Energy Efficiency

Watch the news on TV every night or read the papers about how the share market keeps growing and the economy is growing and you’d think everything is OK

Funny thing is though, with all this continued investment, growth and politicians talking up the ‘recovery’ around the world … world trade actually fell by 12% last year, the biggest drop since the Second World War according to the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

America has been fudging the figures for so long, even they don’t know where fact ends and fiction starts, but in Australia we know the federal government has been talking up the economy and the Reserve Bank has been pretending that that don’t have the same agenda (that they are poles apart) but raising interest rates ‘because of economic growth, when all along they – and we - know that it has been money the federal government has been borrowing and pumping into the system to make it appear  their is growth; that is barely 0.2% growth is ‘growth.

But there figures you just can’t fudge and the level of trade between nations – which had been expected to decline by 10% in 2009 – has had a sharp fall says Pascal Lamy (the Director-General) of the WTO.

Negotiations which began in 2001 and currently at a standstill, were aimed at removing barriers to trade for poor nations by striking a deal that would cut agriculture subsidies and tariffs on industrial goods.

These talks have been hampered by disagreements on how much America and Europe should reduce farm aid and the extent to which developing countries such as India and China should lower tariffs.

The German economy (the biggest in Europe), had stagnated in the fourth quarter of last year after 0.7 per cent growth in GDP between July and September, adding further pressure to the Euro, which has been battered by recent weeks over Greece’s ability to reduce its debt. It has also dimmed hopes that Germany might be able to bail out Greece, as Germany’s public deficit was revised upwards to €79.3 billion / 3.3% of GDP.  Under the European Union’s Stability and Growth Pact, EU members are supposed to run deficits no larger than 3% of GDP and work towards a balance or even a surplus in times of economic growth.

While the Euro has fallen 10% against the USA$ since the end of November 2009 amid growing worries about the debt problems of Greece and other highly indebted eurozone countries such as Portugal and Spain, one must wonder how and why every country’s debt is growing, yet they all appear to have such viable company value / returns – reflected in share values – yet business everywhere is depressed and even more worrying is the fact that the USA$ is really worth far less than the value accorded it by exchange rates.  As I have said previously, if the Americans thought they could borrow money endlessly and print money faster than Zimbabwe to write down the value of their debt, is this how the finance ministers around the world intend to counter this move, by devaluing their own currencies … if other countries around the world have refused or been unable to repay monies borrowed via the IMF and World Bank and these debts have been written off, why not the USA ?

Who said dishonesty doesn’t pay?