Monthly Archives: May 2009

For the love of Big Things

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http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/10/06/article-1069030-00C3A1C600000578-594_468x300.jpghttp://farm1.static.flickr.com/204/516593787_2e780031dc.jpgGrollo’s Amazing Melbourne Tower was lambasted by the soft left as phallic. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it’s because I’m a boy, but I just lerve things that are so big it makes me go ‘Wow!’. (Unless they’re unusually ugly, which they usually aren’t). 

And we seem to get towards finishing the greatest monuments – they capture that strange complacent but frenzied world of the financial bubble – just as the next cataclysm hits.

So it is with the extraordinary tower that is nearing completion in Dubai. And now check out this floating successor to the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth in the 1930s.  Click on the picture for a better look. 

Click the image to enlarge the illustration

 

John Pitchford on debt

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Today’s Canberra Times has a very pertinent article by John Pitchford on the benefits of the fiscal stimulus (no links).

He makes three points:

(1) Rudd’s anti-recession economic stimulus package has effectively prevented much lower output, profits and employment (200,000 Australians off the dole, according to Treasury’s most recent estimate in the Australian);

(2) Rudd’s attempt to boost activity may even have avoided an even larger debt level than otherwise, as the multiplier effects of lower activity spreads through the system; and

(3) it reduced the potential level of “hard core” unemployment (the unemployed who lose credibility and skills in the workforce)

This is what he calls “balancing the budget over the cycle” – the very thing Howard was sworn to.

Read it. It is standard economic theory but it’s good when it comes from the master himself.