Having said all that, it is important to keep some perspective about the situation in which we find ourselves. We have been living through one of the largest transformations in the structure of the global economy, as far as Australia is concerned, for a century.
The rise in the terms of trade over the past five years is the biggest such event since the Korean War boom in the early 1950s. But while the Korean War event was a temporary one, all the indications are that the rise of China is not just a cyclical event, but a structural change of the first order.