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Showing posts from December, 2008

Blagojevich to pay the Christmas credit card bill

I am counting down the minutes of this old year with greater enthusiasm than normal having backed Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to still be in office as 2009 rolls in. When the market back in early December had him only a 20% chance to keep his job by year's end I could not resist a wager and I hope some of my readers copped the tip. As I wrote at the time , I doubted whether the Governor's Illinois colleagues would really have the enthusiasm to move quickly agaisnt him. My current interest in the current affairs betting markets is of a non-political kind. In the spirit of the silly summer season I am researching that major cultural event the Oscars and will attempt to repeat my Blagojevich good fortune with a dollar or two on the best film and best director. Keep watching this space.

What makes news?

Goodness knows how many people died in the conflict in and around Darfur today. There are very few journalists around to count the bodies but it's a fair bet that it leaves the 300 or so casualties in Gaza well behind in the body count. Yet throughout the world the military action by Israel in Palestine is headlines in the papers and dominating the television and radio news bulletins while Darfur gets nary a mention. I really don't understand why it is so. In the Darfur conflict this century alone the estimate is of 400,000 deaths. And that pales in to insignificance compared with perhaps 1.8 million killed in the Congo. Yet there is no sense of outrage at these slaughters while Israel gets condemned as if it is some kind of mass murdering regime. Why, too, is there no general outrage at the barbaric deliberate slaughter of innocent civilians by Muslim suicide bombers comparable to that which is accompanying the peripheral killing of innocent civilians as the Israelis attempt t

Hotelling's law and the tragedy of Afghanistan

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Keeping yourself closer to the consensus view of the voters than your opponent is a good starting point for someone wanting to win an election. During the Australian election campaign last year, when it came to matters of foreign policy and defence, Labor did it with great skill.  On the question of committing troops to the war in Iraq, Labor's Kevin Rudd put himself closer to public opinion, which had grown against the invasion, than the Liberal-National Coalition. His was a "we will withdraw as soon as it can decently be done without upsetting the Americans too much" kind of policy. John Howard remained dedicated to the interventionist cause. On a scale of 0 (get out immediately) to 100 (stay as long as it takes to win) the public view was, say, at 35, Labor around 50 and the Coalition 70. On Afghanistan, where public opinion broadly favoured letting Australia's involvement stay as it was, both Labor and the Coalition were slightly more gung -ho with both sides favo

The madness of markets

As I reflect on the year nearly passed and ponder the one about to begin I am left with the frightful thought that we are about to recreate in trying to deal with climate change all the artificial absurdities that led to the international financial crisis. In the financial system people have lost faith in the ability of markets to deliver the best of all possible solutions. Greed combined with clever minds adept at devising wonderful ways of clipping the tickets to earn a dollar have brought the world to its most parlous state in generations. Yet the very same smart minds have been given the go ahead to devise so-called market solutions to the creation of the gases which the scientists tell us are the cause of global warming. With the game of financial derivatives now at an end, get ready to play the new one with carbon and a host of intricate schemes to create tickets to be clipped by merchant bankers and other traders.

Rio Tinto - Australia's disaster?

Australians might joke about Americans saying that what is good for General Motors is good for the United States but we do have our own example. BHP, which now has that funny word Billiton tacked on, is the symbol for Australians of the good and safe company that helped build a nation. If that mining giant was ever to be under threat of collapse there really would be a crisis of confidence for ordinary Australians. Thus we should all be grateful that finally the big Australian abandoned its quest to become the giant international  by taking over fellow mining company Rio Tinto.  The sad truth is that Rio Tinto,  the second biggest company in the Australian mining industry, is crippled and if BHP Billiton had taken it over if too would be a threatened species. There was a rather harsh assessment of the troubles confronting Rio in the London Daily Telegraph just before Christmas with the comapny described as sinking under a huge $39bn debt pile. The debt was created, said the paper, to f

Just worry about Japan

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It has become very fashionable for Australians to look to China as the great salvation for our economic prosperity but it really is Japan that we should be worrying about. The growth in Australian exports to China might have been dramatic from a low base but it is still Japan that contributes the greatest number of dollars. And, unfortunately, it is Japan which is suffering the greater economic hardship as a result of the international financial crisis. The news out of Japan today was grim indeed. Bloomberg reports   Japan’s recession deepened in November as companies cut production at the fastest pace in 55 years and rising unemployment prompted households to pare spending.   Factory output plunged 8.1 percent from October, the Trade Ministry said today in Tokyo , more than the 6.8 percent estimated by economists. The jobless rate climbed to 3.9 percent from 3.7 percent. Household spending slid 0.5 percent, a ninth drop.

Bring back a little class war fare

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There's nothing like a little bit of class war fare to enliven a British election and that voice of the middle class Conservatives, The London Daily Telegraph, is doing the right thing

A typically incompetent farewell by the Sydney Morning Herald

For 21 years Alan Ramsey wrote a Saturday column for the Sydney Morning Herald. The last of them before his retirement appeared the Saturday just past.  I would like to be able to refer you to it but alas I can't. For some strange reason the Herald has chosen not to post it on its website. What you can read is a thoughtful and considerate piece by David Marr describing a political journalist who was " right passionately, wrong passionately and patronised at times by his hardboiled colleagues for taking a stand in their shifting world."

Be skeptical of miracles

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It's probably unfair of me to pick on Thomas L. Friedman because there are literally thousands of articles that described Ireland in the early part of this century as being the home of an economic miracle. But his article in The New York Times extolling the virtues of economic management in the Irish Republic comes near the top of the list in a Google search and is so well written that reading it with hindsight is more amusing than most of the others. This is what Friedman wrote in May 2005 Here's something you probably didn't know: Ireland today is the richest country in the European Union after Luxembourg . Yes, the country that for hundreds of years was best known for emigration, tragic poets, famines, civil wars and leprechauns today has a per capita G.D.P. higher than that of Germany , France and Britain . How Ireland went from the sick man of Europe to the rich man in less than a generation is an amazing story. It tells you a lot about Europe today: all

The Owl/Crikey election indicators

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Getting under the statistician's skin

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.” Lies, Damn Lies and AFR Editorials on statistics” is what Brian Pink has called the statement on the ABS website this morning responding to an editorial in yesterday’s Financial Review. The Australian Statistician is clearly peeved the Fin has resorted “to a conspiracy theory to seek to explain my decisions over the past 12 months on changes to the statistical program of the ABS.” Mr Pink also expresses his disappointment that “the AFR published this opinion without paying me the courtesy of contacting me to get my views on the situation.” Clearly Mr Pink is a sensitive fellow who does not fancy with being portrayed as the villain whose changes to data collection made retail sales statistics unreliable and that is understandable enough. If there is a villain in this story of budget cutbacks it is those dreadful fellows in the Department of Finance with their love of across the board efficiency dividends. At least the Statistician can console himself with the knowledge that this

When something doesn't work use more of the same

It's almost a law of governments - if something you are doing doesn't work don't change it just do more of it. We see this principle regularly applied in various attempts at social engineering and now I   notice it has spread to economics. One of the necessary first steps in the global financial crisis was a slavish belief in those strange institutions called ratings agencies who charge those wanting to borrow money to obtain a credit rating. To get the fee for doing the work the ratings agency first has to be chosen by the borrower. Human nature being what it is, borrowers look for an agency that will give them the highest possible rating so the interest they have to pay is as little as possible. The temptation for the ratings agency to be generous in its assessment is considerable for if they don't get the job they don't get the fee. So it came to pass that all those collateralised debt obligations or whatever they are called, ended up changing from sub-prime

What sagging national trend?

Preaching to the converted is a hard habit for The Australian  to break. From the moment Labor nearly lost the Northern Territory election, the paper's political writers -- federal and state -- have all been going on about some sagging national trend for Labor. The actual West Australian defeat was confirmation that the resurrection was underway and Labor's slide in the polls in New South Wales was portrayed as inevitable. Then along comes the opinions of those pesky Queenslanders and Victorians. In both states, Newspoll has measured Labor on the improve. How can we fit that into our sagging national trend? Yesterday, bringing the Newspoll news about Queensland, where the two party vote is now 57% to 43% on a two-party basis, Sean Parnell made the grudging concession that "Labor has slowed the momentum of the Liberal National Party's run to the next election" but Premier Anna Bligh is struggling to keep pace with her Opposition and satisfy community expectations.

The perpetual motion machine

Surely the battery must run out eventually. Our Prime Minister is just like a perpetual motion machine that cannot stay in one place for a moment. The way Kevin Rudd treats every day as if there is an election in a week's time would fill me with fear if I was Malcolm Turnbull. This Prime Minister just keeps ticking all the boxes you need to if you are preparing for a double dissolution next year.  Start the week doing something about global warming. End it visiting the troops in Afghanistan. The man just cannot stop spinning.

Starting at the top

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No doubt the world wide recession will get us all in the end but at least this one seems to be starting in a different way. As the London Evening Standard pointed out over nuight, it is the middle class professions such as finance, advertising and consultancy that are being hit first.  London now has an unemployment rate of 7.6 per cent with new rounds of retrenchments being announced almost daily.

Checking the power of Crikey

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My colleague Ruth Brown had an entertainingly witty piece in Crikey last Friday P*nis in a park bench  looking at the 100 most read stories for the year on the news.com.au website. Now I notice that the most read story overnight at theage.com.au was a similar list of the 50 biggest online stories of 2008 .  Quite an achievement for a once great paper when the most interesting thing to read on its website is a story about what things have been most read over the previous 12 months. Maybe it is not so surprising when you study what made the list and discover what Age readers really like. Not wishing to be a spoil sport I have left off the year's most popular story. To find the winning entry, click here . 2.  Outrage as ex-Clinton staffer runs debate 3.  Oral sex blamed for throat cancer rise 4.  Ponting 'must be sacked'   5.  Victoria's killer weather causes chaos 6.  Stolen photos from laptop tell a tawdry tale 7.  'Terrorist' gunmen massacre scores across Mumbai

An anomaly of hard times

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Australian elections in the second half of the 1980s and the early 1990s produced the seemingly anomalous situation where a Government presiding over difficult economic times kept winning elections. Now there are signs that the British Labour Government is benefiting from a similar phenomenon. In the midst of this giant economic crisis where banks are being bailed out and recession has struck, Labour is narrowing the gap in the opinion polls between itself and the Conservatives. The Guardian/ICM poll out this morning shows the gap between the two main parties has dropped from 15 points to just five. The Guardian says that voters are sceptical of the opposition's ability to handle the economy. Asked to compare Conservative Leader David Cameron and Prime Minister Gordon Brown on a series of characteristics, Brown pulls ahead by 11 points as the person most likely to get the economy back on track. He scores 35% against 24% for Cameron.

A clever Christmas e card from Malcolm

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Australian politicians are beginning to get into this internet business. I received my first Christmas e-card last night and a charming effort it was too. Malcolm Turnbull has gathered together literally hundreds of illustrations from children around the country and I predict there will be lots of proud Mums and Dads forwarding the Opposition Leader's words to friends and relatives in the next few days. Clever viral marketing is what I think the experts call it. Nothing yet from the Prime Minister but I live in hope. The Labor Party even seems a bit slack in updating his new Kevin PM site. The last video added was on 20 November and out-of-date sites are probably worse than not having a site at all. 

When competition for news gets close to blackmail

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Giving in to blackmailers is rarely a sensible thing to do. Even if the one you pay sticks to the bargain and goes away after taking the money, the payment encourages someone else to do the same. Being a willing party to publishing the embarrassing material in the event that the blackmailer's bluff is called is not only a pretty grubby act but serves as a warning to future victims of extortion attempts that payment is preferable to publication. Which makes this morning's case involving the Channel Seven presenter Andrew O'Keefe a particularly sordid affair that exposes yet again the appalling morality of commercial television networks. As told in the Confidential pages of the Melbourne Herald Sun Nine spokesman David Hurley claimed Seven allegedly paid $25,000 to a bouncer hawking mobile phone footage of its star Andrew O'Keefe on a wild night out in South Yarra last month. The footage, which has been seen by Nine sources, is claimed to have been taken of O'K

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse!

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As if the story of the $50 billion fraudster who has given us the latest world financial shockl was not bad news enough, this morning's The Independent has a really frightening story. Arctic at tipping point  brings the glad tidings that scientists have found  the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen. Evidence that air temperatures in the region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is accumulating heat in the ocean, a phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, will be presented overnight at a conference of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Not playing Perkins

There might come a time when Australian politicians will need to make some hard decisions about measures to combat global warming but this is hardly one of them. Both Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull know it and showed it yesterday with their statements on an emissions trading scheme. Both securely headed for the middle of the spectrum of possibilities where electoral safety lies. Both want to wait and see if the world reaches a global agreement before promising to create too much of the hardship of dramatic change. Perhaps Kevin Rudd has put himself more squarely in the centre than Malcolm Turnbull. The Government has gone for minimal targets reducing carbon emissions that can be undone without too great a cost should next year's efforts at an international agreement fail completely. The opinion polls suggest that some action is considered by voters to be preferable to the Liberal position of postponing any action until there has been more study. Wh

The Governor: Coming or Going?

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The Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich has sensibly ignored the clamouring of the out of Chicago media for him to resign after being caught on phone taps trying to raise a dollar or two in campaign funds. Like that other Chicago son of a migrant, Barack Obama, the Guv rose in a tough school to reach high political office. He knows that it is not network television hosts who will be voting on his impeachment. His principal wheeling and dealing will continue to be done within the confines of the local Democratic Party. And what wonderful wheeling and dealing it will surely prove to be. The prospect of Gov. Blagojevich singing along to the Federal Attorney General about the fund raising and other activities of some of those gunning to get him should have Republicans salivating. No wonder Team Obama was so quick to declare that their man had had no contact with the man about who would choose his replacement as a Senator.  The team of the family headed by the Revd Jesse Jackson, whose

Feeling happier about a President Obama

I admit to feeling happier this week about the world having a President Obama as its supreme ruler. Until the case of Rod Blagojevich broke forth I was a bit nervous about whether this seeming political novice was made of the right stuff to safely guide us through a world of Muslim terrorists and greedy but incompetent international financiers. There was this terrible fear that this wizard of oratory's words would be insufficient protection when confronted with the collection of hard men he will have to deal with come the end of January. Reading about the troubles of Governor Blagojevich showed me the error of my ways. Barack Obama has grown up in what is surely as tough a political school as anything Vladimir Putin confronted in the KGB. Osama Bin Laden proved he is a master manipulator by getting young men to blow themselves up for his cause but the incoming President of the USA fought his way up through the Democratic machine politics of Illinois. The thing that shows how gre

Some defamation common sense

It was pleasing to see common sense prevail in two quite different defamation cases in two different countries in the last few days. In Adelaide a jury found two child protection advocates not guilty to charges of criminal libel. In London Sir Elton John lost a case brought against The Guardian over a spoof diary written by Marina Hyde. The South Australian case was perhaps the more significant of the two. Criminal libel is a rather draconian way of curbing political debate even if the comments made are both very hutful and very wrong.  Barry Standfield, 67, and Wendy Utting, 39, were the first people charged with the offence since the attempt to jail Rohan Rivett, the then editor of the now defunct Adelaide newspaper The News, 48 years ago. The pair were charged with four counts of criminal defamation over the faxing of documents on April 1, 2005, to the media naming two political figures and two senior police officers as alleged pedophiles. The court has suppressed publication of th

A story that lives on

A wonderful example this morning of how stories published on the internet can live on and attract new readers for weeks after someone, somewhere posts a link to them. Back on 9 December the Melbourne Herald Sun ran an item saying discrimination against dominant white males will soon be encouraged in a bid to boost the status of women, the disabled and cultural and religious minorities. This morning it finally made it to the top of the most read list on the paper's website -  Discrimination against white males will soon be encouraged

Giving Simon a rest

For many days now I had been wondering whether the Sydney Daily Telegraph still had Simon Benson as its state political editor as he failed to be the author of any stories I could list on my blog of what the papers say. He missed out on the news pages again this morning as the paper continues to steer away from the outrageously over the top kind of reporting that coincided with a falling circulation. When Big boobs are not a sickness is the top of the paper's most read list it tells you that your clients are unlikely to be all that interested in the comings and goings of politicians. But at least political editor Benson was allowed to join the Tele's columnist Piers Akerman this morning in serving up the kind of analysis that does no harm on an editorial page that proper Telegraph readers would not turn to in a fit anyway.

The beginning of a what if nobody agrees strategy?

Getting the pictures right is a key component of the Kevin Rudd strategy of staying popular during troubled times. He knows that most of us have only scant understanding of what all that global warming and carbon emissions stuff is all about. So the Prime Minister just looks and sounds serious and earnest as he says the words, as I am sure his National Press Club appearance will show, while concentrating on giving us a vision that will leave us with an impression that he is doing something.  He started the picture thing about global warming yesterday by posing with Queensland Premier Anna Bligh at a solar power farm in Windorah before flying to Canberra to prepare for his NPC appearance to release the white paper on climate change. The hard hats on the political heads, against the background of five 14 metre reflective reflective mirrors, certainly created the impression that this Labor Party lot are actually doing something innovative and new.  While the critics from left and right ar

This sporting world - drug bans come to chess

I was so fascinated by the Crikey coverage of the world chess championship that I now get one of those Google news messages each day to keep me up to date. Not that I play the sport, mind you - I'm strictly a draughts man, but those that do are such characters, And I use that word sport advisedly because in this morning's message is the terrible news that Grandmaster Vassily Ivanchuk refused to submit a urine sample for a drug test at the Chess Olympiad in Dresden and is now considered guilty of doping. Chess has subjected itself to the rigours of the World Anti-Doping Agency run by our very own John Fahey because the World Chess Federation (FIDE) has been trying, since the late 1990s, to make chess an Olympic discipline. Here's the link to this latest drugs in sport scandal.

Paying the government to mind your money

You just know that things have got to be serious when some people are prepared to pay the government to hold on to their money for them. I know it sounds mad but I'm a sucker for listening to news of the financial crisis and I keep hearing on Bloomberg that three month US Treasury notes occasionally sell at a negative yield. They rallied somewhat this morning to close yielding a magnificent 0.01%.

Not many without sin

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President elect Barack Obama has thrown a couple of verbal pebbles at Rod Blagojevich since the Illinois Governor was exposed doing a little fund raising but generally American politicians have been relatively mild in their condemnation. Which does not surprise me at all really for in my experience there would be many of them who have engaged in similar behaviour even if their methods are generally slightly subtler and not subject to being phone tapped. I base this terrible accusation on my experience lobbying on Washington's Capital Hill back in the early 1990s when doing a little stint for the Croatian American Association. The task was to convince the politicians that gallant Croatians were legitimately battling for their deserved independence from nasty communist Serbs and that the United States should remove an embargo on arms sales and support the fledgling democracy. After considerable effort a delegation of Congressmen was persuaded to visit Yugoslavia and make their own as