Did you know that more than half a million Australians are victims of identity theft every year. It’s now the world’s fastest growing crime. Identity theft may be as simple as someone using your credit card details to buy things online, to opening bank accounts or taking out loans in your name. This is serious stuff. It could have a long lasting impact on your bank balance and your credit record.

New research from Veda Advantage shows most Australians are worried about identity theft but only 1 in 3 of us are taking necessary precautions to prevent it from happening.

When most people think about identity theft the first thing that comes to mind is loosing money through online banking or phishing scams. Would you believe you are ten times more likely to have your identity stolen by thieves going through your mailbox or garbage than through online scams.

There are some really simple things you can do to protect yourself and your family from identity theft. Start with these six steps.

For generations economists, governments, central banks and investors have worried about inflation. We’ve been besotted by CPI figures, we’ve been lectured about keeping inflation within target bands or suffer the consequences (higher interest rates) and we’ve been convinced about the inflation benefits of pushing up investment values.

But now the world is talking about Deflation.

“What the?”

Basically the world is being faced with the very real possibility of prices falling. Not a slowdown in the rise of prices, actual falls.

We’ve written a lot about how sick the US economy is and the legitimate fear of it falling in to a double dip recession. Housing prices have crashed, unemployment is showing no signs of improving (it’s 9.8 per cent) and consumers aren’t spending.

Official interest rates in the US are 0 per cent and the economy is still sick. So there’s not much left for the Federal Reserve to do to kick things along except print money.

That’s exactly what they did last week. The Federal Reserve kept rates at zero and said they’d stay that way for an “extended period. Plus they committed to pumping more money in to the economy.

An immediate reaction to these measures would be a fear that it would fuel inflation. But that’s the least of their problems. In, fact it’s the opposite.

...from this week's News Ltd column...

MINING SHARES

The Australian sharemarket suffered its worst May result since 1984 with a decline of 7.8 per cent on the ASX-200 index.

Interestingly the mining index fell JUST 6 per cent during the month so performed better than the average market.

Remember May was the first month of reaction to the Federal Government’s proposed super profits tax on our major resource companies. The tax was proposed on May 2 and, as part of the mining industry’s campaign, its been claimed the tax was the reason for the slump in resource company share prices.

The actual figures show those claims are simply wrong.

BHP’s share price fell 6 per cent over the month and RIO’s by 7 per cent. Both these stocks, and the rest of the industry, performed better than the overall market.

There’s the old saying that when America sneezes, the world catches a cold.

Our dependence on the health of the US economy has diminished a little over recent years as China’s importance has grown, but the home of capitalism still sets the trend for global economic and financial cycles.

Over the last few days there have been a couple of important developments in the US.

Image: AP

History tells us banks are instrumental in the health of a country’s economy. While Governments manipulate the levers of and economy, banks grease the wheels.

But, as we saw in the Global Financial Crisis, greedy, incompetent banks (and banking systems) can bring an economy down.

That’s exactly what happened in the US, Europe and a string of other developed countries. A decade of easy credit and slack banking regulation meant that when the economic cycle turned down banks teetered on the brink and had to be saved by the American taxpayer.

The taxpayer had to come to the rescue because many of the banks were regarded as being too big to fail… even though bank executives were still paying themselves extortionately high bonuses.

In other words the banks fuelled the American boom and then caused the US bust.

But President Obama has now launched a series of banking reforms to ensure US banks are never allowed to get in to that position again.