John Linton .......the stock market crashes as more people realise the US and EUC economies are, to use a technical term, totally stuffed and every major country has borrowed too much to repay in any estimated time frame. This is obviously news to our RBA which as recently as Tuesday was contemplating raising interest rates and, of course, that mindless union apparatchik Whine Swan was making his moronic pronouncements of "Australia is in great shape" (it isn't - you f***ing idiot) even though you base your stupidities on living in the tax payer money pit of Canberra they show a complete lack of comprehension about the actual state of the Australian economy. Doubtless it will "bounce back" in coming days but it looks pretty certain tht after every future "bounce back" it will then fall again as the underlying issues are irreversibly negative.
I couldn't find a single positive statement in any of the overseas papers I read this morning as it has finally dawned on the collective media that the US is bankrupt and so are half the countries in the EU. What this actually means seems to be unknown to anyone whom I respect as having sensible understandings of financial issues but no-one seems to express any positive views. I guess it's only time before the "D" word re-appears in the financial press. It appears that times are already bad in NSW and are about to get a whole lot worse....something I, and most people I talk to, have 'noticed' for longer than a year.
What this means, if anything, to a company of Exetel's size in the Australian communications industry is way beyond my ability to understand. I can dimly understand that it will mean an increasing number of business and residential defaults on payments to Exetel for services as businesses go broke and people lose their jobs. I can understand that bad times lower everyone's ability and/or desire to spend their money which in turn accelerates business bankruptcy and job losses generally making markets shrink overall. I have no idea what the extent of today's news means to Australia generally other than if $A100 billion is "wiped off the share market" then everyone who has shares is suddenly a lot poorer and as most of us have superannuation invested in the share market we will all feel poorer and many people will actually be poorer. So 'bad news on the electronic door step' but, nevertheless, we do actually have to 'take one more step'.
The main thing to get done today is to review the HSPA plans and to see how we can improve their value - which I had thought was pretty good anyway but apparently I haven't noticed what is happening in the wireless broadband market places.....which is strange because I have always had a keen interest in them - both here and in the US and EU - and read relatively extensively on the subject. In any event we are making absolutely no progress in growing our wireless broadband business and we need to do something about that. Exactly what we can do, particularly in light of the first two paragraphs of this piece of writing is going to be very 'challenging'. Personally I think the market's requirements for "free" everything has reached the stage in this industry that government borrowing has reached in the global financial worlds - been going on way too long for any realistic offering to be made by companies like Exetel. This recent article demonstrates what a realistic price is for MBB:
http://www.betanews.com/article/Verizon-confirms-end-of-unlimited-data-plans/1309889424
These 'new' prices are much higher than Exetel currently charge (and even more than Vodafone charge) and demonstrate how under priced MBB services are in Australia. Yet the pressure is to reduce our very low prices even further which we simply cannot do - we already barely break even on providing wireless broadband services. Perhaps we should get out of the HSPA residential market completely? Vodafone's recent attempts at 'unlimited' MBB clearly demonstrated the foolishness of that stupidity and I am amazed that a company that has more mobile customers than anyone else wouldn't have warehouses full of statistics to tell them how foolish that would be - to the point of destroying their company in Australia.
So, not the best start to a day - I am sure things will seem brighter soon - but I guess that's what the US Treasury Department has been saying for the past three decades.
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