Despite its tendency to provoke anxiety-inducing debates in Congress and government shutdowns, the high level of US IOUs isn’t a big deal.
Then NSW treasurer and now Premier Mike Baird, shaking hands in 2013 to mark the handover of Port Botany under a 99-year lease – the same period as has been proposed to lease state electricity assets to private operators.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Privatising public assets is like a tradesperson selling her or his tools when facing a temporary income shortfall. Much better to borrow at low interest rates and productively invest those funds.
Queensland’s debt: is it sky high, or under control? An economist shows what you need to know to judge for yourself.
AAP/Dan Peled
How much debt is Queensland really in? How much of that debt can past Labor governments bear responsibility for, and has the current Liberal National government cut or added to it? And how does Queensland’s…
Fast-spinning black holes don’t just exist in space – Queensland’s Liberal National and Labor parties are busy attacking each other’s strategies to cut debt, yet both have been guilty of having black holes in their plans.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Author’s update, January 29: In the week since this article was published (on January 23), Labor has moved to address the funding “black hole” in its plans to reduce Queensland’s debt, mainly by adopting…
Taken at face value, David Cameron’s warning this week about risks in the global economy sounds like it might be wonderfully prescient. Here’s the country’s economic chauffeur, carefully checking his instrument…
Does your treasurer suffer from deficit size fetishism?
Alan Porritt/AAP
Though money and financial factors are integrated in complex ways in the workings of the economy, ultimately it is real resources – work forces (sizes and skills), capital goods and natural resources…
And they cleared the public debt and lived happily ever after.
Conservatives
There’s something to be said for the suggestion that politicians habitually cite academic papers they have never read and thus use them as convenient props for measures they would have implemented anyway…
You can’t fault a treasurer for trying to put the best possible spin on budget numbers — and that’s certainly what Joe Hockey did last night. The most important numbers, of course, are the deficit projections…
Household debt in the UK recently hit a record high, surpassing the previous peak reached in September 2008. That was the month when Lehman Brothers collapsed, sparking off the global financial crisis…
Australia’s debt level is currently pegged at A$300 billion, but should the debt belt be tightened or dropped altogether?
John Pryke/AAP
The Australian Parliament is deadlocked on a bid by the government to increase the debt ceiling from A$300 billion to A$500 billion. The Greens have flagged a willingness to drop the ceiling entirely…
While the Coalition has criticised Australia’s public debt levels, it is the country’s private debt that is the big issue.
Image sourced from www.shutterstock.com
Liberal MP Andrew Robb has criticised the rise in public debt under the current Gillard government in a recent ABC radio interview. During the interview, Robb claimed growth in public debt was excessive…