Club Troppo

According to Ross Gittins in the weekend Herald , There's been a lot of debate - and confusion - over the right way to assess the degree of stimulus the budget will impart to the economy and how this may affect interest rates. Well, he's dead right about the confusion. But unf...

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Margaret Simmons had a lead article in Crikey recently in which she quoted Mark Day bemoaning the way in which, in his view Packers gaming interests were tearing apart the corporate culture of Channel Nine. As Day put it I believe media is a positive force in society while gam...

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I began this series of posts a while ago, but its theme is that two identifiable schools of economics focus on two economic phenomena as central and tend to underplay something else. The two phenomena and their traditions are as follows: 1. the pursuit of self interest (econom...

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I'm a huge fan of Warren Buffett - the billionaire from a Norman Rockwell painting.He understands the central problem of finance reduced in economists jargon to the principal-agent problem in the context of asymmetric information.Investors need to be able to trust managers, so...

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Thx to to Ric Simes for sendinng me the link to this piece in the New Yorker bemoaning the Bush Govt's lack of accountability. As Ric said it is all of a piece with my bemoaning 'he said - she said' journalism . Attorney General Alberto Gonzaless admission that mistakes were m...

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In the newly dumbed down and still decending A2 Supplement in The Age comes a nicely written review of a bad book about a great actress. My all time fave I think. From the review: " How, one wonders, could she not have wanted to give more sense of Bergman's career highlights?...

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When I first saw that there was a musical called "Keating!" I avoided it like the plague. Keating had his strong points - namely his mastery of the language. But I feared lame nostagia for this Great Land that Keating was going to build. The same Great Land that we heard almos...

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A few quick comments on Kevin Rudd's Budget Reply speech. 1. The text was very well crafted, full of clear undertakings and strong metaphors, and Rudd delivered it with a nice balance between enthusiasm and calm authority. There was none of Beazley's verbosity or Latham's tran...

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Is there such a thing as 'Budget Bounce'? Will Cossie's spend-up save the Coalition come polling day? Or is the budget something of a Curate's Egg - only good in parts? Welcome to Club Troppo's Budget Special Edition, where we round up the best blogospheric commentary so you d...

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Crikey ran a piece of mine today heavily reworked from my earlier Troppo post on 'he said - she said' journalism. In it I tried to further articulate - with the help of my friend George Orwell - how serious this issue is. For me it's the difference between reason and unreason,...

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Crikey has taken it upon itself to run a competition in which people get the same number of words Lincoln used in the Gettysburg address to get their rocks off about this great nation. The entries have been uniformly execrable - well execrable, but perhaps not uniformly. Even...

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Here's my column for the ABC website on the budget which focuses on what's good about the tax cuts - already foreshadowed in my previous post . Tax cuts meld good economics with good politics The test of a good politician is whether they can craft out of their own political se...

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Tomorrow, as the 2007 Extravaganza Budget is knocked off the front pages by the developing drama of Paris Hiltons bid for freedom, the Australian punters, flush with already factored-in cash from yesterdays tax cut announcement, will no doubt cast a critical eye over Treasurer...

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If someone told me they were going to forego some money cutting tax and asked me for some tips these are some tips I would have given them. Cut the bottom marginal rate or lift the threshold at which the second marginal rate cuts in. If you're cutting tax to the battlers consi...

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Paul Kelly is on the button, he tells us : The policy and strategic flaws of the Howard Government have been exposed this week with the appointment by ALP leader Kevin Rudd of Australian National University economics professor Ross Garnaut to produce Australias version of the...

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Former Skyhooks guitarist and media 'personality' - he's a funny man if you're up early in Melbourne on Radio 774 - Red Symonds has taken to video mophing to amuse himself. Crikey often picks up his efforts. Having looked at a few this one particularly took my fancy. If as I p...

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1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad Industrial relations got Ozblogistan going this week, with some great stuff from across the political spectrum. That apart, there was some interest in the French election...

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From last week's Fin Review. The Australian Bureau of Statistics publications on government finance measure the financial activities of governments and reflect the impact of those activities on other sectors of the economy. But statistics sometimes fail, mostly because politic...

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Does relative poverty matter? If differences in income just mean that some people have bigger, shinier barbeques then probably not. Big shiny propane guzzling barbeques are nice but, as Clive Hamilton says , living without one doesn't amount to hardship. To many people it seem...

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The teachers were becoming concerned. Week by week, the kids at the Hilltop Children's Center were building a city out of LEGO . And as the city emerged, so too did the children's assumptions about private property and power -- assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based...

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