The pain in falling land prices
photo credit: Travis S. The US housing market is a living hell. Homeowners are being boiled alive. The price of land was bid up to staggering multiples of incomes, until it no longer made sense to buy a house. And…
Tag wealth gap
Selling alleys and lanes: latifundia at work.
Melbourne City Council is selling lanes to developers, according to The Age today. It makes a pretty penny, too, having pocketed $1.2 million from the sale of part of three lanes in the last 12 months alone. The article sparked…
Dear Australia, the world is watching, waiting for our bubble to burst
photo credit: robertivanc The great property speculation game is over in America and Europe. The music has stopped. Forty years of steadily increasing pressure has been released. Houses are worth a fraction of what people paid in better times,…
Tax reform is hard and dreary work.
photo credit: Cayusa Tax reform is hard for government: losers complain loud and long, while those who will benefit are suspicious and silent. We should be angry as hell about the tax system. It scoops up the earnings of the…
Creative Destructionism V Bailout the Destroyers
photo credit: nflorence2012 How to avoid being caught short: US calls in old rules to shield its markets: The slumping financial markets have been rebounding steadily in the past month for several reasons, including regulatory and legislative decisions in Washington.…
Rudd Bails out the Wealth Gap
photo credit: mdumlao98 Prime Minister Rudd’s $10bn ‘economic security strategy’ is another blinkered response. A decade of record economic growth has done little for the aussie battler. Record prices for iron ore have cascaded into the deepest pockets in the…
2030, Affordability and Understanding
Today’s report on the Melbourne 2030 urban growth boundary cries out for a comment from Prosper Australia members. Melbourne University academic Rob Moodie rolled out the usual suspects in recommending that dwellings per hectare improve on the urban fringe, that…
Economics for Activists
Tuesday evenings in May, 6.15pm – 8pm, starting May 1st Ever wanted to read between the lines of the newspaper? Arm yourself with the tools of modern warfare as Karl Fitzgerald takes you through the key understandings required to ‘follow…