We should actually reject economic liberalisation as it is an ideology in itself. It was dreamed up by corporations and handed over to university departments throughout the Western world to give credence that any policy development for economic liberalisation somehow had the look of intellectual respectability about it.

Our current prosperity comes from two main sources:
1) our heritage of asset and revenue rich public utilities
2) the error of economic liberalist policies sicne the mid 1980s in privatising them

Quick big bucks look good as a once off on government balance sheets and then are used for good or for ill but in both cases are eventually whittled away. When the government silver is all sold up voila there you have a privatised nation in which control is out of government and public hands to our great detriment economically, socially and in sovereign terms.

The author notes that:
" ... by focusing on ideology [in his The Monthly essay], Rudd does not adequately explore the economics underpinning the politics. His argument would have been far stronger if it had buttressed ideology with real-world economics as a basis for addressing the crisis."

I put it to the author that he is subject to a similar type of criticism.

He notes that:
"In the worst cases, publicly subsidised profits are privatised while losses are borne by taxpayers and employees. This approach may be justified for banks whose failure threatens the entire economy, but not for non-finance companies.

Government must demand reciprocal obligation for corporate welfare as it does for individual welfare."

It would have been interesting to hear more from the author, on measures he would consider to be efficacious regarding these reciprocal obligations - or is it more reasonable that he would best leave the details to other experts of his Per Capita think tank?.

I expect they will think long and hard on this problem, which he has most laudably identified and publicised.

Both the neo liberal economists along with Rudd and his part criticism of a system that he himself has gone along with, are both wrong. Morals is the real issue and the averge Joe Blow and mary Jane could tell Rudd, Turnbull and the economic rationalists- whom both sides of politics have gone along with, that the new economics since the Lima Agreement in the 70s followed up by the mass privatisations and reduction of tarrifs in the 1980s was always about corporate greed and control by human design. It is not an other worldly ideology or one that is even intellectual. It only has the veneer of being intellectual but is really about greed and power. It is up to patriotic labor type Australians particuarly from a traditional as opposed to a neo modernist/liberl Catholic beleif system to speak up and act politically.

Economic treason is the elephant in the room. The issue shouldn't be given the respectability and satisfaction of in any way being about use of the intellect.

It's interesting to watch Rudd, & his bunch of dills waffle on about the big bad banks, not passing on the latest rate cut. They have the easy, & obvious lever of the tax payer deposit guarantee, to make the banks do their bidding, & they can apply the mutual obligation label to it, as well.

Withdraw that guarantee from any of the banks, & that bank will be haemorrhaging deposits, & proffits so fast that they won't be able to give the full rate cut quickly enough.

Of course, being tough on banks is not in Rudd & co's future interest. The flow of company directorships they are expecting, after politics, may be considerably reduced if they have inhibited bank profits, while in office.

The author seems to equate success for a small section of the economy as being success for the country, yet we see growing unemployment, collapsing business, growing homelessness, poverty and retiree's future going down the drain. You can only claim prosperity when all of your family are receiving equal benefit and not just 5-10%.

I understand the head in the sand crowd didn't see what would happen from the economic, governance and social approach those in power took, just about everyone else saw it coming. Sadly the psychology of the ideological human shows they rarely take notice of reality, instead concentrate on feeding their greed and fairy land existence.

If you listen to economists and academics, they say we are at the bottom of the crisis. If you think about it rationally, you'll see we are at the top of the fall and just about to begin the descent. The aim of big business and government is to continue down the same path in the belief globalisation, privatisation and monopolisation will work for them. However none of these things has shown any success for the people or future, just the opposite.

Up dating regulatory design is just saying, manipulate it more so we can continue with our failing agenda. We need full regulation of financial institutions, corporations, costs and wages. Major infrastructure and services should be in the hands of the people, not profit makers. Our progress should not be economic growth which is ultimately destructive, but economic stability and technological growth. There's only one way to contain inflation, fiscal control. Deregulation hasn't worked, costs get higher and higher, so people demand more to survive which just continues the revolving door syndrome of economics. It just goes round and round always back to the same spot with the same results, disaster.

I agree with the thrust of the article, but in introducing ideology and big words it makes the current mess sound complex. It almost seems reasonable our leaders let us walk into it. I think the best way to cure that is a bit of riddicule:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWDdcD-1xoo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScwGBNMH428
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzJmTCYmo9g

Most will find themselves laughing at the skits. It will be the same kind of wry chuckle you'd make watching a video of a your uphill neighbour parking his car with the handbrake off, and then car flying downhill and demolishing your house. All very funny after enough time has passed.

Its not surprising Rudd and his political mates try use the resulting mess to booster their own ideology. The best response to that is to ignore it. What matters is how they propose to fix it. If their fixes simply try to stop people behaving like idiots they will fail - there are just too many ways to be an idiot. Even worse would be to attempt to describe and allow non-idiotic behaviour.

In the long term the only thing that will work are, as the article says, laws enforcing transparency. Banks and other businesses will hate this. All the usual canards about "invasion of privacy" and "business confidentiality" will be trotted out in opposition. But unless you can make it the idiocy obvious at the time it occurs history is doomed to repeat itself.

wrong wrong wrong, we again are treating the symptoms not the underlying problem. We had the strongest growth under the Bretton Woods arrangements. It was based on the US$ being the reserve currency. This is no longer sustainable we need reform of the international currency framework without this we will not address the current account imbalances and the asset bubble they cause.

Whilst we pursue deregulation as a blind religious faith without debating the fundamental paradigm we will only row the boat closer to the waterfall.

Speculation on currency movements is diverting capital from productive investments.

Companies diverting capital to hedge their trading positions is the cost of currency deregulation. Ask the Farmers in Australia sucked into foreign loans in the 80s, homeowners in Poland who have been sucked into loans in Swiss Francs and ask the shareholders of Pasminco which collapsed because of hedging errors.