Re:Chevron Calls End to New Liquified Natural Gas Mega Projects
by ageofwant on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @09:19AM
(#13930637)
GDP, minimum wage, median net worth are all essentially meaningless. My house here in Perth is "worth" AU$700k, 4 years ago it was "worth" AU$850k. Medium house prices in Aus is $630k. The current US$ exchange rate is 0.75.
I pay AU$60 for a box of Little Creatures pale ale, AU$5 for a flat white, $AU12 for a nice Pat Thai. AU$1.26 for a liter of petrol.
I earn about AU$110k/year.
Real estate in Aus is, as you probably know, a real systemic risk. Australians household debt to GDP sits at 123%, at the end of an unprecedented resource boom. Something is wrong with this picture.
That's incorrect. Australians have a higher median net worth than Norway (100% higher in fact!), thanks to the commodity boom (which prompted the real estate boom). Look at where the number was 20 years ago compared to the rest of the world, versus where it's at now. You can also track that exact same thing in the median income and the GDP per capita, they all simultaneously skyrocketed.
Australia's median net worth per capita figure, is higher than Luxembourg. It's 100% higher than the UK, Japan, Iceland. It's nearly four times that of Sweden (!).
Australia went from having a GDP per capita half that of the US in 2000/2001, to having a higher GDP per capita than the US by 2010 (now back to being slightly below the US, thanks to the dollar run). Median incomes in Australia have soared in line, as witnessed by the $17.70 minimum wage (which only a handful of countries could ever attempt / support). All of that was due to the commodity boom, driven mostly by China.
Today, Australia has a standard of living nearly unheard of in the history of humanity. It has clearly surpassed Norway. Whether it ends in a bust - as it's heavily chained to both commodities and real estate - is the question.