The five stages of iron ore grief

Advertisement

It’s not altogether easy to judge whether a large resources endowment makes a nation stupid, or being stupid leads a nation to rely heavily upon a large resources endowment. It’s probably both caught in a feedback loop.

Either way, Australia is going through some kind of rude awakening when it comes to its iron ore dependency. Having all but ignored it through the boom, every man and his newspaper is suddenly an iron ore expert after last week’s inquiry debacle.

And not before time. As some readers will recall, long before MB existed I opined that the iron ore price and its market issues ought to be on the front page of every paper in the country, every day. The two steel commodities (iron ore and coking coal) account for 40% of export revenues and have driven an astonishing three-quarters of Australian export revenue growth since 2003.

The full text of this article is available to MacroBusiness subscribers

$1 for your first month, then:
Cancel at any time through our billing provider, Stripe
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.