Wow Alan, we knew you wrote, but did not realise your talents were in fantasy. When did you join Alice in Wonderland, your bio said France?

I was going to suggest you come back & have a look at Oz, after some of your previous fairyland stuff. I thought you might just be out of touch, but after this post I won't bother. I doubt you could see the truth if it attacked you with 10Lb sledge hammers.

RobertLePage, mac
You don't understand what you're talking about and it's as simple as that.

Governments at all times into and during the GFC (and the Great Depression for that matter) exercised monopoly control of the supply of money and credit. You also don't understand the first thing about derivatives.

The idea that the problem is not enough monopoly government cartels manipulating the money supply so as to hoover up wealth from the productive class and handing it out to the parasite class is simple idiocy. It's precisely your economically ignorant political ideology that has caused the problems you're complaining about in the first place. The only result of the policies you urge would be more of the parasitic corporatocracy that you are trying to oppose.

If you want to understand what you're talking about, you need to start by getting a basic understanding of the theory of money and credit, which you can obtain here:
“What Has Government Done to Our Money?”
http://mises.org/books/whathasgovernmentdone.pdf
“The Mystery of Banking”
http://mises.org/Books/mysteryofbanking.pdf
both by Murray Rothbard

Only *after* you are stopped blurting out garbled ignorant self-contradictions will you be qualified to hold an opinion on the matter and until then, the less said the better eh.

Hello again, Hasbeen.

So how did you go on the quiz?

http://newmatilda.com/2013/03/15/could-you-be-treasurer-take-quiz

Cheers, AA

Hmmm. Try this instead:

http://newmatilda.com/2013/03/15/could-you-be-treasurer-take-our-quiz

Sorry Alan, I stopped reading tripe, when I gave up soothsaying.

Alan Austin,

>Now, after five years of Labor and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression Australia is first in the world - by a very long margin.<

I'm not sure how you (or whoever) arrived at this first place rating for Aus (or any of the ratings for that matter), given that on GDP we are not quite up there with the U.S., China, UK, Germany, etc? I can only assume that this rating is based on qualitative factors (such as indicated in your following statement) rather than on a quantitative basis? Or else, per capita GDP perhaps?

> on almost every indicator of outcomes - unemployment level, job participation, income per person, productivity, etc. etc. etc. - Australia is better placed now than at any time in its history and better than any nation in the world.<

Regarding your point that Aus was 6th, but moved down to 11th during the Howard years, I have to wonder about the correlation of this time-frame with the rise and rise elsewhere of the 'bubble' culminating in the GFC? Given that Aus was not a significant participant in that bubble, is it not possible that this rating was skewed by anomalies in the comparative base? (Since I doubt that you would be involved in any purposeful imaginative accounting.)

I propose a similar question regarding your attribution to the Rudd/Gillard governments of credit for Aus moving up to first place post the GFC's main shock (given that it is really still ongoing). Is it possible that this assessed elevation in rating was a coincidental resultant of the slippage of our other competitors in the ratings - due to their much greater exposure to the economic and fiscal resultants of their much greater participation in the GFC 'bubble-burst'?

I remain unconvinced that your attribution of credit and blame for the progression of our economic or societal 'rating' on the world stage is soundly based, but I remain open to appropriate argument in this regard. Unexplained ratings remain subject to question, don't you think (and any consequential attribution)?