With house prices solid or rising everywhere except in Sydney, household debt is now almost out of control.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, you saw the highly-geared Business sector collapse as interest rates rose. But now, you’re finding it is households with the high levels of debt.
In 1990, households had (on average) borrowed only 65% of their disposable income. By 2005, that figure had rocketed to 155% of their annual disposable income. And today, it stands at nearly 170%.
[Read more…]
It’s not quite the end of the month, but those of you wanting to put forward a solution seem to have done so by now. And I deliberately held off posting your proposed answers — so that everyone could submit without any distraction.
But all your answers are up there now.
In posing the Mind Bender for June, I suggested that you need to quickly choose between an Intuitive or Deliberate thinking, in your approach to finding a solution.
Intuitively, you immediately think that, by adding just 2 metres to the length of the rope around the Earth … the gap would be extremely small. It may be large enough to slip a coin under; but certainly not large enough for you to crawl under.
But the solution to this Bender is found by using Deliberate thinking.
[Read more…]
In a speech last week, Glenn Stevens (RBA governor) said he “saw no reason to revise its forecast for underlying inflation to settle at around 2.5 per cent in the second half of the year …”
As such, his message is that interest rates are likely to remain unchanged. But not everyone seems to share that view.
[Read more…]
The idea of introducing these monthly challenges was to help you to stretch your thinking. But sadly, some people are simply using Google to discover the solutions.
This month, the challenge was to come up with the common words that contained five consecutive Vowels and Consonants.
The emphasis being on “consecutive” and “common” …
[Read more…]
