Club Troppo

Car theives steal cars but they steer away from cars that are worth nothing and they steer away from more recently made and more expensive cars that are fitted with anti-theft technology like engine immobilisation. The CIS prefaces its reporting of this pedestrian fact as foll...

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From finance industry newsletter The Sheet . It's nice to know that after swallowing all those bank guarantees Wespac are keeping on keeping on. If only the entire economy was a bank, we could just sail through the crisis. T he most profitable bank in the world may be Westpac....

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Richard Parker writes HT Mark Thoma . It's easier to unwind. Dear Mr. President, In a future two-volume work, I intend to deal with the relation of a President to economists. I will naturally urge that he listen to them attentively, and indeed with a certain respect and awe. B...

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Crikey! rang today wanting to publish something developed from yesterday's post Costello 1, Keating 0 . I obliged. Readers of the first may find it a bit repetitive, but I reproduce it below as a matter of record and also because it has a few additional thoughts on foreign inv...

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From Tuesday's Financial Review: The Australian Institute of Company Directors acknowledged last week that there have been mistakes made by company boards in setting executive remuneration. As feeble as this admission is, it is the only one shareholders are likely to see from...

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HT: 3Quarks . FORMER GITMO GUARD TELLS ALL Scott Horton in Harper's : Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Nee...

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I think Peter Costello gives a good account of himself here (reproduced below the fold). This will fill some with horror of course. It's difficult to understand what one is doing when one is deciding whether or not to allow a foreign takeover and if so on what terms. Costello...

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If at least one agency in the Victorian Government wasn't too flash at helping Victorians when the fire was raging , some true believers in there are making amends, using an embeddable panel, complete with a Google Map to notify the public of Bushfire Events as per below. The...

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So the economy has problems. Spare a thought for the citizens of New York where the bedbug plague is reaching crisis proportions with a 34% increase in official complaints last year. There are lots and lots of people who are having a devastating experience with bedbugs," said...

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The "Austrian" is Gerard Jackson who puts out weekly bulletins of opinion and commentary. This is his rejoinder to The Weekly article by the PM. He accuses Hayek of treating the market as a "game" "specifically a game of 'catallaxy'". Thereby dishonestly giving the impression...

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Like Australians generally, bloggers are donating generously to the Victorian bushfires relief appeal, over at John Quiggin's place and LP . And this morning news here in Darwin praised the old diggers at Darwin RSL for raising $20,000 over the weekend, while earlier news reve...

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Economic conservatives never really trusted Richard Nixon. Faced with rising inflation the president resorted to price and income controls declaring: " I am now a Keynesian in economics ". Almost everyone agrees that his timing was terrible. As Keynesians struggled to make sen...

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It's pretty easy to touch a nerve with bloggers, says cartoonist Gary Trudeau . Since most of them are not getting paid, he says that narcissism is the only explanation for what they do. Trudeau is the creator of Doonesbury , a popular syndicated comic strip. And last year his...

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I've just been to see the film, and I'm afraid I wasn't impressed. It is of a piece with 'Doubt' which is very well acted but has a slick and ultimately superficial script. I had no idea what the film was about but somehow by osmosis I took in that it was a Good Film and I wan...

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A column published today in the Age. Its all shoulders to the wheel on the fires. Or is it? On the weekend, Google, the largest internet company in the world and (how can it be?) one of the most agile offered Victoria a helping hand. It was turned away. The Country Fire Author...

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