Some of the things reported in this post may not be true. But how many Troppodillians can put their hands on their hearts (well that's tricky in itself if taken literally but you know what I mean) and say that if there was as much half way credible dirt flying around on Obama...
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It is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions" Joseph J. Cassano, former AIG executive, who was in charge of the AIG credit default swaps (CDS) operation. Me...
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The way the proposed bailout is being talked up, you get the impression that the whole world depends on the Bush administration and the Fed coming to the party with the best part of a trillion dollars. The US economy depends on it, our economy depends on it, the capacity of th...
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HT Mark Thoma : via Justin Fox (and I note with weeping gratitude the pundit's confession that he doesn't know enough to pass any decent judgement on the arguments). Me too. Australian money manager John Hempton owned Washington Mutual preferred shares and was thus wiped out w...
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A few weeks ago I spent an afternoon in the Victorian Parliament building discussing regulation and, though I think I've looked in it quickly before, I was completely blown away by how magnificent the Legislative Council is. I mean just take a look at those pictures. And it re...
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From Universe Today , here's the Wednesday quiz. It's time for another "Where In The Universe" (WITU) challenge to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. This one might be relatively easy, but I'm feeling generous today. Guess what this image is, and give yourself extra poi...
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Whatever that is. Anyway, John Quiggin is salivating at the implications of the current schemozzle for 'neoliberalism'. It's finished he reckons. So too the 'Washington Consensus'. I have my doubts. I guess some of the worst excesses of this time around will be a cause for les...
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Gary Linnell in today's Daily Telegraph asserts that debate about capital punishment is taboo in Australia, a claim which is rather negated by the fact that his own death penalty advocacy is carried not only in the Tele but on Australia's mostly widely read online news site an...
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This post is an illustration of why I find Krugman just soooo good. He will probably get the Nobel Prize at some stage, but he'll get it for a bunch of silly stuff he did which was called, at the time 'Strategic Trade Theory' and which he has since conceded wasn't worth much m...
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The US election and the biggest financial swindle of all time (OK - I exaggerate, TARP is not a swindle, it's a really really inefficient and unfair way of doing something sensible, but perhaps as we speak the Congress are making it better) have got me in one of those times wh...
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From an interview on CNBC . I've argued this kind of thing myself - here (pdf). BUFFETT: What you have, Joe, you have all the major institutions in the world trying to deleverage. And we want them to deleverage, but they're trying to deleverage at the same time. Well, if huge...
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Courtesy of Dani Rodrik's blog . Our Center for International Development launched its new Empowerment Lab with a conference yesterday, and one of the most interesting new social entrepreneurship initiatives I learned about is something called MyC4.com . This is a web-based pl...
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In view of the current financial crisis it may be interesting to revisit the work of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) . His first major work in 1912 was on money and credit. A sleeping giant of the 20th century, for many decades he was the spine of the Austrian school of economics...
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There is good piece in The Australian today by Christopher Joye Central Banks arent immune to mistakes. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24397965-7583,00.html He makes three points. First, that the Reserve Bank has consistently under-estimated the severity of...
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We've always had a pretty laissez faire attitude towards commenting at Club Troppo. Contrary to the impressions of some, we have only ever banned two or three persistent trolls, and only ever delete comments that are persistently abusive or defamatory. However, there have been...
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An article of mine - for today's Crikey! It was written yesterday morning and so doesn't consider the latest developments. Thanks to Ingolf for some suggestions. (Which reminds me, on a couple of columns recently, I should have mentioned several people who've helped out includ...
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After the Menzies administration was voted out during World War 2 and the Curtin-led ALP took over there was a suggestion to have a Government of National Unity so the best talent on both sides of the house could be applied directly to the desperate issues at hand. Curtin reje...
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Here's a YouTube of a Keith Olbermann show. KO isn't my favourite kind of guy - a kind of leftish of centre Bill O'Reilly from what I've seen - though nowhere near as obnoxious as BO. Anyway, this has an interesting interview with Paul Krugman but what got my interest is a gra...
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The atmosphere in Washington is all too redolent of 2001. Swept up in the turbulent aftermath of 9/11, legislators were easily stampeded into passing the Patriot Act. F ew, as it turned out, had even read it, much less thought carefully about its implications. [caption id="att...
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From the invariably thoughtful Steve Randy Waldman . Rather than a bail-out, Congress should pass an "ARISE act". ARISE would stand for Automatic Reorganization of Insolvent Systemically-important Enterprises. It could be very simple. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consulta...
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The travails of the financial markets have triggered a degree of jubilation among the usual left-leaning suspects, as though this episode reflects badly on "neoliberalism", deregulation and the free market order. This view is not sustainable because the problems can be traced...
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Statement from Frank Raines released an hour after the ad above was released: "I am not an adviser to Barack Obama, nor have I provided his campaign with advice on housing or economic matters." "This is another flat-out lie from a dishonorable campaign that is increasingly inc...
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How to keep your money safe? Not such an easy question these days. I've had some money piling up in a bank account for my company which runs Lateral Economics and Peach Financial and have just popped down to the bank to pay it from an account heavily in credit to a personal ma...
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Lingua Franca is often a fun show and t omorrow they have someone talking about "the new quotatives" The words like and go when classed as 'new quotatives' have linguistic functions way beyond their traditional meanings. And this phenomenon is not confined to English; it can b...
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From the Fin Column of 19th August. There were so many issues in the last election that you might not have noticed Labors promise to introduce a resale royalty scheme - to provide artists with a share of profits when their art is resold. This is a promise that will soon haunt...
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Just when you were wondering whether we'd ever come through at Pontification Central, over the fold we explain how to fix the financial crisis is explained in full. Well not really. I'm buggered if I know. But this post from Thomas Palley seemed as 'on the money' as any I've s...
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This is light years away whats happening in other banking systems around the world. It is night and day. This is the RBA of Australia discussing our current financial plight. Lets accept that the banks are better safeguarded than the USA (although they may be hit very hard if...
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Hugh Stretton has been a persuasive advocate for the competition-enhancing role of government agencies in the private sector. His example was the South Australian Housing Trust which apparently operated on a commercial basis to provide alternative accommodation in the marketpl...
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Tyler Cowen challenges the idea that the finance markets have failed due to lack of regulation. Not a lack of government intervention , too much, done badly. THERE is a misconception that President Bushs years in office have been characterized by a hands-off approach to regula...
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Steven Long It's hard to escape the irony. Two decades ago, the historian Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history with the triumph of American capitalism. But Socialism, for Wall Street, is alive and well. After the bail-outs AIG, and the mortgage companies Freddie Mac...
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This is one for Don Arthur, maybe you can help to work out where John Gray is coming from these days and what happened since the time he was a fan of Thatcherism and the New Right. Somewhere along the road he decided that he could no longer support liberalism because it provid...
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This is the latest feed from Eddie Cross , a white MP in the MDC party that is now sharing power with Mugabe. Eddie explains how the power-sharing arrangement has a strong resemblance to the traditional governance of the Shona tribe.
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Speaking of that fine subject, this proposal is not exactly audacious ( HT Kathy G ), just a illustration of how Obama might go on the front foot on behalf of issues based politics (as opposed to lipstick based politics) - an illustration of how propitous the times could be fo...
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Nicholas disapproved of Charlie Gibson's 'trick question' to Sarah Palin about the Bush Doctrine. He was especially struck that the question 'was asked by an interviewer who then went on to demonstrate that he didnt know what it was'. The question was only a trick insofar as i...
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Today's column from the Fin. The High Court once declared that governments had only limited powers to withhold information from voters. But a recent judgement effectively means that ministers face no constitutional impediment to keeping government documents from the public eye...
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They look like banks (as they borrow short, are highly leveraged and lend and invest long and in illiquid ways) and thus are highly vulnerable to bank like runs. But unlike banks, they are not properly regulated or supervised and dont have access to deposit insurance or the le...
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The whole of Sept 08 Quadrant . And you have to be a subscriber to look at a limited number of back numbers. Not long ago only selected items were on line in the current edition and there was open access to back numbers extended as far as 2002 or further. WTF? Check out John S...
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There's been a lot of excitement about how terrible the Democrats are being to Sarah Palin and how it's hurting them etc etc. It's all a bit strange. What's strange is that the main guy - Obama - reacted to her appointment in a dignified way. So did Hilary Clinton. But Democra...
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I'm gonna have to cut Obama some slack on that one. I do not think he was referring to Sarah Palin, he didn't reference her. Mike Huckabee McCain's ads have gone one step too far in sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100% truth test. Karl Rove I...
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[ republished from today's Northern Territory News ] The political wash-up from the recent coronial inquest into the death of Margaret Winter at Royal Darwin Hospital in December 2006 is proving messy indeed. Claims this week by Health Minister Chris Burns that he was lied to...
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I suppose it isn't surprising that sentiment among media professionals about the future of newspapers is so negative. Fairfax's recent culling of several hundred journos in the face of a collapsing revenue bottom line has brought the whole issue into sharp focus, as have simil...
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Shopping for Christmas? New books from artist and author Kilmeny Niland. Other artworks from the same source - portraits, miniatures, haiga , wildlife, cards. A prolific source of links on every topic under the sun. Australiana , war , the US , queer issues , etc. Peter Klein...
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Congratulations to Andrew Leigh who has scraped onto the list of the top 50 economics blogs. This came as a feed from The Austrian Economists where one of the five bloggers was excited to come in at 38. Marginal Revolution was on the top, followed by Econbrowser and then Paul...
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On reading Margaret Simons classification of blogs I wonder what kind of blog Troppo is. No doubt others have joined in on other blogs. Anyway, she puts Catallaxy, LP and Andrew Norton's blogs in the category of 'pamphleteering' blog. That's interesting because although I woul...
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We already use the opportunities that the web 2.0 world offers a bit, but we could be doing a lot more . For those who haven't seen it yet here is Lindsay Tanner's blog. Worth keeping an eye on I'd say. He's posed a bunch of questions - as follows. Hightail it over there and a...
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The other day I emailed Don Arthur the url to a terrific essay by Martha Nussbaum on Roger Williams . Who is Roger Williams I hear you cry. He was an amazing and wonderful man who founded Rhode Island and who was the first to theorise the merits of radical religious tolerance....
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I find little evidence of any RBA remorse or regret for what it has done to our economy. Although contributing to a very low GDP growth, a shocking malaise in the housing, retail and low-leverage business credit and rises in unemployment, the RBA remains almost complacent. Nor...
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Herewith today's column in the Fin - on a subject as you may gather on reading the column that gets me fired up. Borrowing to invest could be a perfect issue for Labor Governments - suited to their ideology and a battle they could have with their opponents in which they were r...
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Bob Gould on the evolution of revolutionary thought since 1905. Proving that old lefties don't die, they just write a lot. Bob Gould is the sixty-something proprietor of a series of alternative bookshops, starting in Goulburn St (Sydney) and now located in King St, Newtown. He...
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It was just how Don Watson said it should be -- an act of seduction. "A good speech is a lover's embrace," he wrote. "You want to sit on the metaphorical mountain and with an arm sneaking round their shoulder speak of things you have in common -- your love of trees or cows, th...
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Andrew Leigh writes to me and through to me to you gentle Troppodillians: With my ANU colleague Alison Booth, I'm presently doing some research on racial attitudes in Australia. As part of that, Alison and I are hoping to get a sample of Australians to do an Implicit Associati...
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Good news everyone! Refreshed by a spell on the bench I have decided to line up with the Troppo team, or at least alongside the team. The major mission is to keep people up to date with developments in classical liberalism, critical rationalism and Austrian social studies. Jus...
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Blogger Beth Hamburger at the convention reports the comments of the Ambassador to Israel "Do we want to be more like France, Sweden, Denmark and the rest of Europe, with a hands-off policy when it comes to the Middle East, with a neutral love of life ?" Damn those Europeans....
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A column first published in the Fin on the 5th August. In the first days of the new parliament, the Opposition called for three Senate select committees. Its new found passion for accountability was deeply hypocritical: when the Howard government ruled the Senate it made sure...
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Yesterday, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin, or the Palinator as some of her more excitable fans have taken to calling her, took to the stage in Minnesota to make her pitch. There must have been some trepidation in Republican ranks. She is to most af...
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