So it seems that taxing oil and gas is the only significant result that’s going to come out of the Henry Review, and that probably means I should work out an actual opinion on it. As I understand it, the Resource Rent Tax as proposed by the review is meant to be a different way [...]
I’ve been trying for a while now to figure out why I dislike the gold standard — that is, pegging currency against the price of gold. I think currencies are fundamentally arbitrary — they’re a convention that needs to be (roughly) agreed on, but whether that’s $1 for a ham sandwich or $1000 for a [...]
And here was me thinking forming an opinion on yesterday’s tax review would be hard. Turns out, not so much: the review itself was really well done, pretty much what you’d hope for from a professional public service; the government’s response, on the other hand, was impressively gutless. The most interesting recommendation (to me) in [...]
The Henry Tax Review is supposed to be released tomorrow. Since that might warrant a blog post, and possibly even some criticism, I thought it might be interesting to note down some criteria beforehand to remove one avenue for bias. One issue for regulatory reform is whether changes make the entire system simpler or more [...]
Subtitled: David Pennock’s Wall-Street pick up lines Dr Pennock’s latest post is about fitting stockmarket data — he comes up with a nicely matching randomly generated histogram based on a Laplace distribution over the daily log differences (that is, take the log of the ratio between daily close prices — so if you gained 20% [...]
From the ABC today: Opposition finance spokesman Barnaby Joyce is courting controversy again, warning that Australia is getting to the point where it will not be able to repay its overseas debt. That’s a big call, which I don’t think is actually true. But how close are we? In the news at the moment is [...]
So the government’s decided to go ahead with the “clean feed” filtering scheme. This doesn’t seem remotely surprising to me, they’d already committed to it in their election policies: That is why Labor will: Provide a mandatory ‘clean feed’ internet service for all homes, schools and public computers that are used by Australian children. Internet [...]
(Continued from yesterday, and referring to the MV=PQ equation) Presumably most people care most about increasing Q (how much useful stuff people end up producing — the more the better) and keeping P roughly constant (if prices increase a lot, you can’t buy anything unless you’ve got lots of savings; if prices decrease a lot, [...]
The financial crisis seems to have devolved into a debate about whether stimulus packages are a good idea or not, or possibly whether debt-financed ones are. Really, the stimulus debate seems pretty irrelevant to me — the treasury estimates put Australia’s economic growth as declining by 1.3% without the stimulus package, which barely makes a [...]
Simon Rumble posts some thoughts on the costings for the national broadband network. He offers some working, and requests corrections, so I thought I might redo the calculations. First, at its most basic $42B divided by 7.4M households means infrastructure costs of about $5,700 per household. That seems like a lot of cash, when (non-Telstra) [...]
So I’ve pre-poll voted in preparation for my trip to Melbourne for the LA face-to-face. Not a very exciting range of candidates: Anna Bligh for Labor who’s premier; Mary Carroll for LNP who’s apparently the state secretary of the party; Gary Kane for the Greens who’s running on an anti-developers platform, with light rail to [...]
(Random topic courtesy of Dressy Bessy) A couple more thoughts on Sunday’s post. In comments, Brendan Scott asks “Why would a trader extrapolate against their estimate v valuation?” But there’s actually a broader question — why would anyone trade at all? The initial scenario provided infinite supply at $500 per item, and gave a randomly [...]
The efficient market hypothesis — that prices in a market immediately adjust to fully reflect new information as soon as it becomes available — is probably the primary foundation of the success of markets at allocating resources: eg, making the prices people are willing to pay at supermarkets influence what farmers produce and how much [...]
Disclaimer: I’m not Catholic, so this is even more speculative than usual. It’s also probably taking “devil’s advocacy” a little too literally, but hey, faith is there to be tested, right? So I wonder how much Catholic Guilt is an economic phenomenon, as opposed to a purely religious or moral one. Here’s the theory. The [...]
A recent ABC story quotes the Brotherhood of St Laurence’s recommendations for counting the family home amongst net assets while calculating pension entitlements, with the recommendation that retirees who have valuable homes take out a reverse mortgage, eg, rather than getting a pension. I somehow suspect we’re going to see a lot of ideas along [...]