THE DISTILLERY: Moaning bulls

The economy returns to centre stage in Australia this week: Rate Rise Looms, however, will remain un-mounted in the stables until the June quarter inflation data is released in the last week of July. So tomorrow's meeting of the central bank's board will be notable for the lack of frenzied speculation ahead of it. This week we also have retail sales, building approvals and trade for May and job ads and labour force data for June – so a busy time for the prognosticators amongst the jottery. But the moaning and groaning will continue, the carbon tax is still with us and the June 30 reporting season is approaching.

The Sydney Morning Herald's Economics Editor, Ross Gittins asked a very pertinent question this morning: "Is it possible the luckiest – and long the best macro-economically managed – country in the developed world could turn its prosperity to ashes? I believe in the power of psychology, but I doubt it's that powerful. The resources boom will steam on no matter how the punters are feeling. But it is possible we could go on feeling hard done by, even as we get richer and the economy's underlying structure gets stronger." His column was headlined, quite accurately: "This very lucky country enjoys a good whinge."

And Michael Pascoe asked on smh.com.au yesterday: "Anyone feeling a little sheepish after all the hype about the potential Greek Armageddon last week? Probably not. The fear and worry industry immediately moved on to beating up the importance of China's manufacturing industry numbers on Friday. And before we start feeling superior about dysfunctional Greece, Australia is guilty of a touch of the same. Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson didn't quite put it that way in a speech last week, but Australia's failure to improve our productivity is largely because we haven't had to – we've become nationally richer from the commodities boom and therefore haven't had to collectively work harder to become wealthier.

News Ltd's Terry McCrann wrote yesterday: "The sharemarket will open strongly tomorrow and on Tuesday the Reserve Bank will leave interest rates unchanged. So are we back to the best of all possible worlds: our superannuation balances going up and the RBA not spoiling things by whacking us with higher rates? Well, not exactly."

Gittins also wrote on the weekend: "So if we want to impose new restrictions on how much foreigners own, it's pretty safe to involve less economic development, slower economic growth than we were expecting and a more slowly rising standard of living. That wouldn't worry me much, but many people would see it differently. Point is: don't imagine restricting foreign ownership would come without a price to be paid." The Greens don't care, they want slower growth anyway and don't understand the concept of there being a price for everything.

The Age's Economics Editor Tim Colebatch went for some crystal polishing on the weekend, via a survey: "Australia's private sector economists are less confident about the new financial year than their official counterparts, but nonetheless expect it to be a year of solid growth for Australia and the world. At the end of a financial year that delivered rather less than they had expected, the panel of 19 economists in The Age half-yearly economic survey, by and large, predict growth to accelerate over the next 12 months, the sharemarket to rebound, commodity prices to peak and edge down, unemployment to fall, and interest rates to rise."

Elsewhere, the economics editor of The Australian, Michael Stutchbury, wrote: "The bracing new challenge for public policy is to deflate Australia's mining boom expectations that our living standards can keep improving as they have. From now, any improvement will have to be eked out the hard way. Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson laid out this challenge on Thursday night at the Growth Challenge conference. It marks the first substantial official recognition of two confronting realities."

Fairfax's Malcolm Maiden made a couple of very good points about the Reserve Bank in a column on Saturday: "The Reserve Bank is continuing to negotiate the sale of its 50-per-cent-owned plastic banknote marketing company, Securency, and yesterday's move by the Australian Federal Police to lay bribery charges against Securency, the 100 per cent Reserve-owned Note Printing Australia and six former top executives of the two companies actually advances the process. Working out the damage to the Reserve is going to take longer."

The Australian's Tim Boreham claimed this morning: "Renewed doubts have emerged about the ability of Foster's Group suitor SABMiller to launch a higher formal offer for the beer giant, with Foster's chief John Pollaers insisting the brewer can slug it out as a standalone entity. Local and offshore analysts have questioned whether SABMiller can improve its indicative June 21 offer of $4.90 a share, valuing Foster's at $10 billion."

The Australian Financial Review said this morning: "One in four mortgage broking firms closed shop in the 12 months to March 31, driven out of business by a slowing housing market and new government regulations."

And the AFR also reported: "Controversial new S&P ratings criteria that could put pressure on the AA-rating of the big four banks will be decided within months."

The Australian's John Durie wrote on the weekend: "The wait is finally over for Tabcorp's Paula Dwyer, with Victorian gaming minister Michael O'Brien due to announce his decision on who gets the right to run the retail betting markets in Victoria for the next 12 years. Tabcorp is the hot favourite to win the licence renewal, with rival Tatts to get the consolation prize of the poker machine monitoring business. The licence, which will cost an estimated $550 million, is not make or break for either of them, but for Tabcorp's newly installed chairman Dwyer it will obviously be a welcome boost, the group having spun off the casinos through Echo Entertainment."

The AFR said this morning: "Washington H Soul Pattinson's non-executive chairman has hit back at calls to break up the cross-shareholding between the company and Brickworks."

And Durie also highlighted an odd bit of trading in a daylight comment on Friday and repeated the point on Saturday: "Yesterday's lunchtime online column highlighted trade in Paperlinx, which was subsequently put into a trading halt. Just why is not known, but there could be a material announcement, which was front run by some smart punters or just part of the end-of-year ramp. Paperlinx is just a $100m stock these days but continues to be actively traded, as shown by the 90 per cent price increase from 10c to 19c this week. It was trading at 66c in August last year and traded down to 10c on heavy volume on Wednesday, only to bounce as high as 19c yesterday before easing back at lunch yesterday to 17c before the trading halt."

Fairfax's Adele Ferguson has another chapter in the murky MTAA Super story this morning :"In August last year, the boss of one of the country's biggest super funds, MTAA Super Fund, wrote a letter that said the trustee of the fund had been "bedevilled by APRA" for years, had been subject to "lurid" allegations by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and had been issued with a show cause notice. The 11-page letter, written by Michael Delaney on August 4 last year to the trustee directors, revealed that tensions between APRA and MTAA Super dated back to 2006. "In summary, it shows that the central critical elements of the 2006/7/8/9 and 2010 APRA Review Reports remained unsustained and rebutted by us," the letter stated. Last month, MTAA hit the headlines with reports that its performance and currency hedging were under APRA investigation."

Finally, The Australian's Nabila Ahmed writes: "As NSW transport minister Gladys Berejiklian begins work on the $7 billion northwest rail link that she has dubbed the most important infrastructure project for the state, lessons from two other "most significant" infrastructure projects will be fresh on the minds of potential corporate partners. The twin disasters of RiverCity Motorway, once described as "the most significant traffic infrastructure project in Brisbane's history", and Brisconnections, labelled "one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in Queensland", are great examples of how not to set up an infrastructure project." She forgot the two Sydney disasters: the Lane Cove and Cross City Tunnels, both billion dollar-plus black holes of misinformation and poor advice.