Boom in Australia goes bust as global slowdown hits
— -- For Leigh Davies, the good times ended with a phone call.
Until that day in mid-September, he could hardly keep up with all the demand for his firm's mining equipment. Like just about everyone else in the mineral-rich state of Western Australia, he was riding a worldwide commodities boom, ignited by China's seemingly insatiable demand for the riches beneath the Australian soil — iron and copper ore, zinc, magnesium, coal.
Then the phone rang, two days after the collapse of Wall Street investment bank Lehman Bros.: "We got a call from one of our better clients, saying, 'Most of our finances are tied up in Lehman bank, and we're suspending your contract until we get it sorted out.' "
From there, things got worse. Other clients, caught up in a sudden credit crunch, delayed or canceled projects, idling all eight of Davies' drill rigs for the first time ever. "We've got no work," he says.
In a matter of weeks, Australia's boom has gone bust. Now economists at Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, among others, are forecasting that Australia's economy will shrink this quarter and next, tipping the land down under into a recession for the first time since 1991. JPMorgan sees the jobless rate — a record low 4% just 10 months ago — rising to 9% by 2010.
Davies is stunned by the speed with which it all unraveled. "The whole of Australia had been screaming for more drilling rigs and equipment. We had a severe shortage of manpower. It all stopped within two weeks."
"It was very quick," says Ron Wyndow, whose firm in Karrinyup, Western Australia, provides equipment and services to mining and mineral exploration firms. "It hit about eight weeks ago. Just, bang!"
The financial crisis is hitting debt-laden Australians hard. "We're headed for a recession for the same reason the USA is in one now — the bursting of a debt-financed speculative bubble," says economist Steve Keen of the University of Western Sydney, one of the first forecasters to sound the alarm. Keen says Australian households have been adding debt — as a percentage of economic output — even faster than their U.S. counterparts over the past 18 years. Now they're feeling pinched and are cutting back. "We have a homegrown recession coming our way, regardless of what happens in the rest of the world," Keen says.
