As the UK's public borrowings reach record levels, Britain's credit outlook has been lowered from stable to negative by the ratings agency Standard & Poor's. The agency cited government debt and political uncertainty with an election looming for its decision. It is the first time that Britain has been on negative outlook since S & P introduced outlooks in the 1980s. The move could eventually lead to a cut in the UK's Triple A rating and leave the Government in a position where it would have to pay more to borrow on financial markets. Official data released overnight also shows British public borrowing hit a record high for the month of April. The pound tumbled sharply and shares also fell in response to the Standard & Poor's decision..
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On the qualification of predictions...
The late JK Galbraith, one of the twentieth century's most prominent economists, observed wryly that the purpose of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. The American baseball star Yogi Berra, famous for his malapropisms, said: "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."
Recent history bears that out. Just about every official forecaster around the world underestimated the impacts of the global financial crisis. Over the past year the International Monetary Fund has revised down its forecasts for the global economy month after month. Just ten months ago, it was predicting that the global economy would expand by more than 4 per cent over the year to the end of 2009. Now it sees global growth going backwards by 1.3 per cent.
The Reserve Bank and the Treasury, too, have been consistently wrong during the course of the crisis - or, to put it more kindly, their forecasts have been overtaken by events. Within weeks of being issued in February, the updated economic and financial outlook from Treasury predicting that Australia would avoid recession looked heroic, bordering on ludicrous. Of course, it's almost certain that these forecasts were based on assumptions chosen to accentuate the positive. The last thing the central bankers or the econocrats want to do is undermine public confidence by predicting a recession until it would be utterly implausible not to.
Silver breaks out...
Mitch Hooke is a boso spruiker not to be taken seriously... the hyperbolic dimple will say anything,imo
The mining industry has released modelling saying 23,500 jobs will be lost by 2020 under the Federal Government's emissions trading scheme.
Around half the job losses are forecast to be in Queensland's coal industry, and Minerals Council head Mitch Hooke says those figures will multiply in the future, with job losses doubling by 2030."New South Wales would be the second highest level of job losses - a bit over 4,000 direct jobs [lost]," he said."Put a multiplier on that and you can see these figures really start to become quite significant."
He says one of the fundamental failures of Australia's emissions trading scheme is that its targets are far ahead of other countries. (Liar, liar, pants on fire Mitch...)
Hey Mitch, how many job losses in agriculture and tourism under this senario.....
Now, the MIT study has been published in a peer-reviewed journal -- The American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate (subs. req'd) -- which obviously it makes it much more credible and high-profile. Reuters has a good story on it, "Global warming could be twice as bad as forecast." The study concludes:
The MIT Integrated Global System Model is used to make probabilistic projections of climate change from 1861 to 2100. Since the model's first projections were published in 2003 substantial improvements have been made to the model and improved estimates of the probability distributions of uncertain input parameters have become available. The new projections are considerably warmer than the 2003 projections, e.g., the median surface warming in 2091 to 2100 is 5.2°C compared to 2.4°C in the earlier study. Many changes contribute to the stronger warming; among the more important ones are taking into account the cooling in the second half of the 20th century due to volcanic eruptions for input parameter estimation and a more sophisticated method for projecting GDP growth which eliminated many low emission scenarios.
[Note: That rise is compared to 1981-2000 temperature levels. So you can add at least 0.5 °C and 1.0 °F for comparison with pre-industrial temperatures, which I did in the headline -- see "A (Hopefully) Clarifying Note on Temperature."]
The MIT press release calls for "rapid and massive" action to avoid this. Study co-author Ronald Prinn, the co-director of the Joint Program and director of MIT's Center for Global Change Science, says, it is important "to base our opinions and policies on the peer-reviewed science... There's no way the world can or should take these risks." Duh!
Global warming will hit us so quickly and dramatically going forward that idiots like Mitch will carry the shame of their denial for the rest of their lives round their necks like a dead albatros...
Standard Chartered say buy Gold Silver...
Standard Chartered is including gold and silver as one of four main recommendations to its private banking clients, according to a presentation by chief investment strategist, Lim Say Boon, in Dubai today.
The UK’s second largest bank by market capitalization has been winning clients in a flight to quality from its crashing rivals, and this global trend has also been evident in the Middle East.
Clients are being recommended to purchase gold and silver on price pull backs as the precious metals have a low correlation to traditional asset classes. The bank will recommend on different ways to invest in the metals.
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