Potential Big GFC Discussion Thread

[MAD]

Originally Posted by gtfpv

and all the doom and gloom is only on TV .

Tell that to the people that are getting laid off from retail jobs and other business 'restructuring'.

[gtfpv]

Originally Posted by MAD

Tell that to the people that are getting laid off from retail jobs and other business 'restructuring'.

OK , You tell me who they are ? you ? anyone you know , or just what you hear on tele?

[MAD]

I know of 2 people that have been put in a position where they now need to find work, and they are finding it more difficult to do so. One used to be a woolworths department manager and the other is coming from a technical sales/marketing background.

[Bent8]

Originally Posted by buggerlugs

And I suppose you believed in the Y2K bug.............

Well to be honest, it did concern me at first but later after looking at all the facts, I came to the conclusion that it was based on an assumption...and you know what they say about assuming things?

The chances of the world entering another great depression are very real and it's not just fear-mongering, look at the figures, read any news publication that isn't owned by one of the big media corporations...

There is a valid reason to be concerned, and some might say "what can we do about it?".... to them I say, be prepared !!

[Bent8]

Originally Posted by Scott

This really is a dumb quote, here's why:
"All myths pass through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

I have to disagree with there mate, if I know a myth is a myth, there would be no need to oppose it...

[Bent8]

Originally Posted by gtfpv

mate i really think this is BLOWN WAY OUT OF PROPORTION , and has a false "DOOM AND GLOOM" theme .
i can only state what i see . and i tell you what , 18 months ago i had my house valued , the realestate agents valued it the highest price i've ever had , over the 11 years here . the story was that the market will turn , and for top dollar , sell now . the top prices in the area then were high 700's , now there are many on the market for low 800's and top price 980 000.
I work in essential services trade , and i can tell you, there are max profits , and business has peaked since 2008 with no signs of dropping off .
my own life hasnt changed one bit . and all the doom and gloom is only on TV .

You forgot to mention the rise in inflation and the cost of living since 2008.

[trippytaka]

Originally Posted by gtfpv

OK , You tell me who they are ? you ? anyone you know , or just what you hear on tele?

All of my mates in IT are out of jobs as of this year. There is about 8 of them all up. Re-structuring IT industry apparently big firms sending IT help desk and service logging to India and Malaysia etc.

One of my mates just shut his business down. He makes signage. Construction was his biggest industry client. All gone dead over last 12 months. Tried to push into new industries, but with his overheads etc the only option was to liquidate.

There are plenty more... I don't know them all personally, but the manufacturing industry is at its lowest levels since the '60s.

[GasoLane]

Originally Posted by Resurrection

This thread has nothing to do with negativity or spreading doom and gloom. .

Originally Posted by Resurrection

Not GFC1 or GFC2. We are heading for a depression. Don't worry about house prices. Worry about putting food on the table people!

If this isn't doom & gloom we are in trouble.

[burnz]

interesting take..
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-1...ction=business

[AMGC63]

Originally Posted by MAD

Tell that to the people that are getting laid off from retail jobs and other business 'restructuring'.

Lay-offs and Restructuring is hardly a new phenomenon...

[Professor Farnsworth]

Originally Posted by AMGC63

Lay-offs and Restructuring is hardly a new phenomenon...

neither is a recession.

[AU101]

^^^ Oh ok so its all good then

[mr smith]

1000+ from Quantas to go.

Over the last 2 years our work place has lost over 200 trades people alone. My mate just shut down his plumbing business of 12 years (4 Apprentices and 6 trades out of work) and another mate working in plastic manufacturing is constantly dodging the bullet. Manufacturing and now domestic construction are collapsing. My personal situation is fine for now, but I am living with the knowledge that any day I could be called in and given the boot.

[fmc351]

Ah the old recession, a time for businesses to restructure, with a scapegoat.

[AMGC63]

Originally Posted by mr smith

1000+ from Quantas to go.

Over the last 2 years our work place has lost over 200 trades people alone. My mate just shut down his plumbing business of 12 years (4 Apprentices and 6 trades out of work) and another mate working in plastic manufacturing is constantly dodging the bullet. Manufacturing and now domestic construction are collapsing. My personal situation is fine for now, but I am living with the knowledge that any day I could be called in and given the boot.

Yet despite this unemployment figures remain relatively low and stable.

Any business that stands still and doesnt change and adapt with the economic environment will likely not last long.

Diversification and redeployment has absorbed most jobs lost.

Local industry and manufacturing has died at the hands of the high $AUD. Those manufacturing business have morphed into importers....

[burnz]

Originally Posted by AMGC63

Yet despite this unemployment figures remain relatively low and stable.

Any business that stands still and doesnt change and adapt with the economic environment will likely not last long.

Diversification and redeployment has absorbed most jobs lost.

Local industry and manufacturing has died at the hands of the high $AUD. Those manufacturing business have morphed into importers....

quoted the truth...

[Falc'man]

Originally Posted by MAD

"Fitch Ratings report released in May found a 30 per cent increase in arrears on mortgage payments during the three months to March this year.

More than 400 repossession notices were served on home owners by lenders in May and June, the highest number for almost two years."

Isn't that before this thread started?

I'll try to remain positive: the destitute, homeless and needy won't care when it collapses.

[trippytaka]

Originally Posted by AMGC63

Yet despite this unemployment figures remain relatively low and stable.

Any business that stands still and doesnt change and adapt with the economic environment will likely not last long.

Diversification and redeployment has absorbed most jobs lost.

Local industry and manufacturing has died at the hands of the high $AUD. Those manufacturing business have morphed into importers....

Yeah but how many people lose their gigs in the process? Take door knobs for example. To run a factory here would have a few blokes/women making them, a dockhand and then the accounts and business admin etc. You woul dalso have the people emplyed who make the raw materials, and then the people who deliver the raw materials, then you have the distribution of the goods.

Now you have an office that imports the goods -losing raw materials, delivery of raw materials. A lot of the time now you don't even have a warehouse and dockhand because it's distributed directly to the outlets (say, bunnings).

I would probably stay away from describing this transition as morphing because I think of morphing as change of form, rather than simply shedding mass.

[MAD]

An example of the above...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-1...2/?site=sydney

Manufacturer turned assembler, and 30 jobs gone.

[SEZ213]

Originally Posted by Falc'man

Isn't that before this thread started?

I'll try to remain positive: the destitute, homeless and needy won't care when it collapses.

Had an interesting chat with our real estate agent when we had a few 'troubles' recently. They had gone from one or two a week who had gotten behind to the point of eviction, to two pages...A WEEK. It may have decreased since that point, but it's still a scary thought, particularly in a city like Ipswich, with 100,000+ people, and umpteen real estate agents who are quite likely going through the same thing...

[Jason[98.EL]]

and yet the company I work for are expanding going from a manufacturing staff of 40 to about 60+ over the next 6 months

[mr smith]

Originally Posted by AMGC63

Yet despite this unemployment figures remain relatively low and stable.

Any business that stands still and doesnt change and adapt with the economic environment will likely not last long.

Diversification and redeployment has absorbed most jobs lost.

Local industry and manufacturing has died at the hands of the high $AUD. Those manufacturing business have morphed into importers....

Unemployment figures aren't worth squat. If I get laid off, I wont count as unemployed as a redundacy and my wife working wont even see me through the centerlink door.
There would be tens of thousands of people in this situation.

[SEZ213]

Originally Posted by mr smith

Unemployment figures aren't worth squat. If I get laid off, I wont count as unemployed as a redundacy and my wife working wont even see me through the centerlink door.
There would be tens of thousands of people in this situation.

Can vouch for that one, and I'd probably say closer to the hundreds of thousands.

Centrelink rate is about 37k minimum wage now I think (?)...if your partner earns over that, forget about any kind of assistance, unless you're going to lie to them...your partners wages are taken into consideration, but their expenses aren't...welcome to the world of Part IX debt agreements and bankruptcy...

[trippytaka]

Originally Posted by Sezzy

Can vouch for that one, and I'd probably say closer to the hundreds of thousands.

Centrelink rate is about 37k minimum wage now I think (?)...if your partner earns over that, forget about any kind of assistance, unless you're going to lie to them...your partners wages are taken into consideration, but their expenses aren't...welcome to the world of Part IX debt agreements and bankruptcy...

YEah I had issues getting it a few years ago when I was retrenched because of the pay out - they didn't take into account that my debts at the time were 5 times larger than the payout.

Now that's a period of my life I never want to return to!

[AU101]

The Great Flood continues...

In the last four months ‘Stale Stock’ in Melbourne postcodes 3000-3207 has doubled, ballooning from 19,800 to 38,522. In the wider Melbourne and environs, 60,253 houses have been on the market for more than 6o days and remain unsold.

“At a modest $450,000 per house, that would be $27 billion in surplus housing just sitting there.

‘Stale Stock’ are properties whose sales campaigns have failed. Gardens were primped, interiors polished up, advertisements placed, open for inspections conducted, auctions run and … no sale!

While there are genuine reasons why some properties are slow to move, current stock levels point to other factors.

“Buying has simply dried up. A couple with two good incomes and a solid depost cannot afford these prices.

“New construction has slowed to a crawl because of the unsold stock. This means widespread layoffs in the building trades as projects are completed and new starts deferred,” Collyer said.

“We are entering the spring selling season when property is brought to market in volume. With this ‘Stale Stock’ already overhanging, prices must change.

“Across Australia, homeowners have eagerly bought the story property is wealth and prices can only rise, inflating the market price of Australian land to a ridiculous $3.5 trillion. Unfortunately, these values have been built on debt and we face difficult times as this frenzy is unwound.” ENDS


SQM Research

[Romulus]

Edited, see post below.

[Romulus]

The cost of living may be up, but Australians are saving more again

The Age, February 19, 2011 .

And it's mainly the retailers who are paying the price as a thriftier populace thinks more carefully about its spending and borrowing.

THE punters, pollies and shock jocks who tell us we're groaning under the weight of the rapidly rising cost of living need to answer a question: if so, how come households are managing to save 10 per cent of their disposable income?

It's drawn remarkably little comment, but the household saving ratio - saving as a proportion of household disposable (that is, after-tax) income - is the highest it has been in more than 20 years.

You wonder why the retailers are doing it so tough? That's why. With wage rates increasing and more people in jobs, household income has been growing quite strongly. But in recent years we've been much less inclined to rush out and spend every cent that comes our way.

That's what saving is: the bit that's left over when you don't spend all your income on consumption.

Most of us think of saving as putting money in bank accounts. We've been doing more of that lately, but it's not the main way we save. Historically, the main way Australians have saved is by borrowing a shed-load of money to buy a house, then paying it off over the next 25 years. Your savings are embodied in the proportion of the house that's owned by you rather than the bank - your equity in the house.

The household saving ratio was at 15 per cent in the early 1980s, but then it fell for more than two decades to a low of minus 2 per cent in the early noughties. We were ''dissaving'' - consuming more than we earned.

How's that possible? By running down past savings or by borrowing.

Since the mid-noughties, however, the saving ratio has shot up to 10 per cent. You could be forgiven for not knowing this because much of the increase has suddenly appeared as a result of the Bureau of Statistics' revisions to the national accounts.

Since 2004 household disposable income has grown strongly, averaging 7.3 per cent a year in nominal terms (that is, before allowing for inflation). Over the same period, household consumption has grown by 5.4 per cent a year.

Philip Lowe, an assistant governor of the Reserve Bank, expressed the figures differently in a speech this week. In quite a few of the years during the 15 years to 2005, household consumption increased by more than $1 for every extra $1 of household disposable income received. Since then, however, only about 65¢ in every extra $1 of income has been spent.

The evidence that something has changed in our attitude to saving can be seen in other indicators. One example comes from the annual survey of household, income and labour dynamics in Australia (HILDA).

In the surveys between 2000 and 2005, there was a clear trend of fewer and fewer households with mortgages reporting they were ahead of schedule in their repayments (a way of saving).

But this downtrend slowed in about 2005 and then in 2009 - the most recent year for which results are available - there was a marked increase in the number of people saying they were ahead of schedule.

Similarly, over the past couple of years there has been an increase in the proportion of households that say they pay their credit card balance in full each month. It has gone from about 60 per cent to almost 65 per cent.

A final bit of evidence comes from the estimates of how much equity households are adding to the housing stock. Until the late 1990s, it was normal for the proportion of the nation's total amount of housing that was not owed to banks to increase each year. Economists call this ''equity injection''.

But during the early part of the noughties this changed and households were withdrawing equity. Now here's the point: in recent years things have changed again and we have returned to the usual pattern of increasing equity.

So what's going on? Why did we stop saving and why have we started again?

Over the decade to 2005, there was a large run-up in household debt and a related rise in the (gross) value of household assets such as homes and shares, while our rate of saving declined.

This seems to have been a period of adjustment to the fall in nominal interest rates (caused by our return to low inflation) and financial innovation (banks keener to lend for housing, with new products such as home-equity loans and reverse mortgages).

Lower nominal mortgage rates allowed us to borrow more, which many of us did at much the same time, thus bidding up house prices in the process. Some of us even increased our mortgage to pay for an overseas trip.

But it seems this period of adjustment to new possibilities was largely completed by the mid-noughties and we have gone back to our usual preference for paying off the mortgage as soon as we can.

And then this episode of ''structural adjustment'' seems to have been reinforced by the global financial crisis, which has led some households to rethink their spending and borrowing. Some people are a lot more cautious and a lot less sure that house and share prices can only ever go up.


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/th...#ixzz1VNziHkwr

One needs to ask, why are households saving more? Post 2008 GFC jitters, uncertainty about government policy?

Something is smashing people's confidence. I suspect people are not confident in the current government.

[Resurrection]

Stock markets are looking ugly tonight.

[Bent8]

Worth a look...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJ6co__lz8

[geckoGT]

Originally Posted by F6 Concorde

The cost of living may be up, but Australians are saving more again

The Age, February 19, 2011 .

And it's mainly the retailers who are paying the price as a thriftier populace thinks more carefully about its spending and borrowing.

THE punters, pollies and shock jocks who tell us we're groaning under the weight of the rapidly rising cost of living need to answer a question: if so, how come households are managing to save 10 per cent of their disposable income?

It's drawn remarkably little comment, but the household saving ratio - saving as a proportion of household disposable (that is, after-tax) income - is the highest it has been in more than 20 years.

You wonder why the retailers are doing it so tough? That's why. With wage rates increasing and more people in jobs, household income has been growing quite strongly. But in recent years we've been much less inclined to rush out and spend every cent that comes our way.

That's what saving is: the bit that's left over when you don't spend all your income on consumption.

Most of us think of saving as putting money in bank accounts. We've been doing more of that lately, but it's not the main way we save. Historically, the main way Australians have saved is by borrowing a shed-load of money to buy a house, then paying it off over the next 25 years. Your savings are embodied in the proportion of the house that's owned by you rather than the bank - your equity in the house.

The household saving ratio was at 15 per cent in the early 1980s, but then it fell for more than two decades to a low of minus 2 per cent in the early noughties. We were ''dissaving'' - consuming more than we earned.

How's that possible? By running down past savings or by borrowing.

Since the mid-noughties, however, the saving ratio has shot up to 10 per cent. You could be forgiven for not knowing this because much of the increase has suddenly appeared as a result of the Bureau of Statistics' revisions to the national accounts.

Since 2004 household disposable income has grown strongly, averaging 7.3 per cent a year in nominal terms (that is, before allowing for inflation). Over the same period, household consumption has grown by 5.4 per cent a year.

Philip Lowe, an assistant governor of the Reserve Bank, expressed the figures differently in a speech this week. In quite a few of the years during the 15 years to 2005, household consumption increased by more than $1 for every extra $1 of household disposable income received. Since then, however, only about 65¢ in every extra $1 of income has been spent.

The evidence that something has changed in our attitude to saving can be seen in other indicators. One example comes from the annual survey of household, income and labour dynamics in Australia (HILDA).

In the surveys between 2000 and 2005, there was a clear trend of fewer and fewer households with mortgages reporting they were ahead of schedule in their repayments (a way of saving).

But this downtrend slowed in about 2005 and then in 2009 - the most recent year for which results are available - there was a marked increase in the number of people saying they were ahead of schedule.

Similarly, over the past couple of years there has been an increase in the proportion of households that say they pay their credit card balance in full each month. It has gone from about 60 per cent to almost 65 per cent.

A final bit of evidence comes from the estimates of how much equity households are adding to the housing stock. Until the late 1990s, it was normal for the proportion of the nation's total amount of housing that was not owed to banks to increase each year. Economists call this ''equity injection''.

But during the early part of the noughties this changed and households were withdrawing equity. Now here's the point: in recent years things have changed again and we have returned to the usual pattern of increasing equity.

So what's going on? Why did we stop saving and why have we started again?

Over the decade to 2005, there was a large run-up in household debt and a related rise in the (gross) value of household assets such as homes and shares, while our rate of saving declined.

This seems to have been a period of adjustment to the fall in nominal interest rates (caused by our return to low inflation) and financial innovation (banks keener to lend for housing, with new products such as home-equity loans and reverse mortgages).

Lower nominal mortgage rates allowed us to borrow more, which many of us did at much the same time, thus bidding up house prices in the process. Some of us even increased our mortgage to pay for an overseas trip.

But it seems this period of adjustment to new possibilities was largely completed by the mid-noughties and we have gone back to our usual preference for paying off the mortgage as soon as we can.

And then this episode of ''structural adjustment'' seems to have been reinforced by the global financial crisis, which has led some households to rethink their spending and borrowing. Some people are a lot more cautious and a lot less sure that house and share prices can only ever go up.


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/th...#ixzz1VNziHkwr

One needs to ask, why are households saving more? Post 2008 GFC jitters, uncertainty about government policy?

Something is smashing people's confidence. I suspect people are not confident in the current government.

Quite an interesting read.

I know from personal point of view we have decreased our spending and are now putting more money away each week as well as putting a bit extra into the mortgage occasionally. I think the major driving force for us was when the interest rates went up a few years ago. Although we made it through it did sting a bit and we have no intention of feeling that pain again.

On top of that, the constant rise of the cost of utilities in QLD, increasing fuel prices and other unavoidable expenses that are rising at a rate that exceed the increases in our pay are forcing us to prepare for some difficult times ahead.

I do realise that decreased spending can lead to a downturn in the economy but with so many costs going up, you can not blame the consumer for being a bit nervous and preparing themselves for a storm. Perhaps with all this talk of a financial crisis, it is not a good time for the government to talk of a new carbon tax. One that no matter what spin you put on it, it will get passed onto the consumer. Perhaps the government needs to support consumer confidence and not with handouts that we have to pay for anyway, that is smoke and mirrors if you ask me.