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Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by eru on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @10:17AM (#15081696)
Which country are you talking about? Different countries have different business cycles.

Eg Australia and Israel barely noticed the Great Recession.

Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by gonzo41 on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @11:03AM (#15082019)
We are going to notice it when people come to the realization that a 3 bedroom house isn't actually worth a million bucks. Also one of the big reasons Australia skipped a few downturns is we got lucky having a ton of iron ore in the ground. In addition to this when the GFC hit the government just poured money at regular people, (trickle Up! Economics). I got $900 bucks for nothing, with a clear signal from the government that I was to spend that money keeping things ticking over. We got lucky.
Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by eru on Thursday August 24, 2017 @05:05AM (#15088621)
The iron ore made China pay Australia lots. But the iron ore wasn't preventing any downturn. Just the opposite: commonly countries that rely on commodity exports have crazy volatile economies, since global commodity prices are volatile.

Give your central bank some credit!

Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by googletazer on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @04:06PM (#15084594)
Not lucky, you guys just played your cards right. Other nations squandered their chance.
Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by vram22 on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @11:03AM (#15082022)
>Eg Australia and Israel barely noticed the Great Recession.

Do you know why? AFAIK India too did not get very affected by it, maybe because it has a large internal market with both domestic suppliers and consumers. Or I may be thinking of the Asian crisis in 1997-1999 or so - not sure. Had been to S.E. Asia at that time and they were just recovering from it, IIRC.

Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by nopassrecover on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @11:32AM (#15082294)
Our (Australian) government at the time provided significant consumer stimulus (most taxpayers got up to $950 to spend, people on welfare and/or with children got even more) and it also invested heavily in infrastructure and construction projects (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/02/04/1233423265116.html). Like other countries, our central bank also dropped interest rates.

As a consequence we now, apparently, lay claim to the longest period of uninterrupted growth in modern history.

However, we've had uncharacteristicaly flat growth since, narrowly avoided recession a couple of times, and are battling low wage growth which, in combination with rising energy and property costs, is beginning to undermine consumer demand.

This has been unhelped by the end of a mining boom, related decrease in Chinese growth and demand for commodities, structural taxation challenges (income taxes were reduced during the boom, and we struggle to tax multinational companies), and a huge speculative property bubble (fuelled by lower interest rates, favourable taxation schemes, currency flight from foreign investors, and ultimately the self-reinforcing returns). I'm sure demographics are playing a role too.

Considering most of our pension schemes ("superannuation") are invested in either property, mining, or banking (itself dependent on property), there's huge uncertainty ahead.

Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by warrenm on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @12:05PM (#15082631)
Almost sounds like all that happened was pushing off the bust of the boom-bust cycle, instead of actually avoiding it
Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by vram22 on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @01:16PM (#15083287)
What do you mean by "the self-reinforcing returns"?
Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by Nacraile on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @02:14PM (#15083761)
Presumably, the classic mechanism underlying speculative bubbles: investors buying because they expect to be able to sell to other investors at a higher price, later.
Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by eru on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @02:18PM (#15083793)
For Israel and Australia it's too do with competent central banks. See https://marketmonetarist.com/2012/11/19/the-export-price-nor... and https://marketmonetarist.com/2014/04/24/how-stan-fischer-pre...

And compare https://marketmonetarist.com/2015/07/14/the-euro-a-monetary-...

I don't know about India. They probably just printed enough money to avoid the Great Recession. (But had some other problems independent of the Great Recession.) Some Googling on the same blog revealed https://marketmonetarist.com/2013/07/17/too-easy-and-too-tig...

Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by vram22 on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @02:44PM (#15084012)
>I don't know about India. They probably just printed enough money to avoid the Great Recession.

I doubt they did only that, or even that. The RBI (Reserve Bank of India) and the Indian finance ministry have some well-educated and experienced economists (some even with Harvard / Oxford type backgrounds, or at least were earlier) (though I'm not saying they are perfect, no one is). Even without being a finance professional or economist myself (though I did take a year of Economics in 11/12th grade), I can tell that (mainly gut feel or educated guess, of course).

A sort of caveat or counter to what I said above, though (and what you said as well) is that (IMO) no economist fully knows what they are doing, partly because the field is so complex (dealing with economies of nations or the world, after all), and partly because economics is not a science like the physical sciences are (and hence not perfectly predictable, even if you have a supercomputer), not matter how hard proponents of that try to claim so. It's not called The Dismal Science for nothing ...

Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by eru on Thursday August 24, 2017 @05:09AM (#15088631)
I should perhaps have expressed myself more academically:

The banking crisis might have caused a recession, but what turned that recession into The Great Recession in Europe and the US was too tight money: nominal GDP just fell off a cliff.

India was further away from the dreaded 'zero bound' on interest rates, and never had any problem generating enough nominal GDP. (India's problems are with the real part of the economy. So they are producing too much inflation.)

The Fed and ECB also have clever people. They still made mistakes--especially when evaluated with the benefit of hindsight.

Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by vram22 on Thursday August 24, 2017 @07:14PM (#15094892)
Didn't really get some of that. I guess I need to brush up on my economics terms and concepts.
Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by eru on Friday August 25, 2017 @06:00AM (#15097296)
Either that or I mixed up some terms. Happy to try and explain more.
Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by vram22 on Friday August 25, 2017 @07:47AM (#15097729)
Please do:

>The banking crisis might have caused a recession, but what turned that recession into The Great Recession in Europe and the US was too tight money: nominal GDP just fell off a cliff.

Was going to ask what nominal GDP is, but googled it, it seems it is GDP without being adjusted for inflation. Okay.

By "too tight money" do you mean less money available for business investment, or higher interest rates for borrowing it, or something else?

>India was further away from the dreaded 'zero bound' on interest rates, and never had any problem generating enough nominal GDP. (India's problems are with the real part of the economy. So they are producing too much inflation.)

Okay, this second paragraph seems to indicate that nominal-GDP-wise, India was okay, but it was not okay after adjusting the GDP for inflation?

Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by warrenm on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @12:03PM (#15082605)
India's also a developing country vs a developed one

A rapidly developing country, no doubt - but not developed yet

The vast majority of Indians aren't involved in either the "real" economy enough (ie, the one governments measure), or are too poor for it to matter

Yes, India has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go - economically speaking

Re:Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming by vram22 on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @01:18PM (#15083301)
>The vast majority of Indians aren't involved in either the "real" economy enough (ie, the one governments measure), or are too poor for it to matter

Not too sure about that. Also will depend on what exactly you mean by it. If income tax payers, maybe yes. But if just people who earn money, there are other means than income tax to include them in calculations.

Anyway, it's a very complex issue.

>Yes, India has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go - economically speaking

True. And not just economically - in other ways too.