John Linton ......that times will get very tough in Australia over the coming months:
http://business.smh.com.au/business/difficult-times-ahead-warns-cba-chief-20090327-9e50.html
and any hope for Australia of a "China lead recovery" is dispelled by almost every economist within or outside that country with this 'info piece':
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123810562770552071.html
indicating that our 'government's' claims of export orders to the PRC "protecting Australia" are almost certainly as nonsensical as their other stupid statements.....
......but Exetel's order intakes in March are already at record levels and are amost 40% up on a very good January and more than 30% up on an even better February....so there are very mixed signals.......perhaps we are still in the "phony recession" with the real impact still somewhere in the future?
I have absolutely no knowledge or even remotely enough intellectual ability to properly undersand what is reported in the more sensible and thoughtful sections of the international financial press - except that there are no 'good news' stories from either the USA or the EU - at least none that I can find. The Australian business and financial press is, as far as I can see, almost worthless in general understanding of the future financial situation in this country and their 'reporting' of even current 'facts' appears to almost always be distorted to the point that actual events aren't actually reported factually followed by sensible analysis of the FACTS but are always twisted to follow some unseen political or other agenda.
So Exetel is still following the view that business life is going to become very hard 'real soon now' and that caution and conservatism are the only ways to make current and future decisions. What continues to puzzle me is that there is absolutely no evidence of that in our minute by minute, daily, weekly, monthly and now quarterly 'figures'. I must be missing something but, for the life of me, I can't figure out what is happening that seems to be 'denying' the overall consensus of what we should be seeing. Maybe we have our own 'personal Chinese economy' equivalent that really is protecting us from the general world wide business down turn?
I keep reading into what 'people who know' appear to be really 'biting their tongue' about not saying which appears to be that the current economic trends are pointing to a 'depression' rather than a 'deep recession' and that all the talk about 'reforming the world's financial systems' is just obfuscation for no-one having a clue what went wrong and certainly less than no clue about how to recover from whatever deep financial trouble the developed world is now in. Problems of this magnitude don't end with 'financial troubles' though, because lack of income brings far more serious problems than some companies ceasing to exist and the 'sociall' consequences of not being able to legitimately keep yourself and those for whom you are responsible fed and clothed and schooled leads to truly dire consequences.
The crass stupidity of "the bike gang wars" and the even more stupid "Lebanese immigrant drug wars" that have dominated Sydney's media for the past 10 or so days are far more frightening than the financial press. The concepts of the acceptance by the NSW Police, the NSW Government (and even the NSW Public) that its "OK" for criminals to act in the ways they do to "control the drug traffic in NSW" is astonishing. Perhaps the UK press is correct and it isn't the financial system that is broken but the financial problems now being experienced are simply an aspect of the break down of 'civilised western societies' where disregard for the laws and respect for other people's lives, health and property are a quaint old fashioned notion of the past.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5988491.ece
I have some personal experiences of the last three Australian 'recessions' and they were extremely unpleasant and the scars (mental rather than physical) the early 1990s inflicted on me personally haven't given any indication of fading with the passage of time. The 2001/2 dot.com bust was mild by comparison though many people I knew then and still keep in touch with today never recovered their desire to continue taking the risks of running their own businesses and they are very different people today than they were up to that time. I'm sure that many other people who lost their incomes and perhaps their homes in previous recessions were equally emotionally affected and may well also have never returned to being the people they could have been.
It's going to be a difficult weekend, for me, as there are so many 'directional decisions' we need to make to be able to form a clear view so that we can make a range of subsequent decisions across the breadth of our operations that have real ramifications on how we conduct our small business for the balance of this calendar year and neither endanger ourselves nor any of the entities and people that depend, in some greater or lesser ways, on those decisions being made correctly.
Perhaps some 'head buried in the sand' attitudes will be a preferred way of not looking at anything for too long or in too great a depth?