Prosper is Moving!

We are moving!

Prosper is excited to inform our Evolving Economics readers that we are moving to the Lennox Street Exchange (LSX), a dynamic co-working space in Richmond where we will be surrounded by professionals and small businesses engaged in social media, marketing and creative enterprise.

The building at Punch Lane was sold last year and high rents have inspired our push into a collaborative workspace such as LSX. Check the LSX facebook photostream to get a sense of the atmosphere.

We view this as a positive and exciting move and operationally little will change – we will still maintain our events calendar, and continue to run the bookshop. LSX is just a few minutes walk from Richmond train station and visitors are very welcome. There’s a neat cafe as part of the operational synergies too.

It’s been an incredibly successful time for Prosper at Punch Lane and while we are sad to move we are also very excited by the opportunities our new location presents.

Please make a note of our new address – 285 Lennox Street, Richmond, 3121. We we will be there from March 31st. If you are interested you can visit www.lsx.com.au for more information about the co-working community and the collaborative potentials about to unfold!

Property Boom or Bust – where are we in the cycle?

Tuesday, 17th March, 6.30pm
Level 2, 22 Punch Lane, Melbourne
Presenter: Phillip J Anderson, author of The Secret Life of Real Estate & Banking

This event is almost sold out. Only 4 standing room tickets are left: RSVP & Tickets

Phillip Anderson is the world’s leading expert on business cycles and the symbiosis between the stock, commodity and real estate markets. Phillip is an astute judge of global trends, having consistently stood up to the bears with an array of information to quell the concerned. He is set to decipher the noise with his unique analysis of macroeconomic behaviours.

This is Phillip’s last public presentation before he heads back to Europ and our very last event at Punch Lane! Help us send off the old office in style with an exciting night of insight and discussion.

Don’t defer stamp duty – abolish it!

Prosper’s David Collyer has written a scathing review of NSW opposition leader Luke Foley’s proposal to allow buyers to defer stamp duty:

If SD payment is to be made in instalments or deferred, the contingent liability becomes attached to the asset. Settlement after sale gives the vendor a clean break, renouncing all and any interest in the asset and clearing all future liabilities. With this single gesture, the economic incidence for SD just shifted back to the buyer.

The housing market will immediately re-price houses as the deferred SD, not being required at settlement, can be disregarded.

While you’re thinking about stamp duty, Danika Wright has written a good piece at The Conversation, in which she also argues for axing this inefficient transaction tax.

Australian Youth – off the agenda

Matt Ellis has written a fantastic piece about the raw deal for young Australians over at the Rational Radical blog:

Thus the tragedy of youth today is not unaffordable housing and an uneven share of wealth distribution, but rather our fast failing economic model. A model which is now built almost exclusively on leveraging the income from resource extraction and using it to borrow offshore funds to be pumped into housing and land, which is then paid forward into construction, consumer spending and employment, owing to the pyramid-like phenomenon of the “wealth effect”. An effect that only works as long as there are new entrants to the pyramid to maintain ever-escalating land prices.

A quick search of the 2015 Intergenerational report found inequality, housing, land, speculation and unearned income all completely ignored! Check out the report for yourself via The Treasury.

Map Jam, Big Tek

Check out this great discussion with David Pecotic (Map Jam). David discusses the importance of mapping the booming sharing economy and how map jams can help communities. A must read for everyone interested in geo-spatial and sharing.

Recently on the Renegade Economists, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Max Carlson joined Karl for an entertaining chat. This extended podcast special is full of insights into big data, data monopoly, robotics, climate change, privacy, the Irish shuffle, tech-led inequality in San Fran, voting machines and discussions on how to tax these fast moving devlopments. Then last week, Lindsay David warned in BoomBust – Do the Math of the danger of that other sort of technology – a mass exodus of foreign capital as the U$ carry trade unwinds. 

Rounding Off

Journalists, bureaucrats, academics…. we’ve been meeting with them all over the last fortnight! People are wising up to the rent-seeking game and the coming months are going to be busy.

Our new home in the LSX community is another cause for excitement and we will announce our first event there in the coming weeks. Packing is underway and there are still plenty of economics books to be given away so contact the office for a booklist.

New members are always welcome and everyone’s ongoing support is very much appreciated.

Until next time,
Jess Wright