Скачать или смотреть The Australian Opportunity December 2008

Barry Dawes, Managing Director of Martin Place Securities, speaks about investing in Australia, the Australian economy and Australia's outlook in the current market

Talking about Australia...were a long way from anywhere when youre in the Northern Hemisphere. But Australia really has been away from much of the turmoil thats taken place in international financial markets over the last year, the main reason for that has been that Australias reliance on its commodity base has allowed it to sail through much of the problem. But the other thing, which is very, very important, is that the Australian economy is in remarkable robust shape, after having 11 years of expansion. And during that period weve had some very important things happen. Probably most important is the fact that we no longer have any sovereign debt. That is zip... in fact that is a positive, weve had over 10 years of budget surplices at the federal level and as a result of that we now have a surplus on our capital account on behalf of the federal government.

So that puts us in a very, very different position from almost anything in Europe, the UK, the US, Japan and many other parts of the world, so Australia has been in a quite good position. It also means that there is a buffer for the federal government to increase spending, and carrying out other fiscal programs to underpin the economy.

The other really important thing is our banking system. Our banking system has been remarkably robust, sure the stocks have probably been down 50% from their highs, but theyre nowhere near the 90% declines that weve seen in the bank stocks around the world. Australian banks do not have very much exposure to the derivative markets, and very importantly, that property markets in Australia have been reasonably quite, which is unusual at this stage of a 10 or 11 year expansion. The Sydney property market peaked in 2002, and since then its been fairly steady, so were not going to see the problems that weve perhaps seen in the UK or in the United States in respect of property values and that impacting on the banks.

Now the outlook on a world scene is difficult to come to grips with in terms of where we will be in 2009. Because weve got such a big reliance on China were probably in a far better position than perhaps if we were in North America. We can expect that the China will continue its growth , slow growth is probably recession by anyone elses standards, but never the less it will be growth in the 7-8% level, which will be good for Australia. Commodity demand will still be firm in terms of volumes, prices have come off but the important areas in iron ore and coal still remain reasonable robust.

Now as far as the economic outlook, 2009 will be difficult, Australia will have a growth in 2008 of about 2.5% and should decline to about 1.7% in 2009 according the latest OECD figures that have just been released this week, and then we should get a recovery to about 2.9% in 2010. Our interest rate environment is coming down.

The budget surpluses that the Australian government has had, will also allow the reserve bank to ease on monetary conditions and bring interest rates down even more. The rise that weve seen over the last couple of years in Australia was counter-trend to what was going on in the United States and now were seeing the interest rates coming off and probably other half to 1% cut before the end of the year. So the Australian economy looks quite reasonable for 2009 and it should be able to withstand reasonable shocks in 2009 and beyond.