And the former finance minister, Lindsay Tanner, says trying to raise debt is a growing challenge for Australia's mid-sized companies. Mr. Tanner says the weakness of the corporate bond market is a major constraint for companies with the market capitalization of between one and two billion dollars. He says big companies like BHP Billiton and Telstra can easily go offshore to borrow money. 

 

At the moment, very low interest rates in international markets skew the balance in favor of placing your debt offshore. If you are big enough and serious enough to be able to do that, even though of course there is currency risk involved, but the critical fact underneath all these issues that if there is not much for market domestically, particularly not much of a retail market either, well then you do have a significant worry and you're gonna be up for pretty hefty investment bank fees to underwrite your issue. So there is a quite complicated problem with a number of different factors here. 

 

Lindsay Tanner there. Let's go to the markets. And the Dow Jones has closed 64 points lower overnight. The NASDAQ ended six points down. The S&P 500 fell eight and across in London, the FTSE shed 36 points. Checking commodity prices. West Texas crude is trading at $104 a barrel. Tapis crude is at $132 a barrel. And Gold this morning is at $1644 an ounce. The Australian dollar is buying 103 US cents, 78 euro cents and 64 pence sterling.