Lots of people I know are either still pouring their money into super or leaving it for another few years until it recovers the losses of the past year or so. One friend told me just the other day that this was her strategy, in preference to paying off a mortgage. Now the markets have […]

If you have just hummed that tune correctly, you may avoid being caught with bubble gum on your face. It’s an old tune, probably from the 1940s, but familiar enough to those who like jazz or who grew up with big band music in their background. That cohort has been more risk averse, less inclined […]

(Cross posted from What the people want). According to a media release from the CEO Institute: Queensland seems to have weathered the worst of the global financial crisis, with 77% of CEOs having positive views on the economy and 60% saying they were likely to hire in the next six months, according to the inaugural […]

Home-ownership can be a curse, according to Saul Eslake. In this interesting op-ed in The Age Eslake argues that it wasn’t unregulated markets that caused the sub-prime crisis, it was a misguided desire to increase home ownership by directing banks to fund people into houses who couldn’t really afford them. One of the means adopted […]

It has come to my attention that the government is looking for inputs to its Gov 2.0 strategy, complete with blogspace for comments. What should they do with government information? Who should see what? What about FOI? etc. All this has been part of the public conversation since well before the digital age, and much […]

RBA Governor Glen Stevens was widely quoted as warning of a housing “bubble” if we didn’t use the current period of low interest rates to increase housing supply. The word “bubble” appears to be a journalistic embellishment. What he said was: “Given the circumstances – the economy moving to a position of less than full […]