When You've Paid Your Rent, You've Paid Your Way View more presentations from Prosper. Following Gavin’s recent presentation, we thought those of you who missed it might find this of interest. Flick through the 6 slides according to the audio below. Our premises is based in the Hardware Lane cafe precinct. Enjoy the background jazz. [...]
photo credit: TerenceKearns.com Residential planning approvals fell another 6.6 per cent in May. No, this isn’t proof the housing bubble is over, but it hints broadly at that conclusion. I try to warn friends of the impending crash. They dismiss me as a Cassandra, or laugh it off. Why should it change? They are geared [...]
photo credit: Gary Denness Harold Mitchell, advertising supremo, summed up the mood that led to Kevin Rudd’s downfall, as quoted in the AFR, 23 June: It is an ‘amazing fact’ that ‘ordinary people on the street are barracking for five people…who have got so much money they don’t know what to do with it’. The [...]
photo credit: looseends Saturday mornings at the Richmond market. I hear a fruit stall worker calling his wares: “Last of the carrots! A dollar a bunch! AND THERE’S NO MORE!” Of course, he has carrots by the boxful under the table, but his solemn warning means he sells out every day. Shameless lying by [...]
photo credit: Schaffner Sometimes the ignorance of experts makes my blood boil. Why can’t they do the arithmetic, the sums plainly before them? The Victorian Transport Plan will cost $38 billion and produce benefits of $180 billion, according to a state-commissioned report by Ernst and Young. If these numbers are right, the Plan [...]
photo credit: loungerie The Henry Tax Review recommended a resource rent tax to the Australian government, carefully designed to maintain incentives and reward risk. The miners responded with apoplexy and a campaign of deliberate misinformation that has left the economically literate gobsmacked. Let’s get a few things straight. Searching for ore-bodies is not done by [...]
photo credit: Yuga. The government must focus on the rate of return between those who benefit from economic rents and those that are entrepreneurial. The Age reports today: …a Senate estimates committee was told the average profit in mining was 37.1 per cent, compared with 11.4 for the overall economy. Some projects had ”extraordinarily high [...]
photo credit: funadium Yesterday’s ABS release of a 14.8% fall in seasonally adjusted building approvals shows that property insiders understand that a crash is coming. If not them, then the banks curtailing credit for housing is another signal that housing is over-priced and well overdue for a major correction. Last weekend’s housing auction figures showed [...]
photo credit: ~Brenda-Starr~ Letter to the Editor – AFR 25/05/2010 Bryan Kavanagh, Glen Waverley Ross Garnaut and Ken Henry are undoubtedly correct about the benefits of the so-called super-profits ‘tax’ on miners. It’s actually a resource rent and acts vastly differently from a tax. Where taxes notoriously fine and destroy industry and production, natural resource [...]
Michael Hudson The Counter-Enlightenment, its Economic Program – and the Classical Alternative Based on a talk given to Prosper Australia on Friday October 16th, 2009. First published in Progress Magazine – Autumn 2010. Download Progress #1096 here. The last few years have seen Social Democratic and Labour parties fall into disarray throughout the world. Retreating [...]