Ouch! 1AUD = 73yen today.

Forget the holiday in January though, I'm just glad I'm 20 years from retiring, and hopefully the world economy will have recovered by then, and my super will not be worth peanuts.

On the train this morning I was scrolling through the news headlines on my blackberry:

Aussie dollar plunges
Wall street rout
Global sharemarket in turmoil
Meteor heading for Earth!

I actually laughed out loud - it's the end of the world folks!

Seriously though, gotta feel for the retirees out there with their super funds being king hit in the worst kind of way right now.

If I was about 2 years from retirement I don't think I'd have my 40 years of savings sitting in a high risk "high return" portfolio. Damm silly if you did.

I have a sinking feeling its not just going to be the aussie dollar, but most currencies that are going to tank...

You need to think of dollar averaging. Holiday this year , not so good, but averaged out over 20 years, not so bad.

Sounds like it's not only the high risk portfolios that have hit the skids. And two years ago, it seemed like a terrific idea.

I don't think it is just high risk portfolios, lots of low risk super funds are being hammered as well. Any fund with any kind of stockmarket exposure is suffering.

Hot off the press, the RBA just dropped the cash rate in Oz by 100 basis points, to 6.0%.

Man the lifeboats!

Yeah I am pretty happy to be making yen about now

Yes today was such a super day - I have a business that is considered a luxury so it is hurting at the moment AND then to wake up and see the US dollar has dived to 70c when all my purchases in China are paid in US Dollar and then the Yen has dived to 71c.

Our trip is fully paid for. I am not one of those rich Australians - I work hard and save for my holidays and enjoy every minute of time off. At this stage there will be no fancy eating out while in Niseko it will be Potato salad sandwichs from the Seico Mart!!

It is probably a good thing for Niseko that the current problems didn't start earlier in the year, before a lot of people booked and paid for their trips. would be a few opting out by now. Snowhunter, cheer up mate, when you get up there and you're riding through the trees and stop for a moment to take in the amazing snow covered land scape and the sheer beauty of the winter wonderland around you or you're sitting in the local onsen with a vending machine beer after a hard day in the snow it will more than make up for any exchange rate hassles.

This is a bit long but provides some very good reality to the "greedy banks" claims.


AS usual after a financial crisis, we hear demands for new controls and regulations to stop it from happening again. But since every crisis has led to thousands of new pages of regulation, why is it that regulation doesn't stop crises from happening again? No matter what pundits say, we are nowhere near a laissez-faire situation. Look no further than the US federal institutions in Washington, DC, and we find 12,113 individuals working full time to regulate the financial markets. What did they do with the powers they had?

Made mistakes. American politicians, central banks and regulators were just as eager as speculators to expand the housing bubble. They just had a bigger pump.

The US Federal Reserve lowered interest rates from 6.5 per cent to 1per cent between 2001 and 2003, and housing prices soared. Starting in 1995, the government threatened banks and thrifts with regulations and legal challenges if they did not extend more loans to poor neighbourhoods and a government-sponsored company such as Fannie Mae used its state guarantees to purchase more risky loans and expand the sub-prime market.

Is the solution to the crisis really to give more power to people and institutions that contributed to bringing it about?

The problem with regulation is that it is always a response to the last crisis. Generals fight the last war and always try to avoid the mistakes made then. So we get new rules that target the mistakes that everybody already knows they must avoid. The next possible crisis and its causes are so far unknown, and our regulations may have no effect or even make them worse.

After the exposure of accounting scandals in companies such as Enron, we have seen more drastic accounting regulations. We all wanted to avoid another Enron. "Fair value accounting" was one of the results, which means that financial institutions had to mark their assets to market. If a bank has mortgage-backed securities for sale, their value is registered as the price it could get if it sold them on the market today, rather than taking historic prices into account.

It sounds reasonable, but the problem is that when there is panic in the market, no liquidity and no buyers, that price is very low. So suddenly all institutions see the value of their assets drop at the same time. If they sell to make up for the loss, the prices fall even more, and accountants keep marking down assets. The result is that a bank or thrift that looked very stable a few days ago can suddenly turn out

to be insolvent, at least on paper.

William Isaac, who used to be chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, has said that if fair value accounting was in place in the 1980s, all the big banks in the US would have collapsed and the recession might have become a depression.

These accounting rules are "like fighting a fire with gasoline", as Steve Forbes has pointed out.

In other words, regulation that was introduced to solve yesterday's problems can easily become a big problem around the corner.

The only thing we know for sure is that we don't know where the next problem is going to come from. Our best way of preparing is to be flexible and to make sure that individuals and institutions are ready to learn and adapt as soon as new information is available. Regulation that locks in particular solutions or blocks others could stand in the way of thatflexibility.

Another result of the accounting scandals was the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which required US companies to introduce rigorous internal controls and to send regular, detailed financial reports to the federal authorities. The result has been new costs for American companies, fewer public offerings and a flight of talented directors.

The present financial crisis has swept away the independent investment banks on Wall Street. It is now obvious that they couldn't afford the risks they took without having bank deposits that have made life easier for big commercial banks. But why did independent investment banks evolve in the first place? Because American politicians outlawed universal banks as part of the New Deal, a ban that was in place for 66 years.

The Glass-Steagall Act, which enforced that ban, was repealed in 1999: one piece of deregulation on which some people now blame the crisis. On the contrary, it was important and it was done in the nick of time.

If it hadn't been repealed, J.P. Morgan would not have been able to buy Bear Stearns, Bank of America could not have bought Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs would not have been able to save themselves by becoming bank holding companies.

Regulations and controls often result in new difficulties even when the intentions of policymakers are good and the hopes are real. That does not even begin to address the problem that a lot of new regulations are just symbols, enacted to show people that politicians have done something, even if they know that it does not really address the problem. It follows the politicians' logic from the British television series Yes, Prime Minister: "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it."

This logic is as old as the crises. After the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, the British parliament delayed the Industrial Revolution by impeding the free formation of joint stock companies for more than 100 years.

And after the Depression, American politicians made risk-handling more difficult for two generations by banning stock options.

Regulators and politicians always fight the last crisis, and when they do they run the risk of making the next crisis more severe.

As we don't know what the next trigger will be, we can't regulate against it without introducing such drastic measures that financial markets cease to function effectively.

And that would be a terrible loss, much, much worse than any financial crisis we could imagine. Buying bad assets from financial institutions may be a bad idea and may cost the US treasury $US700 billion ($935billion), but financial markets help the world economy to create that amount twice a week.

Speculators and investment banks have shown that it is difficult to keep a cool head when there are large sums of money at stake. But the same goes for politicians and regulators. And the only thing more dangerous than financial crises may be our way of responding to them.

Johan Norberg is the author of In Defence of Global Capitalism and a senior fellow of the Cato Institute in Washington, DC.

Yeah but if most currencies tanked then there is less of a problem with travel and exchange rates. What is going on right now is the AUSSIE DOLLAR tanking against the US and Yen (and the others) so those of us that earn and spend in Aussie Dollars are seeing our buying power disappear rapidly! WHY? It does not seem logical that when our economy is much more stable than the US our dollar is worth proportionally less and less... go figure

I can only hope a reversal of the trend happens soon!

Poor bugger

Thanks RD - Yep now I have had a good nights sleep I can look at everything a little clearer. At least I not retiring and desperate for my money, I have my health and a good lifestyle AND most importantly I AM GOING TO NISEKO IN FEBRUARY.

Everything is already paid for, we are going with 4 friends and we are going to have a blast. I will definately have enough money for my beer in the Onsen!!!!! I am already day dreaming of swooshing through the POW and trees.

Down to 67.70 today. But the good news is the Qantas is reducing its fuel surcharge!

Doesn't quite make up for ending up with your head through a hole in the ceiling does it?

Wear seatbelts people!!!

It's getting brutal for the AUD. You'll be paying Aussie prices this winter I'm afraid. At least you'll get better snow for your money in Japan (that sounds really crass!).

There's a school of thought that says that Australia is dependent on commodities (like wool, wheat and coal) so the AUD is the same. The value varies depending on the need for our commodities, and with the loss of enthusiasm in the world, the need for raw materials (coal, iron ore, wheat, wool) is reduced. Thus the dollar is less important. Add to that the lower interest rate and it is much less attractive.

All of the stability of the economy, the budget surpluses and so-on means bu99er all in relation to the world's perceptions of us.

I worked it out and it means all prices in AUD are up 40% compared to last year. OUCH!
Imports in Oz must be about to go ballastic too.

Still, if you bought a condo at Niseko, its value in AUD has just gone up 15% in one week!

I wouldn't count on finding a buyer too quickly though. They'll also probably want to haggle on the price,