Club Troppo

When I was a boy growing up in Sydney - and this is the 60s we're talking about here - I often spent school holidays at my grandmother's house in the western suburbs. Generally speaking, it wasn't much fun. My grandmother never had any money. There was a box on the wall out th...

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In the USA, Lawrence Summers tells us that the case for a fiscal stimulus is stronger than at any time in my professional lifetime. And most people other than a few crazy republicans agree with him. Paul Krugman and Greg Mankiw both add their voice: counter-cyclical measures a...

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In a recent post , Rafe quoted Frank Shostak as one of the dissenters who are critical of the bailout proposal, not only in its particulars, but in principle. Shostak sees all interventions of this kind as economically damaging as well as adding to the already existing mountai...

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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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