I hate Austin. As for Nashville, nice cities don't steal other cities football teams.

Lol gopher... Nice.

@ Amby, the pound is headed down. You just need to calculate how long until China implodes. I don't know what to think of someone who prefers van Gogh to van Ruysdael, Rembrandt or Saenredam.

I could never truly appreciate Van Gogh, I could never get past the whole crazy thing

@Gopher, yes, but will the pound head down further than the US dollar?

Go the little Aussie battler!!

Yes....the pound will decline against the Euro and the ECB will not allow the Euro to appreciate much more against the dollar. The Aussie dollar is primarily driven by the Yen.

Sorry gopher, I know your credentials but beg to differ. The Aussie dollar is currently being driven by the commodity boom fueled by China.

A good friend of mine from Detroit moved to Tasmania when he got married.

Agreed, but the currency pair that provides its floor and ceiling is the Yen. The dollar and Euro don't really matter than much to it. The carry trade and Japanese-Aussie interest differential are the dynamics that drive day to day exchange rates.

@gopher: before you fire a broadside back, 3 other reasons for the strong Aussie dollar in my economic treatise:
- Australia went into the global financial crisis/recession with practically no public debt. It did a Keynesian pump priming excercise (like everyone else at the time) but are on track to paying debtors totally back within 3 years
- As a result Australia (unlike the rest of the developed world) never went into recession, and has had no reason to increase monetary supply, so while other currencies are being devalued by increasing money supply this hasn't happened in Australia, naturally increasing the Australian dollar's value
- The economy here is fundamentally sound (GDP around 2-3% and unemployment around 4-5%), as a result the Reserve Bank here has been increasing interest rates, which obviously attracts capital, and as a result drives the Australian dollar all up further.

So if I get bored here can I get a job at your school ;-)

(you fired back while typing... good response though)

Sounds a lot like Canada.....or Ireland from a few years ago.

My greatest confusion of this recessions is how small the US housing boom was compared to everywhere else. The central question is not why did the US have a housing boom, but why was ours so much smaller and why did it burst so much earlier than everyone else. Canada and most of Europe (and yes Australia) are sitting on housing bubbles that have to burst at some point.

The Aussie dollar is right in it's Yen range. The Yen moving up against the dollar and Euro is playing it's part. I'll predict that if the Yen were to crash, then the Aussie dollar would too.

Australia's property market has largely stalled (some areas like Brisbane are down 3%, others like Melbourne are up 2%.) Property prices have slowed because of rising interest rates. But the bubble is a bit of a fallacy here as the domestic demand and housing shortage due to everyone in the world coming over to 'share the wealth' has largely insulated the country (much the same way that the London and New York property markets haven'd had the arse fall out of them.)

Eventually either incomes must rise or prices must fall. I don't think all of Oz can be a money laundering operation for the Russians like London. And I don't see how supply can be as restricted on a continental basis as NyLon. The Irish and the Spanish said the same things a few years back.

So in other words, ride the dragon now and get out before the market tanks.

Whoa Amby - I'm not FROM Tasmania, I merely live there at the moment - in fact today myself and a couple of mates went and stole wood from a forestry coup. Do you have access to wood in the north?

re: economies - don't you think that they are integrally tied to the supply of oil? For instance the US housing crash / stock market craziness of 2008 happened very shortly after oil peaked at 147$ a barrel...

In normal times, energy is 5% of peoples spending. During these periodic oil booms, energy rises to somewhere less than 10%. I don't think that it is a big deal. I'm from the Oil Patch in the US and it had the least volatile housing prices in the country.

@kaner - what do we need wood for up here? (except for building rafts to escape floods)

(and you not being a native born Tasmanian excuses you too)

:P I like people with two heads... :)

Well, I am from country of golden birds and land of spirituality, INDIA. Basically I am in Its Capital Delhi for more than a decade now!!
India Is Simply Incredible!