Opening up early access to super for housing would have a negative effect on the balances of even those members that don’t dig into their savings, with funds forced to adopt more conservative investment strategies and hold more liquid assets.
The circa $88 billion industry fund for workers in health and community services reckons that alleviating the affordable housing crisis will boost its other investments by easing the cost of living and inflation.
China in transition presents new opportunities for investors: Franklin Templeton
For most of the past 40 years, investors, policymakers and interested observers have become used to the idea of China as a fast-growing, emergent economy, well on its way to achieving middle-income status, with every hope of continuing along a path of resounding economic success. Recently, however, a different story has surfaced. This one portrays China as stumbling badly, weighed down by long-term challenges related to excess debt and investment, an aging population, the end of globalisation, and the adoption of policies inside and outside China that may frighten off investment and consumption.
In a new paper uncovering China, Christy Tan, Investment Strategist at the Franklin Templeton Institute says “In our view, the truth about China is neither as optimistic as some had earlier believed, nor as pessimistic as is currently fashionable. Rather, the central narrative is one of China in transition. China is shifting from an economy underpinned by extraordinarily high and probably unsustainable rates of savings, investment and debt accumulation to something else.”
