Club Troppo

Well, kind of. I'm on his list of people who receive his Christmas e-mail complete with his speech to the Australian Business Economists Annual Forecasting Conference in Sydney on December 9, 2008. It's below the fold. AUSTRALIA S OUTLOOK FOR POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT IN 2009 Ac...

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UPDATE, 24 December: Many thanks for the nominations so far. We have enough to get started on, but would love to double the number. Therefore, we're extending the deadline to 10 January! But please post your nominations sooner rather than later, so we can get on with the judgi...

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One of the recommendations that I think of as most important in the Review of the National Innovation System is one that will cost next to nothing. As a result, it costs next to nothing. We spent a fair bit of our time focusing on the question of how we could accellerate innov...

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Sara Macliver ....the best Pinchgut ever! I didn't really expect it to be. Though I admired their courage in picking such an obscure and, at first blush unsuitable, work, it seemd inconceivable that it would be as rapturously beautiful as, say, L'Orfeo or The Fairy Queen . But...

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I offer no guarantees as to the accuracy of this article by Bill Ayres the 'unrepentant terrorist' whom Obama was supposed to be 'palling around with' , but I thought it was interesting and others might like to check it out.

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Some interesting pieces in The Australian Literary Review , 3 Dec, the insert that comes in the paper on the first Wednesday of the month. Richard Lansdowne wrote on the courage of Alexander Solzhenitsyn which he suggests made him the greatest writer of the 20th century. I am...

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This diagram is a scatter plot of lagging PE ratios against subsequent market performance. Amongst other things it demonstrates the wisdom in hindsight of Alan Greenspan's first warning about 'irrational exhuberance' which his subsequent utterances seemed to repudiate. Real re...

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Ben Bernanke and Paul Kruman have written on the dangers of deflation and the implicit importance of some level of inflation. Generally this has been in the context of dealing with a liquidity trap. Ken Rogoff has a different angle suggesting that "a sudden burst of moderate i...

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Here's an open letter to the Prime Minister proposing further stimulatory measures by the following signatories which is receiving some coverage today. Tony Cole, Saul Eslake, Allan Fels, Rod Glover, Nicholas Gruen, Ian Harper, Tony Harris, Mike Waller Dear Prime Minister, We...

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A good while back I put up a post on all the ways I liked Platinum Capital . I hope some of you were suitably convinced to have invested. Just as Kier Neilson (the firm's founder) made his name in the 1987 crash, this is how Platinum international fund has performed recently....

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I'm not always in favour of the kind of argument defended here - it all depends on context, intent and, as the author says, whether it's offered as the start or the end of a conversation - but the case for this style of argument is well put by Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mum...

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"La Somme le roy", circa 1300, via Wikipedia I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me; your love to me was extraordinary, surpassing the love of women. 2 Samuel 1:26 (English Standard Version) What better definition could you ask for of '...

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In a fit of what some Troppodillians will now know to be rather typical hot headed enthusiasm, I recently pontificated about the best blog post I'd seen in the year . Well it has a sequel , which is also worth reading. And I laughed out loud when I got to this part of the argu...

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Civilization and the evolution of short sighted agents , Date: 2008-11-19 By: Basuchoudhary, Atin Allen, Sam Siemers, Troy We model an assurance game played within a population with two types of individuals -- short-sighted and foresighted. Foresighted people have a lower disc...

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Today's column in the Fin. There are three arms of macroeconomic policy. There are the two in the economics textbooks monetary and fiscal. And theres a third, Australian, arm of macroeconomic policy, or there could be with a bit of lateral thinking of which more in a moment. T...

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Thank you, Rafe, for sending me the October 8 article by Ergas. There is also a new article in todays Australia -- http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,24730487-7583,00.html?from=public_rss I was originally looking for hard evidence - that Kevin Rudd is alleged to hav...

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For decades SNOOTS have been hunting down whiches and replacing them with thats . Whenever a SNOOT discovers the relative pronoun which introducing a restrictive clause, the writer responsible will drop several notches in her esteem. For a SNOOT , knowing which relative pronou...

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I have separate contracts for all of the above. Sounds daft to me. I note that TPG now has an 'all you can eat' mobile for $59.95 and it's an ISP and provides me with VoIP. But I get mobile broadband from Three, mobile phone from Optus and a basic phone connection from Telstra...

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The financial crisis has been the making of Gordon Browne we're told. While Hank Paulson was holding masterclasses in crony capitalism Gordon Browne's rescue package showed how it was done. His recapitalising the banks by buying equity in them was right out of the textbook, ma...

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