Monday, February 28, 2011

Break in posting

Interesting take by Australia economist and Reserve Bank of Australia board member Warwick McKibbin - the headline Bigger bubble is building captures the message.

I haven't had time to go back and look at the things I wrote at the time of the global financial crisis, but one of the things that I talked about then was the nature of the lags associated with the various global responses to the crisis. McKibbin's point that the bubble in global commodity prices and property markets in Asia threatened to dwarf the US housing market bubble that led to the GFC in 2008 is directly linked to this; the world is awash with liquidity.

I am still packing to move, but when I do get through that dreadful process, I want to come back to Professor McKibbin's point. It bears upon another point I have been making, the possible lessons for the present from the 1979-81 period.

In the midst of the packing I have been constantly distracted by books. Books that I haven't read, haven't read for a long while, or just old favourites. I have a new reading list!

I have also been distracted by the sheer scale of the task. I have been trying to keep focused by chunking things into small bits, cleaning as I go along, but the sheer scale of it all is overwhelming.

I have tried to keep posting up, but that has really become very difficult. So I am going off-line here until the whole moving process has been completed.       

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