Billie,

You like every other commentator forgets we are still in the middle of a resources boom. Prices and volumes haven't changed recently.

Obviously the Reserve Bank got it seriously wrong with all those rate rises during the election and after. Of course Rudd and Swan were wrong to have talked up inflation earlier in the year and in 'egging on' the reserve to raise rates. Just as both have got it completely wrong with the cuts, the stimulii and state and Federal deficits.

Watch in about 6 to 12 months for that's how long it took for their stupid actions to stiffle the Australian economy. Btw that occurred well before the effects of the world recession, the following world credit crisis, the later Stock Market crashes and the Chinese Economic meltdown reached or are to reach us.

billie, you miss completely the point of my critique, which I directed against the irrelevancy of Thornton, the Reserve board, and now yourself too. So you claim that my allusions to Soros and Keynes are irrelevant, but I added them merely to emphasize how misguided and dangerous is the widespread adulation of such parasitic speculators. Malthusian eugenicists and their kin in fascist neo-Darwinians should already be deemed irrelevant in any properly democratic and human society; instead, such scum are lionized precisely because the ruling oligarchs are themselves so corrupt and perverse.

Given such degeneracy and stupidity among the supposed "leadership", how can we expect them to even properly acknowledge the real source of the disaster in the derivatives market, or to start with the proper, moral and logical corrective action i.e., writing that market's players off as bankrupt - which they are - instead of persisting with this bail-out and underwriting lunacy?

Another threat is the "reformist" lie, which claims that the usury and fraud themselves were not the problem, just that such practices were somehow "not regulated enough". We could call this BS the free-trade "harm minimization" approach, which is really a publicity approach of spin, nothing of substance in actual policy or other leadership. Obama spouted this rubbish (obviously with Sortos' hand moving his lips), and ex-Reserve boss Ian MacFarlane spewed it again just today (see: http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/look-beyond-greed--a-world-of-leverage-made-this/2008/12/03/1228257139387.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap).