Chinese company hands out credit-rating gongs

A Chinese endorsement. Australia is one of only seven countries awarded the top AAA  credit rating by a Chinese entrant into the international credit rating business. Dagong Global Credit Rating Co Ltd released its 2010 sovereign credit risk ratings in Beijing this week and they show a quite different picture to those of the United States based agencies such as Moody’s, S&P and Fitch.

Of the 50 countries rated , there was an obvious difference in those by Dagong and the three majors for 27 countries. “Those countries which have received higher ratings are mainly the new emerging countries which have political stability and good economic performance,” the Chinese analysts said.

“Those countries which have received lower ratings are many developed countries which have shown economic growth and are heavily burdened with increasing debt. These differences are caused by different rating concept and method which have been used by Dagong. More importantly, during the rating process, Dagong has insisted to extend a fair rating which should not be affected by the ideology in the country.”

The core elements of the Dagong ratings standard are said to be the “national governance capacity, economic strength, financial strength, fiscal strength and foreign exchange strength”  with the core concept being that the wealth creating capacity is the fundamental for a country to support its national borrowing capability and the source of debt payment.

Under these criteria, Australia, along with Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Singapore and New Zealand were assigned AAA ratings; China, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany were assigned AA +, the United States and  Saudi Arabia AA; France , the United Kingdom, Korea and Japan got AA-. The countries that were assigned local currency sovereign credit rating of A- level include Belgium, Chile, Spain, South Africa, Malaysia, Estonia, Russia, Poland, Israel, Italy, Portugal and Brazil.

Let’s call it the first promise. I’ve given up waiting for an official starting date. As far as I’m concerned the election campaign proper is under way and if you needed confirmation to agree with me, how about this morning’s promise by Julia Gillard to give parents a tax break of up to $779 on the annual cost of school uniforms if Labor wins the next federal election? That’s a happy little cost of $220 million over four years to get things under way in these frugal times.

Helping us understand the housing market. Are things getting better or worse? Are prices going higher or lower? Consider this effort by the Sydney Morning Herald to help its readers understand:

Now, have you got that?

One part I do like. There’s one part of the SMH website that I do like and that’s the use during the day of material from the AAP newsagency. It is wonderfully refreshing to read what a politician has said or done without the journalists having to distort it with their own opinions.

Get Up gets going. This Get Up lot are a bit outside my experience but I fancy the Greens will be welcoming their growing participation in the political process. The group has just launched a climate change ad featuring a red-headed actress playing Prime Minister Julia Gillard suggesting several potential climate policies, including moving Australia to East Timor and distributing gas masks and snorkels. A young voter responds: “Why don’t we just put a price on pollution instead.”

I’ve not been able to find the climate ad yet but I do think that the Get Up election preview is more likely to get young people to enrol to vote than anything the official electoral office has produced.

Escaping a disaster? There’s only one thing that will stop the government’s East Timor nonsense being an electoral disaster and that’s if people are not really as concerned about boat people as the politicians seem to think they are. It really has been a botched process with ignoring the vote of the East Timorese Parliament just being the latest example of what can happen when you listen to the spinners and simply spin an issue out of control. Yet I did notice this morning that the story does not feature on the most read lists of the internet news sites so maybe Labor will escape unpunished.