… Well, it’s not misleading is it. It’s coming. Saturday.
Who to vote for is still the unanswerable question, for I am sure, many people, simply because there’s no real distinction between each party, mainly because it is dominated with me-too.
Considering a vote for Kevin or a vote for John is going to yeild many the same result (let’s just ignore IR laws), why vote for one over the other?
Change, as Mr Howard was talking with The 7.30 Report, seemed to raise eyes for me at least.
He claims theres no such thing as a changeless change of government.
And he is right, thinking about this.
If you vote Labor, you’ll have, certainly, ex union officials placed on the Nation’s top spots.
If you vote Coalition, the status quo is potentially maintained, and the only changes are the policies that have been revealed.
The safer vote seems to be the Coalition, because for those who don’t generally sit up a politicians arse all day (I don’t), the better vote is certainly going to be the one that is going to have the least negative impact, or where both have no negative impact, the better vote is the one which has the most positive impact, or where there is no difference in general for the positive, or negative impact, then the better vote will essentially be on history, and where history is no longer relevant .. Yep, here we are, the better vote will be to simply maintain the status quo and see what eventuates.
You simply cannot gamble with a nation, one which is primarily living off debt (no, not the economy, the state governments and the people who live within the states are generally in debt).
Which moves us away from the election to some level, and to the topic of Interest Rates.
The government doesn’t generally speaking have much influence over interest rates, the general interest rates are dictated by debt. And guess what?
The nation is full of debt, except at the federal government level.
We have many, many people inside the nation living beyond thier means, simply because they were too silly to see the debt filled nation coming, and instead decided to contribute to rising interest rates.
You see, even interest rates are a supply and demand issue.
If the banks are going to be getting hard earned dollars, from you, why should they come down in price? You max the cards out, they profit. Pretty simple, isn’t it?
In the last few years, you can generally pick any bank, check its price on the stock market, and it is liking the general trend has been a strong rise. I think I wrote a while back about an imaginary portfolio I placed on MSN Money site a few years back. I checked on that a few months back and CBA was the strongest performer.
There’s no real need to question why that is. With interest rates on credit cards hovering between 17 – 25%, you can easily recognise where those dollars are coming from.
Debt influences interest rates. The more demand there is for dollars, the higher the interest rates go to slow that demand down. And if you don’t have an interest bearing savings account with a bank, then you are the one losing out in the long term. The debt industry is where I see a boom happening. People are seemingly spending lots of dollars (and in some cases dollars they dont have), so getting those dollars back from many, many people will cause banks to rise interest rates (and they have been, I’ve seen term deposit advertising (nah, no term deposit for me, nothing to put towards one)) to the levels they are now. ie. I’ve seen them go from what was probably 4.5% a few years back to a whopping 7% that they are now. That’s a 3% rise, probably fuelled by consumer debt.
A good goal for many is almost certainly to plug dollars into an interest bearing savings account, if not for you, then Kids, who with BankWest can get 10%!!! That’s a fair bit of dollars for a kid putting away $20 a week. It compounds, and becomes a strong move.
The more dollars in savings accounts (whilst not a big fat strong 25% share market return), are a safer investment, and will essentially give back to you in the short, medium and even over the long term – these silly consumers have no idea how to manage debt, they’ll buy anything and everything they can get hands on.
Enjoy!