Heard about the resources boom coming back from the dead?
Australia recently posted its biggest ever monthly trade surplus of $3.5 billion, helped by a surge in commodity exports to China.
The price of coal used to make steel more than doubled last year, as iron ore also surged, and mining shares have been taking off once again.
You could be forgiven for assuming the resources bonanza is back, and with it the windfall gains that were delivered to government coffers, and many households.
But alas, it is a different story this time around. The economy should still benefit from this part of the boom, but the gains for households from this mining boom will probably be less visible than in the past.
The reality is there have been several phases to what we call the "resources boom" over the last decade or so, and we are now in the final one.
The first part was the surge in prices in the early noughties, and the second was a wave of construction activity as miners scrambled to cash in by building more mines. Commodity prices peaked in 2011 and fell for the next five years, while mining investment has also been falling since 2012.
In the third and current phase, more and more of the mines are being completed, and it's boosting the quantity of mining exports that leave Australia every month. The recent price rises are icing on the cake, though the prices are still well below the peaks of 2012.
In short, it is a very different story to when the world was prepared to pay much higher prices for our exports, or when miners were falling over themselves to spend money here.
And unfortunately, this phase probably won't result in such obvious benefits for households as in the past, for a few reasons.
For one, the budget can't afford it. When our export prices went through the roof in the early 2000s, it was a gift to the budget.
It's been estimated by the Australia Institute that Coalition and then Labor governments handed out $169 billion in income tax cuts between 2005 and 2012. The main reason they could afford to do this was the China boom. But with the budget facing a $37.1 billion deficit, don't count on tax cuts any time soon.
A second benefit to households from past booms has been to inflate wages, as mining companies paid up to hire staff, and this spilled over into other industries. But that's not happening now either.
Indeed, as more of the mining and energy projects are finished, they are shedding workers. Commonwealth Bank economists estimate that from peak to trough, this will mean 90,000 job losses in mining construction, and we're only about 42 per cent of the way through this trend.
Finally, the Aussie dollar isn't giving households much love either. When the dollar went through "parity" with the US dollar in 2010, this was one way in which many of us benefited, whether it was by getting cheaper imports, online shopping, or overseas trips.
The dollar hasn't surged with commodity prices this time. If anything, many think the currency may weaken this year because the United States is finally raising its interest rates, which attracts capital to the US.
So the latest boom probably won't pave the way for tax cuts, or trigger a wages spike, or a surge in the dollar.
Mining will play a bigger part in our economy, and help fund imports, but don't expect the windfall gains of the past to be repeated.
