…….this handsome chap spotted while watching the Anzac Day match between the ‘pies and the Bombers.

Managed by the world’s best Treasurer.

That’s the only logical conclusion to be drawn from today’s IMF forecast, confirming that “Australia leads the world“.

According to the 10,000 staff at the International Monetary Fund, Australia will “medal” in first place in the world economic growth race next year. I’d say they’d take the gold medal but quantitative easing has reduced that to a rubbish medallion made out of milk bottle tops and manufactured by a small child in China.

3% growth next year.

Must be true, I read it in the paper.

Just out of interest, what’s the IMF’s track record in this prediction game then?

Well, according to their own figures, their average margin for error from actual growth rates for western economies has been 39%.

So…. going by past performance (and that’s usually a shit method of prediction too), we could see growth rates of anywhere between 4.1% or 1.8%. Or a completely different figure. You choose.

How did they do in predicting economic shocks? Pretty fucking awful, come to think of it. Completely missed the events of 2008 and variously predicted better recoveries than were experienced for the USA and worse than the one that actually occurred in Australia.

They’re about as good at predicting as anyone else with an historical graph, a pencil and a ruler placed at the end.

I’m not certain what will happen next year, but I am certain of this; no-one in the IMF is going to stand up at the press conference and say any of the following;

- A country will exit the Euro and devalue
- China will have a hard landing
- The USA will engineer another bloody oil war
- Apple will pop
- Something else will happen that the markets don’t like

Any of which would make a prediction of growth about as accurate as the average Australian’s understanding of the non-ANZAC casualty numbers at Gallipoli.

I like their products but I’m a bit sceptical of the company’s worth.

Certainly, this chart reminds me of those heady dot com days when intoxicated colleagues would implore me to purchase zapdog.com or floppymonkey.co.uk as a sure fire route to untold wealth.

But overnight, I think a few other folk turned similarly sceptical. In fact, the market capitalisation of Apple fell back to below that of Spain, Portugal and Greece. Obviously we’re not in bubble territory here and never have been, no sir.

Tonight’s news from the S&P500 will be interesting viewing. Back on track to the moon or is the start of Apple’s “Newton moment”.

Apple represents over 4% of the S&P500, or it did until last night. I’m shorting the whole index currently, put it in during the middle of March. Time will tell if that was a smart move…..

UPDATE:
And this goes to show why I am not a day trader;

Of course, we could have just entered the “bull trap” stage. What do I know?

I’m not without my faults, I’ve got a fair few worth pointing out, vanity being probably higher on the list than I’d care to admit. I like fine suits and shoes and I’m a bit sneery at people who don’t come up to my sartorial standards.

Another vanity I have is to dip into the visitor statistics of this blog and see what you’re reading and how many of you visit. Sometimes it’s ego-boosting (this went a bit viral thanks to an anonymous link from Creepbook), other days I realise I’m just a strange bloke with an unpopular blog and some days are just weird. Recently it has been the latter category.

I couldn’t work out why this post from last year about a stupid colleague was becoming increasingly popular.

A little research at the TAFE of Google revealed the answer; Tony Robbins is back in town. He has a show/lecture/sermon/shouty session (delete where appropriate) in Sydney at the end of next week.

Ticket prices are just a wonder to be witnessed (about halfway down this page). $995 to sit at the back of the hall and watch him on a big TV screen. Alternatively, pay $3995 and get a mini massage (I had one of those in Wan Chai once; very relaxing) and your own barista to take home as a slave. Ok, perhaps it’s a shared barista.

Brilliant.

This guy is a fucking genius; he’s taken the modus operandi of the corrupt televangelists and taken it to a new audience. You don’t have to have a Christian leaning to give money to Tony for salvation; all creeds and backgrounds are welcome, come one come all. It’s a simple twist on the age-old promise of certainty and direction in an uncertain life but with the explicitly religious bit removed.

Why do I think this? Because nearly every search that directs folk to my previous post about the great-haired dentist’s wet-dream has the following words in the Google search field; “Tony Robbins religion”.

They’re going to his circus looking for religious opinion and guidance. And thats probably what they’re getting.

Bless ‘em.

UPDATE: I’ve just been told that the big life change for my ex-colleague prompted by attending a Tony Robbins lecture has resulted in her taking a few months off and then getting a job for a previous employer doing what she did before. “Unleashing the power within” was a bit of a damp squib, it would seem.

I arrived in the office and realised I’d missed the memo informing us that it was “bring your 12 year old son in to work day” today.

Either that or we’d got the external auditors in.

The correct explanation was the latter. There they were sitting in the hot desks each wearing their first ever suit and earnestly scanning the checklist of questions they had downloaded from their corporate intranet on Friday, wondering how in the world they pronounced some of the terms listed and what the bloody heck they actually meant.

As per the manual, they’ve booked their meetings with suitably long gaps in between to pad out the working (billable) day. As each appointment arrives, all three of them leap up and attend the meeting as if they were the modern equivalent of the Graeae Sisters and, instead of passing around the communal eye, they have just the single brain between them with which to interrogate my Perseus-like colleagues.

I think I’ve skipped their attention this visit, which is a pity as I usually quite enjoy my interviews with these barely-pubescent holders of 2:1’s from provincial polytechnics or TAFEs. My modus operandi at these meetings is to always keep at front of mind that my organisation has been sold a fixed-price audit consisting of day rates that are heavily-weighted with Senior Consultants, Managing Partners, Executive Partners, etc. and the auditor makes their biggest margins by wheeling in these virgins instead. Subsequently, my attempt is to run rings around them to such a degree, heading off-piste from their pre-prepared checklist so regularly and confusingly that the ACTUAL Managing Partner has to come in to our office once he’s read the utter rubbish they’ve returned with and re-do the interview himself.

For anyone new to this game of KPMG/ PWC/ E&Y/ Deloitte-baiting and obfuscation, the trick is to take a simple concept of the work you’re doing that they’ve clearly not understood and then describe in exacting detail the related and adjacent work that occurs around it, none of which will be on the downloaded checklist they were given last week. When they try to pull you back on track, ask them to repeat back what you’ve just asked as it’s important that we don’t move on until the concept has been fully-grasped. Next, respond to a question with the answer, “I can give you that answer but you’re really asking the wrong question” and then proceed to explain a much more “interesting” aspect of the subject matter. This should eat up loads of time and then you simply walk out at the end of the booked period as you’re extremely busy. Decline the next two suggested appointment times when they are emailed through (but only twice otherwise you’ll cop it from the internal organisation).

“Oh TNA” I hear you cry, “but why so cynical about the efficacies of the auditors? Surely they are good at what they do otherwise they wouldn’t be in business?”.

Wrong. External auditors are worse than useless. They are paid well to put their letterhead on a report that you might as well had written yourself. YOU pay them, after all, so they’re going to write what you’re going to tell them to. Don’t believe me though, check out this list:

Enron – Given a clean bill of health by Arthur Anderson.
Worldcom – Arthur Anderson again.
Satyam – PWC saw no problems in the books. The monthly interest alone on the missing $1bn should have been $50m; you’d think that would have rang some bells.
Lehmans – Ernst and Young thought everything was fine and dandy and Dick Fuld was running a tight ship.
Olympus – KMPG and E&Y didn’t see the droids they were looking for.
Madoff Investments – PWC and KPMG were two of the several auditors to congratulate Bernie on his miracle of alchemy.

So when the auditors are next sitting opposite you in a shirt that their mum ironed the night before and the sickly smell of Brut Aftershave (oh, the irony of both nouns) is in your eyes and nostrils, get angry, people. Not only do these children represent “The Man”, but they represent all that is worst in the human psyche; the ability to blindly follow orders without stopping to understand why or the desired outcome. Simply cogs in a corporate machine, grinding their way along the years to a well-funded superannuated retirement, adding no value to the sum of humanity in the meantime.

And they justify this complete waste of a life with the simple comforting sentiment;
“at least I’m not an Actuary”.