2015 will be ugly in the West! (members)

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From Bloomie:

Western Australia’s bonds are the nation’s worst-performing regional debt this year as an iron-ore rout clouds the finances of a borrower that’s already lost its top credit score at Standard & Poor’s.

Securities sold by Australia’s biggest state by area have returned 5.1 percent since Dec. 31, compared with 6.3 percent for an index of the nation’s provincial notes, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The price of iron ore, the state’s largest export, has slumped 30 percent to $93.40 a metric ton over the same period and entered a bear market, forcing miners in the remote Pilbara region to cut spending and jobs.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.