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 Greece, which [...]
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 Service Providers (ISPs) [...]
(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, you [...]
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 change [...]
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) ADSL2+ [...]
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 chosen [...]
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 core [...]
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 [...]
I’m still not convinced I’ve got much of an idea what’s going on with the economy and global finance and all that, but one thing that seems apparent is that to at least some extent we should be expecting a widespread extended recession.
Naturally, that’s inspired various folks to explain how that’s a good thing for [...]
It’s interesting how much high-falutin economics seems to come down to analogies to baby-sitting. The most recent example (via Russ Nelson a few days ago), is an article by Paul Krugman (actually from 1998) extrapolating from a baby sitter’s co-op to the Asian monetary crisis. Basically, the idea is that a bunch of parents get [...]
It’s a bit funny, but I kind-of think banks are a huge impediment to financial literacy. There are two key insights that could be really useful to Joe Public (or, for that matter, me, say ten years ago…) that banks absolutely mess up.
Credits and debits
One is basic double-entry accounting. In double-entry accounting, you enter every [...]
I was looking at bank accounts and interest rates the other day — such as the Virgin Super page that lists every single fund returning a negative percentage, except for cash and one of the funds available to over-60s. It seems really hard to compare percentage rates, for example if you gain 10% on year, [...]
Economics has lots of odd results. Many of them are deeply insightful, like the principle of comparative advantage, with the potential to improve lots of people’s lives when understood and acted upon. On the other hand, some of them are just bizarre, which for my money includes the claim that voting is irrational. Basically, the [...]