Its a 15 Million splash by ANZ for thier New logo

Coming back right from a stockmarket bust to boom  this will surely look like a bit of overspend . Maybe some graphic designers can shed some light on how much a normal  or then a little bit more professional looking logo can cost a company!!

NEW ANZ 15 Million LOGO

ANZ bank has splashed $15 million on a new logo that it claims reflects its ‘human’ side.

The new logo, at right, features a ‘modernised’ font and a central ‘human’ shape that “represents ANZ’s customers and people” flanked by three shapes that signify the bank’s operations in Australia, New Zealand and Asia-Pacific.

Now lets wait for the 20 mill and 40 mill Comm bank and Westpac logo .. wot say !!

Just coming back from the great big  financial bust and dip , the banks  are now  flush with cash again  and looking more confident  with ANZ new Millions Dollar logo. The question it raises is, Is it Appropriate ? ( just like the  BIG  $$$ raises some CEO’s are receiving in spite of companies  running at a loss )

The new logo will be launched in an advertising campaign from Sunday and ANZ buildings, websites, stationery and marketing material will be re-branded in the coming year at a cost of $15 million.

Can we recapitalize our own loss after BBI recapitalises itself

Credit Suisse and Macquarie Capital have agreed in principle to serve as the underwriters for Babcock and Brown infrastrucure , but the final documentation will not be completed until it is clear there is adequate market support for the recapitalisation plan. Babcock & Brown Infrastructure appears likely to be in a position to update the market on its long-awaited recapitalisation deal by tomorrow or Wednesday.

The key component left to finalise is a $600 million institutional placement to be matched by a placement to the new cornerstone investor, Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management.

The group of hedge funds backed by RBS, which had proposed an alternative plan, is believed to be not taking part.

Interestingly, on Friday evening, Moody’s placed Dalrymple Bay’s Baa2 credit rating on review for a possible downgrade that would see it lose its investment-grade status. However, the downgrade is not expected to happen if the recapitalisation plan succeeds

As part of the $1.5 billion deal to erase all of BBI’s corporate-level debt, Brookfield will take a 50 per cent stake in BBI’s most prized asset, the Dalrymple Bay coal port in Queensland and will buy the debt-laden PD Ports asset in Britain. BBI, now advised byGresham, had tried to sell all or part of those assets before it decided the Brookfield recapitalisation plan was the best option.

The BBI boss’s Payrise

Jeff Kendrew was appointed chief executive officer of Babcock & Brown Infrastructure (BBI) in June 2007.

The basic wage of Babcock & Brown Infrastructure’s boss has risen by more than $300,000, despite the company’s shares losing 90 per cent of their value, according to a market analyst.

Market analysts Wise Owl’s director Sven Restel told News Limited that Mr Kendrew’s basic wage has risen from $365,000 to $700,000, while BBI shares have tanked from $2 in 2007 to less than one cent.

“It’s unbelievable what they think they can get away with,” Mr Restel said.

The Australian share market’s rise to a fresh 10-month high on Monday was erased by a fall in Asian share markets, leaving traders wary of profit taking after sharp gains in the Australian market since March.

Banks sustained their gains on the back of a positive trading update from Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, while resources succumbed to falls in Chinese and Japanese equity markets.

The benchmark S&P/ASX 200 closed down 10.5 points or 0.2% at 4479.1 after hitting 4537.2 in early trading.

The index was up 43% from its March low and 21% above its July low, thanks to signs of global economic recovery and a better-than-expected Australian earnings period.

It rose 5.5% in August, notching up its sixth-consecutive monthly gain.

Australian economy shines

The Australian economy may be faring better than most, but the global economic crisis is hitting profits and wages hard

The slump in profits and wages is sizeable. Company profits fell by 7.8 per cent in the three months to June, Mark, to be almost 15 per cent lower than a year ago and wages fell by 1.1 per cent, they’ve fallen now for the past six months wages and it’s very unusual for wages to actually be going backwards.
It was a tale of different sectors however; you had a big fall in mining profits with the cuts to commodity prices, you had slight falls in profits in wholesale trade and construction as margins got squeezed, but in the retail sector, profits were up nearly nine per cent in the quarter and up more than 20 per cent on a year ago, so the retail sector, thanks to the government stimulus has had a boom.

Chinese stocks helped drive the main index of Asia-Pacific stocks (excluding Japan) to an 11 month high, as two surveys showed accelerating Chinese factory output growth. Car and tyre makers were among the biggest winners, after the US Government announced increased funding for its "cash for clunkers" program to encourage households to trade up to more fuel efficient vehicles.

• In Tokyo, the Nikkei finished flat at 10,352.
• Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 1 per cent at 5:38pm (AEST).
• Mainland China’s Shanghai composite index gained 1.5 per cent to 3,463, its highest level since March last year.
• Singapore’s main share index was flat at 2,659.

Currency markets

The resurgence is due to increased optimism about a global economic recovery, and demand for currencies linked to commodities. At 5:53pm the Australian dollar was fetching:

• 83.60 US cents
• 79.41 Japanese yen
• 58.80 euro cents
• 49.96 British pence
• 1.2612 New Zealand dollars

Major movers in Australian market

The Australian share market has extended its rally, rising 0.5 per cent on the back of another strong showing by the banks.

At the close, the S&P/ASX 200 was 19.4 points higher, or by 0.5 per cent, at 4263.4 while the broader All Ordinaries rose 21 points, or 0.5 per cent, to 4270.5 points.

• ANZ and NAB led the charge of the big banks, with both up 2.5 per cent, and CBA and Westpac both up by just under 2 per cent. The banks have benefited from broker upgrades as the wave of economic optimism has led analysts to upgrade their profit forecasts. The ANZ also gained after sources told several media outlets that ANZ is close to a deal worth around $1 billion to purchase some of RBS’ Asian assets.
• Aquarius Platinum was amongst the best gaining miners, surging 8 per cent on a broker upgrade.
• Wheat exporter GrainCorp jumped 6.7 per cent to $8.00 after it raised its profit forecast for a second time. Competitor AWB also gained 4.2 per cent on the news.
• Sino Gold picked up 2.8 per cent on the discovery of gold mineralisation near its White Mountain mine in China.

Westpac slashes bank fees

Consumers have scored another victory in the battle against exorbitant bank charges when the Westpac group announcing plans to cut a range of penalty fees from as much as $40 to just $9.

The decision by Westpac and St George – the NSW-based bank it bought last year – follows a move last week by their big four rival, National Australia Bank, to axe the entire overdraft fee of $30 on accounts used by 700,000 personal customers from October 1

KUDOS to NAB FOR BEING THE FIRST BANK TO ACTUALLY CARE.. The rest will follow just to be competitive

Westpac said it would reduce "exception” fees across credit cards and personal and business accounts to $9 from current levels of up to $45. The move includes Westpac subsidiary St George Bank.

Major oil stocks were also mixed, with Oil Search losing one cent to $5.63, Santos up 18 cents at $14.70 and Woodside Petroleum dropping 80 cents, or 1.8 per cent, to $44.90.

Gold miners had mixed fortunes, with Lihir Gold easing 3 cents to $2.74, dual-listed Newmont Mining jumping 16 cents to $4.96 and Newcrest Mining steady at $30.00.

Will it be ‘V’, ‘W’, ‘L’, ’square-root’ shaped?

Your editor has no idea. What we do know is that things aren’t as rosy as the mainstream media and analysts make it out to be.

Some of the contrary statistics we’ve seen in recent days and weeks make it hard to believe that the economy is heading in a permanently positive direction. In the near term it may give that impression, just as for a while a block of ice will remain intact under a burning sun.

It doesn’t last for long though, and it soon melts away.

Consumer spending up. House prices up. House building down. Job vacancies down. Unemployment up.

We don’t pretend to have all the answers, but the words ’strong’ and ‘economy’ don’t seem to quite fit in.

But out of those things it is the house prices that cause us the most concern. According to RP Data:

“It’s important to note that it has taken just 15 months for values to recover from the February ‘08 peak. I believe these results are encouraging, especially when we take a closer look at other Western markets around the world where prices are mostly in decline,”

Got that? House prices peaked in February 2008, then fell by around 6%, and have now reclaimed that record high, as noted in Monday’s The Age newspaper:

“A five-month surge in Melbourne house prices has undone the damage to the property market wrought by the global financial crisis, pushing the median house price to $469,357 and the median unit price to $377,077 – both record highs.”

Hmmm. We’re nervous, but not surprised. The massive handouts given to first home buyers was always going to prop prices up. As we expected. And of course, we’ve banked on a short term rally evidenced by our tipping of a real estate investment trust in Australian Small Cap Investigator a few months back.

So far, house price action is panning out as we thought it would. We’re now in the rally phase that pushing prices up before the fall.

In fact in the spirit of ‘alphabetonomics,’ we’d say the housing market is forming for an M-Shaped housing crash…

The above chart from ANZ doesn’t include the latest RP Data numbers so it doesn’t show the house prices up to a record high.

Could we be wrong? Could house prices continue to rise on their never-ending advance northward?

Of course anything’s possible. But one thing is inevitable, no asset can possibly increase in value for ever without an appropriate decline at some point. A 6% drop in fifteen months is during a period of low interest rates and government bribes is not a crash.

It’s just postponed the inevitable.

I mean, take a look at the chart above. Even if you’d bought a house with a $100,000 mortgage back in 2005 on a $110,000 house (this is just to illustrate the point by the way), your costs and interest payments would still be more than the 25% appreciation in the house value.

You’d be lucky if you’re breakeven.

Now think about the first home buyers that didn’t buy at $100,000 in 2005, they’ve bought at $125,000 during the last twelve months. They need another 25% increase in house prices in the next four years just to breakeven.

So, is it realistic to see a 25% housing gain in the next four to five years? Maybe, but not from the current prices.

The odds are still in favour of prices sinking back to 2000 levels once the artificial stimulus has been removed from the economy, and interest rates are 2-3 percentage points higher than they are now.

Some Advice from ‘Dr.’ Merv

Oprah has Dr. Phil. Money Morning has ‘Dr.’ Merv.

Following on from yesterday’s Money Morning and our struggle with the ‘Output Gap,’ your editor received the following free counseling:

“This is your problem.

You are trying to make sense of insanity.

When something is quite irrational there is nothing to understand beyond the fact that it is nuts.

Because a mind in good order has difficulty facing insanity, it fights to make sense of it. It is so foreign to its normal state.

Insanity is very hard to face. As one tries to face it, it has the effect of making one feel they are nuts too because that’s what they are looking at and trying to duplicate.

The solution to this kind of situation, once having recognised it for what it is, and that is that it is nutty, is to do no more than label it for what it is, i.e. crazy. Once you do that you can be relaxed about the whole thing and more on to more useful activities. It is no more that a trap put out by the perpetrator to suck in and confuse the unsuspecting. Just an apparency to make one think they have missed something or there is something there they don’t understand.

Don’t get sucked in.

Merv”

With that your editor was calmed and we shall make no further attempt to interpret the “insanity” of the Output Gap.

Other Stuff on the Markets

The S&P/ASX200 fell 2.05% yesterday, while there was better news overnight on Wall Street with the Dow Jones Industrial Average adding 57 points. In Europe the FTSE100 gained 2.15% and the CAC40 added 2.44%.

The price of gold in Australian dollars is trading at $1,164.61, while in US Dollars it trading at $941.70.

The Aussie dollar remained steady versus the US dollar and Japanese Yen, trading at USD$0.8092, and JPY78.12.

Crude oil closed at USD$69.31.

For the biggest movers on the market yesterday click here…