But before we get on to today’s Money Morning, a brief announcement…

The guys and gals at the Melbourne Adam Smith Club have been crazy enough to invite your editor to be the guest speaker at their May dinner function.

You can download an invitation to the event by clicking here. So, if you’re in Melbourne and you’ve got $45 to spend on a curry dinner and listening to your editor waffling on for half an hour or so then feel free to sign up for it.

We’ll look forward to seeing you there.

But for today, this…

“Greece on the edge of abyss as riots turn deadly”

So says today’s The Age newspaper. Perhaps now the mainstream commentators and finance professionals might start taking things seriously.

For weeks we’ve seen “experts” telling us that Greece will be an isolated event. That it could have an impact elsewhere in Europe, but it shouldn’t have any bearing on the US or Australia (Australia’s different you see).

Then at the start of this week talk of contagion started to do the rounds. But again, maybe Europe and the UK will go pear-shaped, but that’s all. We’ll be fine. Our lovely banks don’t have any Greek exposure.

But now today we’ve got “abyss” being used.

That’s hardly surprising considering the deep mess Greece and the European Union is in. And quite frankly it’s something that should be taken seriously.

We’re not talking about common-all-garden riots here. We’re not talking about World Economic Forum style riots with a few bags of flour being thrown and the odd urine water bomb splashing across the old bill.

It’s not the type of riot where the participants turn up for a bit of copper baiting and argy-bargy, fully expecting to return to their day job in the call centre on Monday morning. From what we can see it’s yer proper lootin’ and a killin’ civil unrest.

But we’ll see. You never know, it could all blow over before you know it. However, we’d want pretty decent odds if we were going to place a bet on it.

So who’s to blame for the Greek mess? Are the Greeks behaving like spoilt brats? Do they deserve the punishment that’s being dealt to them? Haven’t they received all the benefits of government largesse?

It won’t surprise you to learn that we firmly place the blame on the government. Sure, the Greek public aren’t completely innocent, thinking they could have something for nothing. But when it comes down to it, the prime reason for the current mess is the politicians and their insatiable appetite for power.

I’m afraid it’s the nature of the political beast. And it’s why we believe in a minimalist government.

The more powers that politicians are granted, the more they’ll want. The more they get to control things, the more they’ll want to control other things.

Eventually it reaches a tipping point. The government ends up having its fingers in so many pies its actions have the biggest impact on the fortunes of the economy. You can see that in Greece, and you can see that in, er, Australia…

Just look at what the Fairy Ruddfather has done to the markets this week. The impact has only been this big due to the excessive influence of government.

And it adds further evidence to support our claim that Australia does not operate a truly free market. In a free market with limited government, the government would not have this kind of power and could therefore not make these decisions.

As we’ve pointed out all along, it is the excesses of government that is the overwhelming negative influence on the economy, not free enterprise.

The front page of today’s Australian Financial Review (AFR) has political hack Laura Tingle leading with:

“The war of words over the resource super profits tax has overshadowed how the Henry review has presented the government with a new fiscal policy lever to control the economy. The lever is a new tax which, as a macro-economic policy, could reweight the way the economy works.”

To free-marketeers that kind of statement is enough to make you drop your copy of The Wealth of Nations into your bowl of cornflakes of a morning.

We love the last part especially; it “could reweight the way the economy works.”

See what I mean about the obsession for hapless bureaucrats and politicians to control things? They just can’t help themselves.

The idea that the Resource Super Profits Tax is a new lever to control the economy is just plain madness. But again, it’s the overconfidence of bureaucrats who believe they saved the Australian economy from disaster.

We’d love to hear from Ms. Tingle her explanation of how economies work. Our guess is that she believes it involves politicians and bureaucrats pulling and pushing levers like an old signalman.

Clearly Ms. Tingle and other government and tax lovers have some bizarre idea that economies can be directed at the whim of bureaucrats just as a child can control a toy train set.

In fact, in a Money Morning exclusive, below is a photo we secretly took this morning of a government bureaucrat in action – not surprisingly he’s sitting down on the job (probably an occupational health and safety thing):

Obviously the lever that’s been pulled right forward is the Australian housing market! “Full steam ahead Gordon…”

Anyway, the Keynesian hordes are still blindly pushing on with their crazy ideas. Not content with getting the global economy into the current mess they are determined to press ahead with even crazier ideas.

Page 71 of today’s AFR has John Freebairn writing:

“The RSPT could be much higher, close to 100 per cent without deterring the investment.”

What is he going on about? Can he seriously suggest that if you impose a 99% tax on something that investors will still pile in?

Apparently Mr. Freebairn holds the Ritchie Chair in Economics at the University of Melbourne. Based on his attitude to taxes we can only assume it must be the Ritchie Benaud chair, because whatever this Ritchie is, he or she can’t have anything to do with economics.

But at least he’s man enough to admit to the charge we levelled earlier this week. That the Super Profits Tax was nothing more than a backdoor to nationalisation:

“The RSPT plus corporate income tax collected will rise with booms, when capacity to pay is greater, and fall in slumps, when capacity to pay is reduced. In effect, government, on behalf of the citizens who own the basic resources, becomes a shareholder in the mining industry.”

The mistake the prof (if he is a prof) makes is that there will be boom times to begin with.

Who in their right mind will invest capital when they know the government is snatching a load of the profits, and where there’s no guarantee the government won’t take a bigger cut when it feels like it.

Companies and entrepreneurs will only invest capital if they believe the return will justify the reward.

All businessmen and women embark on a business in the full belief they have the nous to make money from it (unless it’s property investing of course, where the idea is to lose as much money as possible). Now, that isn’t to say that all will make money. Some will fail spectacularly. But the point is, they have the belief from day one that in the long run they can earn a buck from the venture.

And obviously some business ventures have more risk than others.

It’s pretty unarguable that opening a little coffee shop on Fitzroy Street here in St Kilda requires less capital investment, less risk and lower returns than someone exploring for gold or iron ore in the Australian outback.

But according to Mr. Freebairn, the return on a coffee shop in Fitzroy Street and a gold mine in Western Australia would be virtually the same, if as he suggests, miners’ Super Profits were taxed at “close to 100 per cent”.

Anyone with an ounce of grey matter can tell you that if the returns are the same or similar, it’s only natural that an investor will opt for the investment with the lowest risk of failure.

But aside from all this, there’s potentially an even bigger concern on the horizon. And that’s the impact government meddling will have on your retirement savings. But that reader, we’ll have to leave for tomorrow…

Cheers,
Kris.

Greece on the verge of default – [whistle].

China trying to engineer a soft economic landing – [whistle].

US Federal Reserve increasing interest rates – [whistle].

Australian property bubble bubbling – [whistle].

Millions of your taxpayer dollars wasted on home insulation stimulus – [whistle].

But funnily enough, it’s the mainstream response to the last one that baffles us the most.

After four insulation installers have been killed – and doubtless tens or hundreds of others have been injured – and at least 87 fires have resulted from the installations, Environment Minister Peter Garrett has abandoned the scheme.

Of course, already, billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on this monumental waste of money.

But here’s the thing we don’t get. At the time all these whacky schemes were announced, the mainstream told you that it was necessary to spend money because spending money was good for the economy.

You remember that don’t you?

Well, if spending money is good for the economy, then surely the disastrous outcome of the housing insulation scheme is an unexpected boost for the economy.

Because if simply spending money is good, then surely spending more money is even better.

The government now has to fork out hundreds of millions of dollars more to arrange for inspectors to make sure the work on at least 48,000 properties has been done properly.

Doubtless it hasn’t – hence the four deaths – so those inspectors will need to arrange for the work to be fixed up. That will cost more money.

Then we’re sure that just to be on the safe side, the government will send inspectors out again to make sure the fix-ups are safe – there’s even more taxpayer dollars spent.

According to the lame thinking of the mainstream that should all equal a boost to the economy, as more taxpayers dollars are spent.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream press haven’t mentioned any of this. Either because they’re too thick to work it out, or because they realise how illogical the idea of stimulus spending is, but they don’t want to admit it. After all, spending other people’s money is fun!

Aside from the wasteful spending, the 6,000 job losses suffered in the home insulation sector is another perfect example of how the misallocation of resources can permanently damage the economy.

As Paul Howes, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union points out, “77,000 jobs went in manufacturing, and the knock-on of that will be felt for years and decades ahead as factories were shut that will never re-open.”

Of course, what Mr. Howes fails to point out is that it’s the unions that help to ensure there are job losses. Their push for higher minimum wages guarantees that Australian businesses will either go bust or have to ship the work offshore.

And he doesn’t mention the millions of other manufacturing jobs that have vanished over the years thanks to the trade union movement.

But here’s the bigger problem. All the excitement about the stimulus programmes ‘creating’ new jobs masks the fact that those jobs which didn’t benefit from direct stimulus spending – such as manufacturing – lost jobs.

Not only that, but once a factory has closed down, as Mr. Howes correctly points out, they “will never re-open.”

If it was uneconomical to maintain a manufacturing business, it will be ten-times more uneconomical to try and re-start one from scratch.

Yet, all those jobs that were ‘created’ by the government to install insulation, what’s happened to them? Oh, that’s right, the programme has been cancelled. So the billions of dollars spent on ‘creating’ jobs have not only destroyed 77,000 manufacturing jobs, but it’s not even benefited the industries that were supposed to gain.

As we wrote a year ago on 4th February 2009:

“The government economic stimulus package will have no positive impact on the broader economy whatsoever. None.”

Yet again we’ve been proved right, and the mainstream press proved wrong.

At the time we also quoted some of the shrill headlines from the mainstream press:

“Rudd throws $42bn at economy” – Australian Financial Review

“Schoolyard blitz to avoid recession” – AFR

“We’re all in this together: except Turnbull” – AFR

“Rudd and the Reserve free up billions to beat recession” – The Age

“Rudd splashes the cash” – The Age

Every last one of them cheering for the government to spend your money to save the economy. Not a single journo was capable of expending one brain cell to figure out what the terrible consequences for the Australian economy would be.

An economy that believes the best solution to national wealth is to build, and then buy and sell houses between each other.

But there’s the consequence for you. One industry gets a bunch of stolen taxpayer money to keep prices sky-high and the credit bubble growing. The other industry gets swamped and ravaged by trade unions and minimum wage legislation which forces it to close down forever.

The upshot is the Australian economy hasn’t benefited one jot from the billions spent in the stimulus programme. All it’s done is allocated resources to prevent a bubble from popping – for now – and ensure thousands of people have received training for an industry that can’t possibly sustain them without the presence of taxpayer money.

Because if it could, then they wouldn’t need the stimulus to begin with – it’s not rocket science.

Despite the complete failure of stimulus spending we’ve little doubt the spin doctors will continue to call for more taxpayer dollars to be thrown at the economy – especially the housing sector.

And as long as that happens then we’ll continue to see headlines such as this:

“Housing debt in overdrive” – News Ltd

According to journalist Anthony Keane, “Total housing debt is set to reach $1 trillion within a year. The figure itself is not a worry, but there is concern the pace of borrowing is exceeding household income growth.”

“Not a worry”! Is he mad?

Nearly $1 trillion isn’t a worry? Oh Lordy. We’ve heard it all now.

But anyway, we’ll end today on that note. As we’ll get stuck into housing again tomorrow.

Cheers.
Kris.

ISN’T GREECE marvellous?

Paying income tax, or any kind of tax it would seem, has been entirely optional. Which should have powered its economy like 1960s’ Hong Kong.

But public spending, however, accounts for 40% of GDP. So who financed that spending if so few people paid?

Last year, only 15,000 of Greece’s 11-million population declared an income above €100,000. The government only got round to making shop receipts mandatory this week. Tax evasion is thought to cost the Greek purse €15 billion per year ($20.5bn). The untaxed “shadow economy” accounts for some 25% of annual output.

“The Greek issue is a Eurozone issue,” wrote Athen’s finance minister in a letter to the Financial Times this week. Which is true, and not just with regard to taxation – and not just with regard to the 16-state currency zone.

Yes, untaxed business accounts for one Euro in five generated in Spain, Portugal and Italy, or so reckons one Austrian economist. But what the PIIGS lose to their shadows (say it like John Cleese would to get the real City joke) is nothing next to the gap between income and spending now looming for pretty much the entire Western world.

Greece, in short, is but Northern Rock in this farce. The first bank to collapse – and thus the first to get rescued – it now looks a mere footnote to the historic crisis which followed. Neither the cause nor a “domino”, the Rock was more than a warning. It announced the crisis was on.

The scramble for tin hats began…

On Weds 12 Sept. 2007, Northern Rock – the biggest employer in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne…sponsor of the city’s football team…and the fastest-growing of the UK’s fast-growing mortgage banks – ran a banner advertisement across the front-page of the national press.

It offered 6.30% interest on new deposits, then more than 250 basis points above the average return offered by High Street savings accounts. Clearly, the bank needed cash in a hurry! And come Thursday it had to arrange an emergency loan from the Bank of England. By 9am Friday, queues were forming at its branches across the country, and Northern Rock’s stock promptly dumped 20%.

On the following Monday, the government effectively rescued the bank’s savers, guaranteeing their deposits in full. And from then until Feb. 2008, when it finally came, nationalization was only a matter of time.

The Rock’s demise wasn’t the first sign of trouble. August ‘07 saw inter-bank interest rates jumped to a near-nine-year high. Both Bear Stearns and BNP Paribas had already closed certain mortgage-investment funds to withdrawals. A handful of smart-arses pointed to the 40-to-1 leverage at leviathan banks such as Lehmans.

Fast forward to early 2010, and the US and UK are running record peacetime public-purse deficits. Dubai last month suspended (and then restructured) repayments on a chunk of its debts. The cost of insuring government bonds against default has risen sharply for more than a month.

So…who gets to play Lehmans in this comedic repeat?

For all London’s dithering and dawdling, saving the Rock was never in doubt. No politics or ideology stood in the way. But making German savers pay the wages of Greek civil servants is another thing altogether. Either the Greeks take a wage cut, or somebody stumps up, or the central bank simply prints money, or Greece will default on its debts as bond-buyers vanish.

Writ large across the developed world’s spending, we’ll thus need the Martians to help…or perhaps we’ll ask God for a loan…if the ever-greater cradle-to-grave promises made after WWII aren’t wound back before they come due. Alternatively, we could just keep printing more money.

After all, it worked to stem the crisis in banking.

“A sovereign debt crisis in the West is coming sooner or later though it is probably not right now,” says Christopher Wood in his closely-followed Greed & Fear analysis for CLSA.

“This is why the recent correction in gold is an opportunity to buy more bullion and more gold mining shares” – a defense, says Wood, against the “almost inevitable Western currency debasement which will be the consequence of the increasingly untenable welfare states and related social security systems.”

It wouldn’t be the first time a sense of impending doom sparked a fresh move worldwide into physical gold. And until the next crisis in debt is resolved, it might not be the last either.

Adrian Ash
for Money Morning Australia

Adrian Ash is head of research at www.BullionVault.com