Shareswatch Australia

The better U.S. media now use fact-checkers and truth meters to debunk outrageous claims by politicians. Maybe Japan should do the same toward its critics. High on the truth-meter treatment list would be the never-ending claims that Japan is a racist society. One of the more egregious was the claim by the Dutch journalist, Karel van Wolferen, who once wrote that special schools existed to make sure that returnee children be “re-molded” into good, obedient Japanese.

It wasn’t that long ago when ex-Treasury Head Ken Henry talked about the Australian economy being in a ‘Golden Age’. I guess when you can retire on a lucrative public service pension and then parachute into a highly paid job as an advisor to the Prime Minister the future does probably seem bright. But now in early 2012 as unemployment appears set to rise and the economy is showing signs of weakness, Ken Henry’s ‘Golden Age’ comment might end up in the same category as Tim Flannery’s ‘Dams will no longer fill’ prediction.

A sure sign that an economic trend has been established is when the OECD finally jumps on the trend bandwagon and recently the OECD has joined the group of recently converted economic pessimists. Gone are the days when big borrowing, big spending governments would save the day – the theme of the day now is hang onto your hats because we might be in for a bumpy ride.

Over the last few months media commentary regarding the Australian economy has turned decidedly gloomy. The wonders of the mining boom are now being questioned,  the U.S. and European economies matter again and people are starting to wake up to the reality that an economic strategy that basically relies on China dragging Australia along for the ride might not be that clever.

Last year when I dared to suggest that the Australian economy was unbalanced and that 2011-2012 could be a period of economic contraction the mainstream financial reporters were churning out “miracle” economy stories. Back then they were obsessed with telling their readers how the mining boom would shower riches across the Great Southern Land, but today many of them have started to sound a lot more cautious.

An overdue stock market correction is currently working it’s way across global markets and as usual spooked investors have been selling out of the financials and mining stocks in Australia.  Once again this illustrates just how feeble the ASX All Ords and ASX 200 are and how dangerously unbalanced the Australian economy is.  But is the current correction anything out of the ordinary?

The following links and documents are from the ASX (Australian Securities Exchange) website. You can access all these links, associated documents and the stock price charting tool without having to log into the ASX website.

As the year has progressed I have noticed that my view of the Australian stock market and economy has become increasingly at odds with most of the mainstream market commentators back in Australia.  Whereas they see reasons to be optimistic and feel the economy is robust, I feel the situation is quite different and believe the Australian economy is dangerously unbalanced and possibly primed for a nasty correction.

Over the last few weeks most of the financial media have once again managed to draw the wrong conclusions on a range of issues from Australian dollar to the strength of the Australian economy.  Talk of the so called two speed economy seems to be back in vogue whereas I believe we should be focused on and worried by, the unbalanced nature of the Australian economy.

All hail to the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, for according to the communiqué from G20 meeting in Washington, they have saved the world from a financial crisis and will now lead us into a new era of growing global trade. Of course if the G20 actually functioned properly in the first place we would not be in the mess we are in now, but I guess they don’t talk about that much at the meeting.

According to many major news outlets and financial commentators in Australia, the recent trade data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is proof  that the Australian economy is “booming”.  The Reserve Bank also seems to think the nation is in the midst of a boom and the amazing Ken Henry (of where is my tax report fame) reckons Australia will enjoy a “golden age” for decades.

I have a message for those people who fled to the hills over the last few years fearing that global trade was going to collapse, paper money would be worthless and that gold would be the only thing worth owning for years to come and that message is:  “the global economy is recovering, please come back and join the rest of us”.

As the end of the year approaches it is time once again to contemplate how stocks may perform over the next 12 months. There are plenty of views around of course that range from the super bearish (i.e. there will be another stock market crash) to super bullish, (i.e. markets will surge to dizzying new heights) but I will steer clear of both extremes. So at the risk of being very wrong, very soon, let me now underwhelm you with my outlook for the Australian share market in 2010.

It’s time to start getting tough on Beijing. No, this is not a rant about China’s alleged lack of human rights. When China has something as evil as Abu Ghraib and Bagram we might have a right to complain. Nor am I complaining about China’s lack of something called democracy. Would China’s one child policy have survived in a democracy?

When it is hard to make sense of what is going on with the global economy I feel it is often best to try and remove the noise created by endless stock market reports, economic surveys, financial forecasts etc. and try and focus on facts not fiction. It also helps to put aside people’s opinions (including our own), relax and calmly assess what the data is really telling us, as opposed to trying to use this data to predict the future.

Have you noticed of late how the Australian stock market is just not listening to the Reserve Bank’s Glenn Stevens? No matter how optimistic the RBA Governor sounds the ASX All Ords refuses to surge past 5000, so what is happening? Are investors wrong about the state of the Australian economy and simply not picking up on the positive economic indicators the RBA is apparently seeing?