A few days ago, LVO penned a piece exposing the extraordinary rent-seeking economy of NSW:
One of the biggest structural changes to have occurred to the Australian economy over the past 35-years has been the explosive growth in the FIRE economy – Finance, Insurance and Rental, Hiring & Real Estate Services – which has roughly doubled its share of the national economy:
In short, since financial markets were deregulated in the mid-1980s, the FIRE sector has grown at roughly twice the pace of the rest of the economy, courtesy of the property bubble and associated explosion in household debt, as well as the rivers of gold from compulsory superannuation.
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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.
