Club Troppo

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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