PaulL,

Entirely right. A BCom from the COCO islands trumps an MA from Melbourne as far as relevance to business or the economy.

TBC,

It appears that you are still ashamed of what you did for the MA, and have yet to indicate what qualifies you comment on economics and / economists? And why you can't get a real job.

P.S.

Ranking of Top Economics Schools in the UK (The Top 30 list):

1 Oxford
2 Cambridge
3 London School of Economics
4 University College London

My my, this is jolly good fun!

I agree with your comments about acquiring an Arts degree, PaulL. Any fool can get one and it behoves employers to scrutinise them closely before they hire. Like everything else the Humanities, indeed university in general, has degenerated in private hands, students have morphed into customers, and degrees are churned out like cheep goods from China.
Brilliant academics are still created, but I doubt there are any more now, PHP, than there were during the elitist days when second class degrees were commonly bought, by cash or influence.
I suspect matters are similar across the academic spectrum, however, so it's curious that the humble Arts degree is always singled out as the lowest of the low--even lower than Business! But then, everything is reduced now to pecuniary pragmatics. The "Humanities" were once synonymous with university and an arts degree was an essential complement to every profession.
I have a brother with an MBA, sponsored by the corporation he works for and he readily admits it was a perfunctory process to make him eligible for a promotion. Form, don't you know; the company wanted to elevate him based on his abilities, but he had to have the letters. So, it was, how do they say it.. "facilitated".
The ratio, literacy : illiteracy, hasn't changed, it's just that now, some illiterates can read.

I agree, SM, that the stimulus spending was a waste of money, indeed it was an obscenity, reinforcing profligacy as a virtue. Nor was it was it needed in the end. But Australia was following suit (it's a decadent world) and I doubt the conservatives would have been much different, perhaps worse. I also doubt it's possible now to cancel projects already underway.
Considering bankers (with MBA's) got us into this mess in the first place, should we hang on their sage advice now?
It does look as though you're merely venting prejudice..

Shadow minister,

So, on topic. I'm a bit surprised that the reserve bank would say all this. The gov't stimulus spending, as wasteful as it was, can surely only cause inflation if it is actually achieving the gov't aim. This was to stimulate economic activity in the face of the possibility of another great depression.

Stimulus spending is ALWAYS a blunt lever. In the end the goal is to put more money into the economy. If it works it is almost always going to cause some inflation.

As for the NBN. How? They have hardly started?.

Isn't it much more likely that inflation is being driven by the mining boom?

PaulL,

An intelligent question for a change.

In an economic downturn, often the first to be retrenched are those working in the construction industry. Other than the distress to the individuals concerned, there is a loss of tax, and loss of money circulating in the economy.

Where the downturn is expected to be greater than a year, government sponsored construction provided needed infrastructure, and the salaries to the construction workers keeps the housing and retail sectors going.

However, if there is close to full employment, what simply happens is that the state is competing with business, and skilled wages rise, at the cost of business projects, boosting inflation and debt with little contribution to the economy.

The tell tale signs that not all was right was when the construction contracts the government negotiated with the unions was 10%-20% higher than the wages prior to the GFC. At this point the alarm should have sounded and the stimulus should have been reduced.

That employment dropped to nearly 5% within a year indicated that the need for stimulus was over, however, 90% of the BER was spent after this, with the result that inflation is picking up, and we have been left with a huge tab. That the BER project itself was complete stuff up was just the cherry on top.

In short the stimulus was:
Too much,
Too late,
Very little to show for it.

If, one morning, the Prime Minister walked over the Murray River, I suspect that Shadow Minister that afternoon would introduce a thread on the forum that would read, "Prime Minister can't swim."

"Prime Minister can't swim."
Lexi,
now you're resorting to leftie quip rhetoric.

As for:
Too much,
Too late,
Very little to show for it.

Do you have evidence to the contrary ?