Crikey’s Bernard Keane is the latest at that organ to lose the plot:
In the RBA and Lowe’s case, the blind spot has turned into rank denialism — when their counterparts elsewhere are taking the issue very seriously indeed.
And as the Reserve Bank keeps jacking up interest rates in pursuit of inflation driven by powerful corporations rather than the greedy workers of central banker stereotype, the cost of that denialism for Australians keeps going up. Lost jobs. Mortgage defaults. Divorces. Yet more inequality. And, inevitably, despair and suicides of people who face a bleak financial future.
Like vaccine denialism, or climate denialism, the RBA’s denialism has a cost that will be counted in lives.
So, Mummy’s boy Phil Lowe is now a murderer. And I thought MB was the master of hyperbole.
It is true that greedflation is playing a major role in inflation. This is a global problem and Australia is not immune. The RBA has done itself no favors in denying it.
But it still has a charter and only one tool to deliver it. It has to control inflation and can only use interest rates.
This is the hand it has been dealt by the Albanese Government. It might have been given more macroprudential tools to be more subtle but Treasurer Jim “Chicken” Chalmers never included APRA in his RBA review.
Moreover, the greedflation that is most obviously at work in the Aussie economy today is the direct responsibility of the Albanese Government.
Albo allowed Ukraine War profiteering by the gas cartel and associated electricity price hikes to go far too long. This has injected cost-push inflation into every business east of WA.
Then he added maniac levels of mass immigration to the mix and skyrocketed rents, as well as turning around the house price correction, the key point of transmission for tighter monetary policy.
These two policy blunders alone comprise roughly 2-3% of this year’s inflation. They will continue to add nearly as much next year.
MB warned Albo non-stop for a year so he has only himself to blame.
Does our good PM have an answer to it? Err, no:
Amid growing recession fears on the back of stagnant GDP growth, climbing interest rates and a record decline in productivity, Mr Albanese will declare “Australia needs to lift our game on productivity”.
Mr Albanese’s growth priorities are led by the clean-energy transformation, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and quantum technologies, diversifying future exports, developing green hydrogen, steel, aluminium and ammonia, training the future workforce, powering advanced manufacturing jobs and strengthening the care and support economy.
Riiight…
- The failing energy transformation is the problem and there is no solution on the horizon as baseload power shuts and renewables rise but there is no firming power to support it other than the gas cartel. Green hydrogen remains very expensive. This is the definition of inflationary which is pretty ironic given renewable energy is free!
- AI has just arrived and will help but that has nothing whatsoever to do with Albo. He couldn’t even spell quantum computing.
- Albo is undoing our diversification of exports away from China at pace as he grovels to Beijing.
- Adding value to resources would be nice but where is it?
- Lunatic levels of mass immigration debase the universities, flood the labour market with dis-productive slaves and explicitly prevent “training the future workforce”.
- Advanced manufacturing platitudes. LOL.
- The bedpan economy is not going to lift productivity.
In short, this agenda is stagflationary: weak growth and productivity and strong inflation. Albo is either a complete idiot or lying through his teeth.
Albo’s tearaway inflation will tumble as the RBA shoves the economy into recession to “make room” for his economic blundering but his stagflationary agenda will bring it back soon afterward.
