed his tune. After months of planglossianisms he is now incorporating into his talk of tough budget and a protracted period of high interest rates the IMFs language of an 'unstable international outlook and inflation'; and that Australia would not be immune from the financial crisis.
Why Swan is even saying that no one at the IMF meetings in Washington he is attending believed that Asia was somehow de-coupled from the financial turmoil that began late last year with the subprime mortgage crisis in the US.
Spooner
Well, that sure contradicts all the rhetoric about China's economic growth and demand for Australia's resources acting as a firewall against an 'unstable international outlook and inflation'. It looks as if Swan needed the authority of the IMF to say the obvious.
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Looks like we've entered a Keating redux. Five minutes of economic sunshine and then those dark clouds of doom and gloom roll in.