Mythbusting: Government Debt Edition Part II

Well, I’m back from my break and had a lovely time with family and friends – back to regularly blogging again.

Nevertheless, this wouldn’t have been my chosen topic, but with the budget little more than a month away, I suppose its understandable.

In a column yesterday at the Malaysian Insider, Azrul Mohd Khalib repeats all the same old myths about Malaysia’s government debt (excerpt; emphasis added):

Maxing out the national credit card

…Every national Budget over the past few years has had a deficit. When total national expenditure exceeds the revenue collected, a budget deficit then exists. The only way for the government to pay for this deficit is to borrow.

July 2012 CPI: Still Retreating

Tucked between the news on GDP, the latest consumer price index numbers show inflation continuing to decelerate (log annual and monthly changes):

The overall index is down, core inflation increased slightly on the month, but was offset by a decrease in the pain index. In fact the annual rate of increase in food and transport prices is now at its slowest pace in more than two years (since March 2010).

2Q 2012 National Accounts: Surprise, Surprise

What a nice lead up to the holidays. While I thought 2Q GDP might turn out to be pretty good, 5.4% annual growth is outside all my expectations (log annual and seasonally adjusted annualised quarterly changes; 2005=100)

Seasonally adjusted quarterly growth has been pretty solid too at 5.9%, holding up above 5.7% for three straight quarters.

June 2012 Industrial Production

Yesterday’s report on June’s industrial production numbers were mildly disappointing (log annual and monthly changes; seasonally adjusted)

June 2012 External Trade

There’s quite frankly not going to be a whole lot of posts until the week after Hari Raya, just a few quick ones on data releases as they come. With luck something like normal posting volume should resume after the Raya break.

Today’s releases of last month’s trade numbers weren’t terribly inspiring (log annual and monthly changes; seasonally adjusted):

Although exports registered an increase of 5.3% y-o-y in log terms, that’s well below the double-digit growth projections from both my models.