It's Not A Bubble, It's Just Elevated
Ever since the RBA and its board started talking about housing as potential bubble, there's been increased discussion in the press about what to do about it. As in, if there might happen to be a bubble developing, maybe we should be doing ... (fill in the blank).
Yesterday it was the eminently despicable Paul Sheehan pointing to China and its dodgy dealings ending up as investment money in Australia as the culprit. Today it is Saul Eslake saying it's the negative gearing that's pushing up prices because it over-incentivises property investors.
It's interesting that the tenor of the discussion has moved towards saying that these elevated house prices might lead to a bubble, as opposed to flatly denying there is a bubble going on. Like a lot of big economic problems, the phenomenon is too big to be seen in small samples because all small samples can be dismissed as anecdotal. That's essentially what's happened to date in claiming there is no bubble going on.
All the same, the mountain of private debt is making things in the economy a lot more constrained. It's a worldwide phenomenon as far as the developed world is concerned, in as much as there is all this investment money that has to go somewhere, and if investing in tech or energy or mining or manufacturing is too hard, people would just prefer to put it into Real Estate and collect the rent as they pay a mortgage. The problem is, when everybody has decided that all these other investment possibilities are no good and property is the only place to be, then it is that classic definition of inflation where too much money is chasing too few assets.
We live in strange times for many reasons, not least of which is that the last global financial crisis was triggered by the sub-prime mortgage market going bust. In other words, the real-estate market killed banking as we knew it; Since then, banks have had to shore up their bottom lines and businesses have had to cut spending to pay down debt. The net result of all this cutting turns out to be a massive loss of confidence in industry and therefore Capitalism. Subsequently a flood of money has gone into residential property. Prices remain elevated in the UK as well as Canada, and in the USA prices are creeping back up to pre-GFC highs. It's not as if Australia is wildly out of line with those places - and so maybe unaffordably high property prices is part and parcel of the 'new normal'?
It's actually a funny moment if you think bout it. The Central Banks of the world have been busy printing money to prop up asset prices. They've well and truly succeeded, in that there is a worldwide housing bubble. So much of the printed money ended up as even more debt taken out by investors to speculate on property because the rest of capitalism has simply lost its lustre, and lost its credibility. If anything this all represents a great no-confidence vote in the Central Banks. It's a bit like a Moebius strip that way. You start out thinking along side with the RBA and you end up realising that there *is* a bubble, but when you go further along the strip you come back to the point where you realise that we only have a bubble when compared to historic norms. These, simply are not normal times.
A Gen-X View of the Universe.
"The Issue Isn't Pussy, It's Monkey" - from The Right Stuff
Film, Cinema, Movies, TV, Music, Rock
2014/09/30
2014/09/29
'The Amazing Spider Man 2'
The Tragic Arc In Spiderman
I've been delayed in watching this thing because people have been telling me how awful this film is, and how it fails to reach the heights of the original Spiderman films directed by Sam Raimi and tarring Tobey Maguire. While I'm hardly one to dispute the rhapsodic heights reached by the original three Spiderman films, I'm reluctant to dump on the Andrew Garfield Spiderman. On some level, each film should be taken on their own merits and not relationship to how it fits into an imaginary canon of comic book movies.
Still, all I had heard was that it was underwhelming and that it didn't deliver on the big thematic promise of facing off against Electro, The Green Goblin and The Rhino. Some have said that the film just doesn't do the story line derived from the comic justice.
If it's all the same, I can report that it's a fine enough film with lots of thought-provoking moments.
Here's the usual spoiler alert.
What's Good About It
Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are a real life item. It shows up in this film as an amazing chemistry. The intimate and the subtle shifts in perception of each other gets a trough working out on screen and they really nail those scenes. Whereas in the original trilogy, Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and ames Franco had a great dynamic going, it was always played on an extrinsic romantic conflict of a three way. It hung on Mary Jane's almost whimsical inability to commit to Peter, while both Peter and Harry desired MJ. In the Garfield Spiderman movies, it is not MJ but Gwen Stacey who gets the romantic attention, and we see a very convoluted attraction and pas de deux between Garfield's Peter and Emma Stone, Gwen, where the third complicating figure is Spiderman himself as separate to Peter Parker.
Andrew Garfield's Spiderman is as different to Tobey Maguire's Spiderman as any James Bond is different from Sean Connery. Just as with Bond where Connery seethe standard against all the following actors, Garfield's performance is being measured against Maguire's. It has to be said, that Garfield's Spiderman is being given more interesting personal areas to negotiate, which at once stretches our understanding of the character.
In turn, these films are about Peter and Gwen, without a hint of Mary Jane. What's truly great is that Peter and Gwen have a much better dynamic than Peter and Mary Jane from the original trilogy, most likely owing to Garfield and Stone's real life relationship. These actors probably won't stay together forever,but they will always have this film as a record of this chemistry.
What's Bad About It
There are so many special effects shots and they're all a mixed bag in quality. It's hard to imagine what a swinging Spiderman is supposed to look like but some of the shots are not as photo real as others - they look like actions from a computer game, just enough to rob you of the wilful suspension of disbelief.
Some of the action is spectacular but gratuitous. I don't know that Electro need be so strange before he becomes Electro; he comes across as OCD and more than a little Asperger's. The respective arcs of the villains in this film are so underdeveloped it is hard to get involved with their project. All of them seem monsters of science than villainous, which takes away from the drama more than it adds to it. Villains are on the whole better if they have a choice to exercise in becoming the villain. Being born that way or made that way is actually not that interesting.
What's Interesting About It
All of the Spiderman films are critiques of New York and its denizens. Superman toils in Metropolis, Batman works in Gotham, but Spiderman is a New Yorker from Queens no less. The particular-ness of that makes the Spiderman films much more grounded in a location than the abstracted sense of location we get from Superman and Batman movies. It also means Spiderman is enmeshed in the misc en scene of New York, and New Yorkers passing by are often part of the story in some subtle way.
Missing from the mayhem are J.Jonah Jameson and the Daily Bugle, with the whole newspaper business storyline. This is an interesting departure as it opens up the scope of the story in other ways.
Gwen Stacey & Mary Jane
One gets the suspicion the reason why this film was not received well, has to do with Gwen Stacey and how she dies. There is no doubt about it, it's a major downer. The original comic book death of Gwen Stacey was a monumental turning point in the history of comic books so it is understandable that on screen, it has the power to shock the audience. It's just not done to kill the love interest like we see in this film. The awkwardness of a superhero movie where he fails to save the girl is the same awkwardness at the end of the Daniel Craig 'Casino Royale' where Vesper Lind dies, or the great 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' where Tracy di Vicenzo is shot to death at the end. It's startling and refreshing to see in a comic book movie.
The current storyline of The Amazing Spiderman thus seems willing to tread where angels fear to tread, to tell more daring stories.
The other notable thing about the choice to go with the Gwen Stacey story line is that Gwen is a scientist with aspirations to go to Oxford and study higher. This contrasts with the original three movies where MJ wants to be an actress and even then isn't terribly good that, so she settles into being a trophy girlfriend for either Spiderman or the immensely rich and handsome Harry Osborne. You sense the in roads and strides feminism has made in bringing the comic book universe up to date, and this is a good development. The death is made even more tragic because it will probably lead back to the MJ story in the next instalment.
The Amazing Spiderman Is A Bildungsroman
Peter Parker finds himself in a particular moment of youth, where his first true love is in many ways his equal and mirror. Gwen Stacey is not the object of his teenage puppy love. She is a woman who is confronting him with difficult life choices. The only reason the life choices become redundant is because Gwen dies.
It's actually hard to see how this Spiderman story moves forward into introducing Mary Jane Watson. By the end of the film, Peter comes to understand that being Spiderman is not some vocation or some random calling. It is a social necessity, and that he has obligations to these dead characters - uncle Ben and Gwen- the compels him to be out there protecting the people from the likes of The Rhino.
To go back to the kind of Mary Jane story from the Tobey Maguire Spiderman movies would in fact be a retreat of sorts from the hard won emotional maturity established in this film.
New York City Skyline As Character
Spiderman took a very long time to bring to screen. The saga of who had rights and how so many people were attached at one point or another is well documented lore. Then came 9/11 which forced the original film to re-imagine its climactic battle. Integral to the imagery of Spiderman is the character swinging on his web, swinging from building to building. Because of this element Spiderman movies have demanded a great degree of architectural interest - from the Osborne residence in the first series through to various bridges that hang between Manhattan and Queens featuring in the background.
Spiderman's relationship to New York is more visceral and immediate than say Batman's relationship to Gotham. Spiderman in all the film incarnations is a denizen of the city who is an active participant in the socio-political discourse of the city. Batman is connected to the socio-political discourse of Gotham through Wayne Industries and therefore sits with the corporate elite when not donning his suit. Peter Parker is quintessentially *of* New York in such a way that the citizens are willing to step up for him and with him. There is a greater democratic impulse in Spiderman movies than there is in most comic book movies.
I've been delayed in watching this thing because people have been telling me how awful this film is, and how it fails to reach the heights of the original Spiderman films directed by Sam Raimi and tarring Tobey Maguire. While I'm hardly one to dispute the rhapsodic heights reached by the original three Spiderman films, I'm reluctant to dump on the Andrew Garfield Spiderman. On some level, each film should be taken on their own merits and not relationship to how it fits into an imaginary canon of comic book movies.
Still, all I had heard was that it was underwhelming and that it didn't deliver on the big thematic promise of facing off against Electro, The Green Goblin and The Rhino. Some have said that the film just doesn't do the story line derived from the comic justice.
If it's all the same, I can report that it's a fine enough film with lots of thought-provoking moments.
Here's the usual spoiler alert.
What's Good About It
Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are a real life item. It shows up in this film as an amazing chemistry. The intimate and the subtle shifts in perception of each other gets a trough working out on screen and they really nail those scenes. Whereas in the original trilogy, Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and ames Franco had a great dynamic going, it was always played on an extrinsic romantic conflict of a three way. It hung on Mary Jane's almost whimsical inability to commit to Peter, while both Peter and Harry desired MJ. In the Garfield Spiderman movies, it is not MJ but Gwen Stacey who gets the romantic attention, and we see a very convoluted attraction and pas de deux between Garfield's Peter and Emma Stone, Gwen, where the third complicating figure is Spiderman himself as separate to Peter Parker.
Andrew Garfield's Spiderman is as different to Tobey Maguire's Spiderman as any James Bond is different from Sean Connery. Just as with Bond where Connery seethe standard against all the following actors, Garfield's performance is being measured against Maguire's. It has to be said, that Garfield's Spiderman is being given more interesting personal areas to negotiate, which at once stretches our understanding of the character.
In turn, these films are about Peter and Gwen, without a hint of Mary Jane. What's truly great is that Peter and Gwen have a much better dynamic than Peter and Mary Jane from the original trilogy, most likely owing to Garfield and Stone's real life relationship. These actors probably won't stay together forever,but they will always have this film as a record of this chemistry.
What's Bad About It
There are so many special effects shots and they're all a mixed bag in quality. It's hard to imagine what a swinging Spiderman is supposed to look like but some of the shots are not as photo real as others - they look like actions from a computer game, just enough to rob you of the wilful suspension of disbelief.
Some of the action is spectacular but gratuitous. I don't know that Electro need be so strange before he becomes Electro; he comes across as OCD and more than a little Asperger's. The respective arcs of the villains in this film are so underdeveloped it is hard to get involved with their project. All of them seem monsters of science than villainous, which takes away from the drama more than it adds to it. Villains are on the whole better if they have a choice to exercise in becoming the villain. Being born that way or made that way is actually not that interesting.
What's Interesting About It
All of the Spiderman films are critiques of New York and its denizens. Superman toils in Metropolis, Batman works in Gotham, but Spiderman is a New Yorker from Queens no less. The particular-ness of that makes the Spiderman films much more grounded in a location than the abstracted sense of location we get from Superman and Batman movies. It also means Spiderman is enmeshed in the misc en scene of New York, and New Yorkers passing by are often part of the story in some subtle way.
Missing from the mayhem are J.Jonah Jameson and the Daily Bugle, with the whole newspaper business storyline. This is an interesting departure as it opens up the scope of the story in other ways.
Gwen Stacey & Mary Jane
One gets the suspicion the reason why this film was not received well, has to do with Gwen Stacey and how she dies. There is no doubt about it, it's a major downer. The original comic book death of Gwen Stacey was a monumental turning point in the history of comic books so it is understandable that on screen, it has the power to shock the audience. It's just not done to kill the love interest like we see in this film. The awkwardness of a superhero movie where he fails to save the girl is the same awkwardness at the end of the Daniel Craig 'Casino Royale' where Vesper Lind dies, or the great 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' where Tracy di Vicenzo is shot to death at the end. It's startling and refreshing to see in a comic book movie.
The current storyline of The Amazing Spiderman thus seems willing to tread where angels fear to tread, to tell more daring stories.
The other notable thing about the choice to go with the Gwen Stacey story line is that Gwen is a scientist with aspirations to go to Oxford and study higher. This contrasts with the original three movies where MJ wants to be an actress and even then isn't terribly good that, so she settles into being a trophy girlfriend for either Spiderman or the immensely rich and handsome Harry Osborne. You sense the in roads and strides feminism has made in bringing the comic book universe up to date, and this is a good development. The death is made even more tragic because it will probably lead back to the MJ story in the next instalment.
The Amazing Spiderman Is A Bildungsroman
Peter Parker finds himself in a particular moment of youth, where his first true love is in many ways his equal and mirror. Gwen Stacey is not the object of his teenage puppy love. She is a woman who is confronting him with difficult life choices. The only reason the life choices become redundant is because Gwen dies.
It's actually hard to see how this Spiderman story moves forward into introducing Mary Jane Watson. By the end of the film, Peter comes to understand that being Spiderman is not some vocation or some random calling. It is a social necessity, and that he has obligations to these dead characters - uncle Ben and Gwen- the compels him to be out there protecting the people from the likes of The Rhino.
To go back to the kind of Mary Jane story from the Tobey Maguire Spiderman movies would in fact be a retreat of sorts from the hard won emotional maturity established in this film.
New York City Skyline As Character
Spiderman took a very long time to bring to screen. The saga of who had rights and how so many people were attached at one point or another is well documented lore. Then came 9/11 which forced the original film to re-imagine its climactic battle. Integral to the imagery of Spiderman is the character swinging on his web, swinging from building to building. Because of this element Spiderman movies have demanded a great degree of architectural interest - from the Osborne residence in the first series through to various bridges that hang between Manhattan and Queens featuring in the background.
Spiderman's relationship to New York is more visceral and immediate than say Batman's relationship to Gotham. Spiderman in all the film incarnations is a denizen of the city who is an active participant in the socio-political discourse of the city. Batman is connected to the socio-political discourse of Gotham through Wayne Industries and therefore sits with the corporate elite when not donning his suit. Peter Parker is quintessentially *of* New York in such a way that the citizens are willing to step up for him and with him. There is a greater democratic impulse in Spiderman movies than there is in most comic book movies.
2014/09/25
The Long Goodbye With Derek Jeter
Eventually, Comes The End
I stopped writing about the Yankees on this blog after they won the World Series in 2009. I made that conscious decision because for all the hoopla, that edition of the Yankees was at an end, and all that remained was a strong of goodbyes to players I loved dearly. I knew it was coming, it was going to happen and I simply didn't have the heart to be around writing about the unwinding.
First, it was Hideki Matsui, who closed out his Yankee career with a bang, earning a MVP in that World Series. his contract ran out at the end of 2009 and he was gone. Andy Pettitte headed for the door too, and Jorge Posada ran out of rope at home plate and finished as a DH. One too many collision at the plate put an end to a historic catching carer. Other players of that 2009 squad quietly left. Nick Swisher signed with Cleveland when his contract ended. Johnny Damon, went and played a couple more seasons elsewhere and ended up in the wilderness the same way Bernie Williams finished. Robinson Cano surprised us all by walking out on the Yankees to sign with Seattle.
And of course there's been the whole Alex Rodriguez biogenesis circus.
CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira haven't really been the same since. The only player to have improved in that squad since that time has been Brett Gardner. Andy Pettitte came back briefly, but in the end he bowed out with Mariano Rivera last year. That left Derek Jeter as the last of the 'Core Four'.
To be honest, the swashbuckling Derek Jeter we knew and loved finished at the end of 2012, dramatically fracturing his ankle in the post-season. It was as if it was as far as his body would carry him and it just broke. He's been nothing like he was before that injury. In 2013 he tried to come back and that was mostly an abortive attempt. This year he declared would be his last, and as the season winds down it is clear he really hasn't been the same player he was before the ankle injury. It's been painful watching his at bats. Pitches he would have drilled in his better days would get fouled off or turn into weak grounders. It's been so bad, it's not been worth talking about. And now it's all mercifully coming to an end.
With that comes a tidal wave of reflection.
Back in the 70's when I was a kid, I used to watch the Bronx Zoo Yankees and wonder about single digit Yankee players. You can just go through them: 3 was BabeRuth; 4 was Lou Gehrig, 5 was Joe DiMaggio; there was no 6, 7 was Mickey Mantle, 8 was Yogi Berra; and 9... 9 was my fave Yankee growing up Graig Nettles. Nettles was a good player, but he wasn't a great player like Ruth Gehrig, DiMaggio or Mantle - He was a bit better than Chase Headley is today and that's about it. Nettles was awfully funny in interviews which is why I liked him. The Captain of that incarnation of the Yankees was Thurman Munson, and the big bat belonged to Reggie Jackson. It was a great team I'll never forget, but they were only together for about 5years.
Then sometime in early 1996 I noticed the Yankees were starting this shortstop wearing '2' and my jaw dropped. It's a big call, giving a single digit in that organisation, but there he was. And the Yankees won the World Series that year for the first time in 18years. The rest is, as we say, history. Over the years he's been exactly that player the Yankees needed, nothing less, and probably even more than they hoped for. And he did it for almost four times as long as the Bronx Zoo Yankees were together.
The 20years he has been playing in the Major Leagues is in of itself a mind bogglingly long time by any measure in sport. It's a stretch of time that takes me back to other odd moments. It goes back to the year the Australian test cricket team finally defeated the Windies at their home grounds. It goes back to a time Mark Taylor was the captain of that team. It goes back to a Wimbledon where Pete Sampras defeated Boris Becker, and Stefi Graf defeated Arantxa Sanchez. It was the year of the OJ Simpson trial. Feeling old now? I certainly do. It was the year The Atlanta Braves beat the Cleveland Indians in the World Series. I remember watching Chipper Jones in his remarkable rookie year.
The barracking, cheering and rooting for the Yankees for that length of time allowed me to relive my childhood in my spare time in such a way that I forgot I was growing old - seriously old!. For 20years, I followed the games, day in day out season in, season out. I lived and died by the moments and made mental notes on how to be graceful and gracious in the way he was, in both triumph and defeat. I held on to a flame that kept burning - a flame I had almost forgotten, and left behind with a pile of old memories. Instead, he provided a whole new bunch of memories.
When I sift through all the moments and stats, I'm most affected by the 2001 post season. It came right on the heels of the 9/11 World Trade Centre event. The world was reeling. You felt for New York City. The Yankees were reaching for one more World Series win with the late '90s Dynasty squad. Along the way to the World Series, we saw the Flip which cemented his name in history like no other play. But most poignant of all was the 'Mr November' Home Run. The Yankees needed a miracle and at the stroke of midnight, the World Series crashed into November for the first time in history. yet another grim reminder of 9/11 and how it was changing the world in front of our eyes.
Moments later, Jeter launched that defiant home run which eventually sent the Series to Game 7. It was as if New York City needed something extra, a piece of something to hope on, and Jeter was there to deliver it. America needed something to save it from despair and for a moment the Yankees were everybody's team and Jeter provided that something with one stroke. The Yankees didn't win Game 7, but it was a moral victory of sorts that the Yankees went as far as they did that year. Without a doubt Jeter truly was the heart and soul of that defiant team.
Even as his career creeks to a rickety end, the memories are piled up like trophies. I am, from the bottom of my heart, grateful that he came along. Every game he played, there was every chance he would do something truly inspiring and extraordinary; and because of that all those days were filled with a happy anticipation. As those moments grew fewer in-between, I've been readying myself for this moment. No, he's not going to die or anything; yes, he too is the luckiest man on the face of this earth; but he will be gone. And so we think thoughts like when we try and compose eulogies and obituaries.
I realise today that what we hang meaning upon in our lives can be so arbitrary. There would be countless Yankee fans who will be waking up to this very thought when Jeter has put down his bat one last time. Maybe it will be waking up from a long, magical intoxicating, enchanting dream. In that, I feel a great kinship to countless people in New York City, across America and probably across the globe. He was a once-in-a-lifetime Yankee great and we've had ours, and now it's done.
I imagine I will look for him on the field when the Yankees take the field next spring, even knowing he's retired and gone. No, he won't be there. It will startle me. They'll still be the Yankees, they'll still be all that wining tradition and glorious history, but it will be the moment that will hit home that I'm just "rooting for the laundry" as Seinfeld would have it. I can't imagine how other fans will see the new guy manning shortstop. That guy, whoever he is, is not going to be as good as Jeter, for we know he can't be. And I'll know, we will never see the likes of Derek Jeter ever again in our lifetime.
I stopped writing about the Yankees on this blog after they won the World Series in 2009. I made that conscious decision because for all the hoopla, that edition of the Yankees was at an end, and all that remained was a strong of goodbyes to players I loved dearly. I knew it was coming, it was going to happen and I simply didn't have the heart to be around writing about the unwinding.
First, it was Hideki Matsui, who closed out his Yankee career with a bang, earning a MVP in that World Series. his contract ran out at the end of 2009 and he was gone. Andy Pettitte headed for the door too, and Jorge Posada ran out of rope at home plate and finished as a DH. One too many collision at the plate put an end to a historic catching carer. Other players of that 2009 squad quietly left. Nick Swisher signed with Cleveland when his contract ended. Johnny Damon, went and played a couple more seasons elsewhere and ended up in the wilderness the same way Bernie Williams finished. Robinson Cano surprised us all by walking out on the Yankees to sign with Seattle.
And of course there's been the whole Alex Rodriguez biogenesis circus.
CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira haven't really been the same since. The only player to have improved in that squad since that time has been Brett Gardner. Andy Pettitte came back briefly, but in the end he bowed out with Mariano Rivera last year. That left Derek Jeter as the last of the 'Core Four'.
To be honest, the swashbuckling Derek Jeter we knew and loved finished at the end of 2012, dramatically fracturing his ankle in the post-season. It was as if it was as far as his body would carry him and it just broke. He's been nothing like he was before that injury. In 2013 he tried to come back and that was mostly an abortive attempt. This year he declared would be his last, and as the season winds down it is clear he really hasn't been the same player he was before the ankle injury. It's been painful watching his at bats. Pitches he would have drilled in his better days would get fouled off or turn into weak grounders. It's been so bad, it's not been worth talking about. And now it's all mercifully coming to an end.
With that comes a tidal wave of reflection.
Back in the 70's when I was a kid, I used to watch the Bronx Zoo Yankees and wonder about single digit Yankee players. You can just go through them: 3 was BabeRuth; 4 was Lou Gehrig, 5 was Joe DiMaggio; there was no 6, 7 was Mickey Mantle, 8 was Yogi Berra; and 9... 9 was my fave Yankee growing up Graig Nettles. Nettles was a good player, but he wasn't a great player like Ruth Gehrig, DiMaggio or Mantle - He was a bit better than Chase Headley is today and that's about it. Nettles was awfully funny in interviews which is why I liked him. The Captain of that incarnation of the Yankees was Thurman Munson, and the big bat belonged to Reggie Jackson. It was a great team I'll never forget, but they were only together for about 5years.
Then sometime in early 1996 I noticed the Yankees were starting this shortstop wearing '2' and my jaw dropped. It's a big call, giving a single digit in that organisation, but there he was. And the Yankees won the World Series that year for the first time in 18years. The rest is, as we say, history. Over the years he's been exactly that player the Yankees needed, nothing less, and probably even more than they hoped for. And he did it for almost four times as long as the Bronx Zoo Yankees were together.
The 20years he has been playing in the Major Leagues is in of itself a mind bogglingly long time by any measure in sport. It's a stretch of time that takes me back to other odd moments. It goes back to the year the Australian test cricket team finally defeated the Windies at their home grounds. It goes back to a time Mark Taylor was the captain of that team. It goes back to a Wimbledon where Pete Sampras defeated Boris Becker, and Stefi Graf defeated Arantxa Sanchez. It was the year of the OJ Simpson trial. Feeling old now? I certainly do. It was the year The Atlanta Braves beat the Cleveland Indians in the World Series. I remember watching Chipper Jones in his remarkable rookie year.
The barracking, cheering and rooting for the Yankees for that length of time allowed me to relive my childhood in my spare time in such a way that I forgot I was growing old - seriously old!. For 20years, I followed the games, day in day out season in, season out. I lived and died by the moments and made mental notes on how to be graceful and gracious in the way he was, in both triumph and defeat. I held on to a flame that kept burning - a flame I had almost forgotten, and left behind with a pile of old memories. Instead, he provided a whole new bunch of memories.
When I sift through all the moments and stats, I'm most affected by the 2001 post season. It came right on the heels of the 9/11 World Trade Centre event. The world was reeling. You felt for New York City. The Yankees were reaching for one more World Series win with the late '90s Dynasty squad. Along the way to the World Series, we saw the Flip which cemented his name in history like no other play. But most poignant of all was the 'Mr November' Home Run. The Yankees needed a miracle and at the stroke of midnight, the World Series crashed into November for the first time in history. yet another grim reminder of 9/11 and how it was changing the world in front of our eyes.
Moments later, Jeter launched that defiant home run which eventually sent the Series to Game 7. It was as if New York City needed something extra, a piece of something to hope on, and Jeter was there to deliver it. America needed something to save it from despair and for a moment the Yankees were everybody's team and Jeter provided that something with one stroke. The Yankees didn't win Game 7, but it was a moral victory of sorts that the Yankees went as far as they did that year. Without a doubt Jeter truly was the heart and soul of that defiant team.
Even as his career creeks to a rickety end, the memories are piled up like trophies. I am, from the bottom of my heart, grateful that he came along. Every game he played, there was every chance he would do something truly inspiring and extraordinary; and because of that all those days were filled with a happy anticipation. As those moments grew fewer in-between, I've been readying myself for this moment. No, he's not going to die or anything; yes, he too is the luckiest man on the face of this earth; but he will be gone. And so we think thoughts like when we try and compose eulogies and obituaries.
I realise today that what we hang meaning upon in our lives can be so arbitrary. There would be countless Yankee fans who will be waking up to this very thought when Jeter has put down his bat one last time. Maybe it will be waking up from a long, magical intoxicating, enchanting dream. In that, I feel a great kinship to countless people in New York City, across America and probably across the globe. He was a once-in-a-lifetime Yankee great and we've had ours, and now it's done.
I imagine I will look for him on the field when the Yankees take the field next spring, even knowing he's retired and gone. No, he won't be there. It will startle me. They'll still be the Yankees, they'll still be all that wining tradition and glorious history, but it will be the moment that will hit home that I'm just "rooting for the laundry" as Seinfeld would have it. I can't imagine how other fans will see the new guy manning shortstop. That guy, whoever he is, is not going to be as good as Jeter, for we know he can't be. And I'll know, we will never see the likes of Derek Jeter ever again in our lifetime.
2014/09/24
Will It Never End?
No, Really, Is This The Way We'll Be Forever?
When I cast my mind back to the events that led to Kevin Rudd's Removal, I'm led back to the chain of events involving the ETS. In late 2009, the ALP Government worked hard to get an agreement at Copenhagen, and of course that fell to bits. In the wake of Copenhagen ending up in smithereens without an agreement in sight, it suddenly put into sharp focus the likelihood that Australia was going to introduce an Emissions Trading Scheme that was tailored for a world in which there had been an agreement in Copenhagen. And this whole fiasco triggered the sequence of events culminating in The Removal (I'm putting in caps so we can understand it like we understand The Dismissal).
In short, Julia Gillard - a good union stalwart that she is - opposed the ETS. It was too soon in her opinion and best buried. So on her advice, and Wayne Swan's advice, Kevin Rudd postponed it indefinitely to the never-never. This led to his polls collapsing. Then he tried to jump start his polls by doing the mining tax and that led to a mining industry backlash campaign, which further damaged his standings in the poll. And so it was time to do a bit of damage control, remove Kevin Rudd, soothe the public, and go to an election to shore up the ALP position. Of course we know what happened then: Julia Gillard campaigned on not having an ETS or a Carbon Price and ended up with a hung Parliament. To form government, she then had to do a fateful backflip and team up with the Greens who made it conditional to have a Carbon price followed by an ETS.
Consequently any time she claimed the carbon price was a good thing, she sort of looked like a real wally because it was difficult to imagine a person who fought and politicked against it twice - knifing a Prime Minister in the process - going on to sell something she clearly didn't put as great an emphasis upon, unlike the man who said it was the greatest moral challenge of our time. Yes, the very same PM she knifed. Power-hungry psychopath he may have been; a chaotic screaming control-freak he might have been; but at least he clearly wanted to do the ETS and do it right.
During the Gillard years I often got asked by ALP supporters why I still wanted Kevin Rudd to come back and I had to explain the above from scratch, each and every time. Put simply, Rudd was the guy who was willing to do the right thing. Gillard was the party hack that made sure it didn't happen until it became incumbent upon her to make it happen. You see, she's never been a conviction politician as far as the track record tells you. She's been an apparatchik, stayed an apparatchik, and her Prime Minster-ship was marked by moments she declared her position very much like an elevated apparatchik. ("I am not a social democrat."- great one, lady, just great!)
It's all water under the bridge now because Clive Palmer helped Tony Abbott get what he wanted, by repealing the carbon 'tax', which also involved a circus double act involving Al Gore of all people.(My head still spins when I think of that moment) Thus, one would think that all of this is so far in the rear view mirror of Australian politics except Julia Gillard is now trying to sell a book about all this form her point of view. No wonder she's been in the headlines a lot in the last week.
Why would she want to sell a book now? She's made for life, she's never going to starve or want for anything material. It's only been a year since she's been ousted. Why now? Why the money grab now? Is she dying of cancer? Is she migrating to England or somewhere, leaving us all behind? The last thing we need right now is a detailed rendition of her account in print. Really - we need that like we need a hole in our heads.
Naturally, Kevin Rudd thinks her account is fiction. It's fair to say he is being provoked.
When I cast my mind back to the events that led to Kevin Rudd's Removal, I'm led back to the chain of events involving the ETS. In late 2009, the ALP Government worked hard to get an agreement at Copenhagen, and of course that fell to bits. In the wake of Copenhagen ending up in smithereens without an agreement in sight, it suddenly put into sharp focus the likelihood that Australia was going to introduce an Emissions Trading Scheme that was tailored for a world in which there had been an agreement in Copenhagen. And this whole fiasco triggered the sequence of events culminating in The Removal (I'm putting in caps so we can understand it like we understand The Dismissal).
In short, Julia Gillard - a good union stalwart that she is - opposed the ETS. It was too soon in her opinion and best buried. So on her advice, and Wayne Swan's advice, Kevin Rudd postponed it indefinitely to the never-never. This led to his polls collapsing. Then he tried to jump start his polls by doing the mining tax and that led to a mining industry backlash campaign, which further damaged his standings in the poll. And so it was time to do a bit of damage control, remove Kevin Rudd, soothe the public, and go to an election to shore up the ALP position. Of course we know what happened then: Julia Gillard campaigned on not having an ETS or a Carbon Price and ended up with a hung Parliament. To form government, she then had to do a fateful backflip and team up with the Greens who made it conditional to have a Carbon price followed by an ETS.
Consequently any time she claimed the carbon price was a good thing, she sort of looked like a real wally because it was difficult to imagine a person who fought and politicked against it twice - knifing a Prime Minister in the process - going on to sell something she clearly didn't put as great an emphasis upon, unlike the man who said it was the greatest moral challenge of our time. Yes, the very same PM she knifed. Power-hungry psychopath he may have been; a chaotic screaming control-freak he might have been; but at least he clearly wanted to do the ETS and do it right.
During the Gillard years I often got asked by ALP supporters why I still wanted Kevin Rudd to come back and I had to explain the above from scratch, each and every time. Put simply, Rudd was the guy who was willing to do the right thing. Gillard was the party hack that made sure it didn't happen until it became incumbent upon her to make it happen. You see, she's never been a conviction politician as far as the track record tells you. She's been an apparatchik, stayed an apparatchik, and her Prime Minster-ship was marked by moments she declared her position very much like an elevated apparatchik. ("I am not a social democrat."- great one, lady, just great!)
It's all water under the bridge now because Clive Palmer helped Tony Abbott get what he wanted, by repealing the carbon 'tax', which also involved a circus double act involving Al Gore of all people.(My head still spins when I think of that moment) Thus, one would think that all of this is so far in the rear view mirror of Australian politics except Julia Gillard is now trying to sell a book about all this form her point of view. No wonder she's been in the headlines a lot in the last week.
Why would she want to sell a book now? She's made for life, she's never going to starve or want for anything material. It's only been a year since she's been ousted. Why now? Why the money grab now? Is she dying of cancer? Is she migrating to England or somewhere, leaving us all behind? The last thing we need right now is a detailed rendition of her account in print. Really - we need that like we need a hole in our heads.
Naturally, Kevin Rudd thinks her account is fiction. It's fair to say he is being provoked.
On Wednesday, Mr Rudd fired back at the woman who knifed him politically and took over the nation's top political job in June, 2010.
"Consistent with the past, Mr Rudd has no substantive comment to make on Ms Gillard's latest contribution to Australian fiction," Mr Rudd said through a spokesman. "The Australian people have long reached their own conclusions about Ms Gillard's relationship with the truth – from the coup to the carbon tax."
"They have also reached their own conclusions on Ms Gillard's continuing efforts to reconstruct a justification after the event for her actions in June 2010 by trying to dress up personal political ambition as some higher purpose for the party and the government."
Mr Rudd's former deputy prime minister, Anthony Albanese, moved to shut down discussion about the damaging political split that ultimately cost Labor government after just six years, during a National Press Club speech on Wednesday.
"People have their critics but the fact is that Julia Gillard is a friend of mine, she remains a friend of mine; Kevin Rudd is a friend of mine, he remains a friend of mine. I'm about looking towards the future," he said. "If the entire caucus was concentrating on the needs of the Labor government rather than internals every day then I might be here without shadow before my portfolio."At this point I want the both of them to fade back into history instead of trying to get their version out. It doesn't matter any more. Between the both of them, they managed to screw the pooch. The both of them need to make a sanguine appraisal of that bit of history and their lousy part in it. We, on the other hand, have the immensely ugly and hopelessly difficult task of living under the utterly insane Abbott Government - a disaster they played great part in ushering in.
2014/09/23
News That's Fit To Punt - 23/Sep/2014
It's Not The Burqa, Stupid
There are people making statements about the burqa and hijab, starting with Jacqui Lambie. It's a funny thing - now the National Party is complaining that their anti-burqa message is being garbled by Senator Lambie's efforts. There's now an Islamophobia hotline to boot because anti-muslim sentiment has gone up in the wake of the arrests of the ISIL//ISOR-sympathisers and their random-beheading plot.
It needs to be said, hounding women with these head dresses is hardly going to achieve anything towards achieving the defeat of ISIL//ISOR or towards World Peace. If we're going on about Sharia Law and who intolerant Islamist muslims are, then it's probably worth talking about other religions that have a highly intolerant branch. Judging muslims by the behaviour of ISIL//ISOR is like judging western society by the behaviour of Westboro Baptist Church. Complaining about the burqa is equally irrelevant as people who complained about bikinis. We've learned to live with bikinis, we'll learn to live with burqas.
Classical Music As Prestige Hobby
Pleiades sent in this story which deserves a bit of kicking around. It turns out that it wasn't just the ballerinas that got a reprieve from the Budget slashing knife wielded by Worst-Treasurer-Ever Joe Hockey; Melba Recordings which specialises in classical music recordings goat direct injection of $275,000 from the Federal Government, directly bypassing the Arts Council.
The story then tells us that Melba Recordings has been receiving Federal grant monies for a long time, and each and every time has been bypassing the Arts Council. This fact alone fills one with great mixed feeling - but I'll get on to that in a moment.
Like, the Attorney General's Office.
Jokes aside, you do wonder how valid it is to be spending money on a label of classical music, recorded in Australia by Australian musicians and artistes. On the one hand, it's good that there is a forum for classical musicians to get a go, recording stuff. Otherwise, it's forever going to be the cultural cringe of worshipping at the altar of 'Deutsche Grammophon' and 'ARKIV Produktion' and 'Decca Records' and all those wonderful, established recording houses in Europe. On the other hand you would think, if there's no market purchase whatsoever, it's in the same basket-case basket as Australian Film & Cinema. Why are we spending good money after bad to indifferent effect, pissing it into the wind when the very same government is screaming about cuts to everything worthwhile?
The mind boggles.
Equally, one understands what the funding selection criteria process would be like for a classical music label to undergo at the Arts Council. It would be a hard sell, and some weird-as left wing ideologue is bound to scuttle sending money to something so conservative and backward looking as a classical music label. They would have no shot - and as progressive and trendy-lefty as I am, the musician side of me wonders if the Arts Council should be the kind of arbiter body for something like this?
It would be really - make that tremendously - hard to make a case that an Australian playing 'The Goldberg Variations' on a harpsichord made in Australia was still culturally Australian in the way funding bodies like it. But is this a fair ruler with which to measure this kind of venture? Is this venture that lacking in national interest?
All the same, when you look at just how much money has been spent and how little money that's been made selling classical music from this label, one would have to conclude this is just this conservative Coalition wanking on spending public monies on something that belongs with private philanthropic enterprises. It says a lot about Australia that this sort of thing happens at all. Bottom line is this: why aren't Jamie Packer and/or Lachlan Murdoch forking out money for this instead of the government? What's wrong with these billionaires? Acute Philistinism perhaps?
There are people making statements about the burqa and hijab, starting with Jacqui Lambie. It's a funny thing - now the National Party is complaining that their anti-burqa message is being garbled by Senator Lambie's efforts. There's now an Islamophobia hotline to boot because anti-muslim sentiment has gone up in the wake of the arrests of the ISIL//ISOR-sympathisers and their random-beheading plot.
It needs to be said, hounding women with these head dresses is hardly going to achieve anything towards achieving the defeat of ISIL//ISOR or towards World Peace. If we're going on about Sharia Law and who intolerant Islamist muslims are, then it's probably worth talking about other religions that have a highly intolerant branch. Judging muslims by the behaviour of ISIL//ISOR is like judging western society by the behaviour of Westboro Baptist Church. Complaining about the burqa is equally irrelevant as people who complained about bikinis. We've learned to live with bikinis, we'll learn to live with burqas.
Classical Music As Prestige Hobby
Pleiades sent in this story which deserves a bit of kicking around. It turns out that it wasn't just the ballerinas that got a reprieve from the Budget slashing knife wielded by Worst-Treasurer-Ever Joe Hockey; Melba Recordings which specialises in classical music recordings goat direct injection of $275,000 from the Federal Government, directly bypassing the Arts Council.
The story then tells us that Melba Recordings has been receiving Federal grant monies for a long time, and each and every time has been bypassing the Arts Council. This fact alone fills one with great mixed feeling - but I'll get on to that in a moment.
ArtsHub reports that: “Melba’s last published financial statements appear to be from 2011-12. They paint a dismal picture. The foundation recorded a $566,704 loss on revenue of only $630,848, of which the Federal Government grant was $500,000 – an extraordinary subsidy ratio of approximately 79 per cent.”
“Melba’s sales record is equally glum. The 2012 annual report shows an “other” income, which appears to include CD sales, of only $39,225. Sales from earlier years were equally disappointing. In 2011 the foundation made only $18,000 and in 2010 as little as $3,500, according to a 2012 analysis by Samantha Randell, a researcher at the Association of Independent Records,” the website reported.The amazing thing about classical music is not the years of devotion and training it takes to master the technique, only to end up teaching the stuff or working in some cruddy orchestra as fifth violinist down the back or something; it's that it keeps finding patronage in the most extraordinary places.
Like, the Attorney General's Office.
Jokes aside, you do wonder how valid it is to be spending money on a label of classical music, recorded in Australia by Australian musicians and artistes. On the one hand, it's good that there is a forum for classical musicians to get a go, recording stuff. Otherwise, it's forever going to be the cultural cringe of worshipping at the altar of 'Deutsche Grammophon' and 'ARKIV Produktion' and 'Decca Records' and all those wonderful, established recording houses in Europe. On the other hand you would think, if there's no market purchase whatsoever, it's in the same basket-case basket as Australian Film & Cinema. Why are we spending good money after bad to indifferent effect, pissing it into the wind when the very same government is screaming about cuts to everything worthwhile?
The mind boggles.
Equally, one understands what the funding selection criteria process would be like for a classical music label to undergo at the Arts Council. It would be a hard sell, and some weird-as left wing ideologue is bound to scuttle sending money to something so conservative and backward looking as a classical music label. They would have no shot - and as progressive and trendy-lefty as I am, the musician side of me wonders if the Arts Council should be the kind of arbiter body for something like this?
It would be really - make that tremendously - hard to make a case that an Australian playing 'The Goldberg Variations' on a harpsichord made in Australia was still culturally Australian in the way funding bodies like it. But is this a fair ruler with which to measure this kind of venture? Is this venture that lacking in national interest?
All the same, when you look at just how much money has been spent and how little money that's been made selling classical music from this label, one would have to conclude this is just this conservative Coalition wanking on spending public monies on something that belongs with private philanthropic enterprises. It says a lot about Australia that this sort of thing happens at all. Bottom line is this: why aren't Jamie Packer and/or Lachlan Murdoch forking out money for this instead of the government? What's wrong with these billionaires? Acute Philistinism perhaps?
2014/09/22
Market Bears Lining Up
How Australia Looks From The outside
We must look like we're living in some cloud-cuckoo land to outside observers. We haven't had a year without economic growth for twenty-oddyears, and we sailed through the GFC without having serious market corrections in Real Estate. Our Equity markets haven't exactly recaptured the highs before the GFC but dividends have been robust. For an economy largely dependent on commodity exports, it simply looks like the GFC hasn't quite caught up with us.
With that in mind, it's almost refreshing to be told we will soon fall back to earth.
There's even a joke going around that if Mac Bank is handing out exorbitant pay packets to its top execs we must be close to the end of the cycle. You get the feeling that investors are heading for the door, and the outward momentum is building. If the RBA cuts rates next month, we'll know we're headed towards "ZIRP" - anything to keep asset prices up.
We must look like we're living in some cloud-cuckoo land to outside observers. We haven't had a year without economic growth for twenty-oddyears, and we sailed through the GFC without having serious market corrections in Real Estate. Our Equity markets haven't exactly recaptured the highs before the GFC but dividends have been robust. For an economy largely dependent on commodity exports, it simply looks like the GFC hasn't quite caught up with us.
With that in mind, it's almost refreshing to be told we will soon fall back to earth.
"Domestically, mining output is still strong, but investment in the sector is not, and iron ore prices are plummeting," wrote Roubini's local analyst David Nowakowski.
"Although some easing of China's credit crunch will help Australian exports in the short run, we see lower Chinese growth in 2015 as a headwind that will weaken Australia's growth and inflation next year, and weigh on growth-orientated assets such as equities and the Australian dollar."
Mr Nowakowski said flagging growth and low inflation would create room for the Reserve Bank of Australia to make a "cut or two in interest rates, to 2 per cent".
This would help drive the Australian dollar down as the US Federal Reserve started to lift interest rates, he said. "The Australian dollar is likely to weaken to below US75¢ - a fall of around 20 per cent - on a combination of the lower interest rate differential and slumping GDP growth, with commodity price effects outweighing volumes," he said.
The local unit was fetching about US89.50¢ in early afternoon trade on Monday, up slightly on the day. After recovering slightly throughout last week, the price of iron more settled down again on Friday at a new five-year low of $US81.70 a tonne.
The bearish Roubini report also identifies Australia's housing boom as "increasingly out of line with fundamentals", including demand for goods and services and the unemployment rate.Ah. So in amongst all that, Dr. Roubini thinks there's something wrong with the housing price boom. It's interesting to see this today of all days because the share market essentially has given up all the gains of 2014 to date. The Australian Dollar has been retreating significantly to below 90cents, hitting a 7month low today. Taken together withe collapse in iron ore prices and the wide-spread perception that China is finally about to crack, we might be about to see Dr. Roubini's scenario come true.
There's even a joke going around that if Mac Bank is handing out exorbitant pay packets to its top execs we must be close to the end of the cycle. You get the feeling that investors are heading for the door, and the outward momentum is building. If the RBA cuts rates next month, we'll know we're headed towards "ZIRP" - anything to keep asset prices up.
This Must Be The Week For Ex-PMs Airing Grievances
Dear John Howard... You Can STFU Too
If Julia Gillard offering up her analysis about her time in government wasn't painful enough yesterday, today we have the wretched John Howard offering up some spuds of stupidity and onions of opinions.
The first spud of stupidity is that he says he's 'embarrassed' about the WMDs not being there in Iraq. This is interesting because a lot of people died and got maimed for that mistake. John Howard insists the intelligence said in forceful language that the WMDs were there. I seem to recall at the time, Collin Powell was telling us that if we looked at the photographs closely enough, we could almost imagine there being WMDs on the ground.
Andrew Wilkie who once had to become a whistleblower on this very subject came forth and slammed John Howard saying he should be ashamed. This was peculiar. The man says he's embarrassed - presumably that's shameful enough. I mean, I don't rely get the political nuance difference between being embarrassed and being ashamed, that would some how "un-fuck the goat". I guess John Howard wants us to know that he didn't lie - because he's still wanting to be 'Honest John'. Well, thanks John Howard you're still racist prick in my books. Which brings me to this other bit:
Yes, just as I predicted there would be throng coming forth to slam multiculturalism in the wake of the arrests over the ISOR terrorists the other day, John Howard chose this moment to say he "wasn't a fan of the doctrine of multiculturalism". John Howard then goes on to say he doesn't believe in culture, he believes in races and people coming here to assimilate.
He even had something negative to say about Julia Gillard's big shining international moment, 'The Misgyny Speech'.
The fact that he wanted comment on it in that way spoke volumes about why he had to go and be consigned to history's dust bin. Except I thought this was self-evident in 1987, so I don't know why it took another 20 years for Australia to be finally done with him.
While he was in a mood to diss people and things left, right, and centre, he decided to tell us that Peter Costello didn't have the ticker to take over as Prime Minister. Well, thanks for that non-history lesson John Howard, we surmised that when Peter Costello pulled up stumps in a petulant frenzy and quit politics after that 2007 election.
No, really. With a cavalcade of wretched excuses for mistakes and insults for both Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, it was an interview we really didn't need. if they really want a say in all this, they should've stayed and fought on. It's the worst kind of commentary in a democracy.
And Then There's Bob Carr
Bob Carr wasn't happy that Julia Gillard said he was lazy.
I can't think of another time in the last 30years where politics equalled such misery-making. If you go back 40, I guess you get The Dismissal. This, is just The Dismal.
If Julia Gillard offering up her analysis about her time in government wasn't painful enough yesterday, today we have the wretched John Howard offering up some spuds of stupidity and onions of opinions.
The first spud of stupidity is that he says he's 'embarrassed' about the WMDs not being there in Iraq. This is interesting because a lot of people died and got maimed for that mistake. John Howard insists the intelligence said in forceful language that the WMDs were there. I seem to recall at the time, Collin Powell was telling us that if we looked at the photographs closely enough, we could almost imagine there being WMDs on the ground.
Andrew Wilkie who once had to become a whistleblower on this very subject came forth and slammed John Howard saying he should be ashamed. This was peculiar. The man says he's embarrassed - presumably that's shameful enough. I mean, I don't rely get the political nuance difference between being embarrassed and being ashamed, that would some how "un-fuck the goat". I guess John Howard wants us to know that he didn't lie - because he's still wanting to be 'Honest John'. Well, thanks John Howard you're still racist prick in my books. Which brings me to this other bit:
Yes, just as I predicted there would be throng coming forth to slam multiculturalism in the wake of the arrests over the ISOR terrorists the other day, John Howard chose this moment to say he "wasn't a fan of the doctrine of multiculturalism". John Howard then goes on to say he doesn't believe in culture, he believes in races and people coming here to assimilate.
He also weighed back into multiculturalism. Howard in the 1980s was a trenchant public critic of multiculturalism and argued for a reduction in Asian immigration. He later recanted the position on reducing Asian immigration.
“I’m not an overwhelming fan of the doctrine of multiculturalism, I believe in multi-racialism, I believe in bringing people from different races, different religions to this country but once you’re here, you’ve got to become part of the mainstream of the community,” he said. “I think over the years we’ve dropped off a bit too much.”
On Sunday night he argued now was not the time to debate the level of immigration from the Middle East - but he remained critical of the term multiculturalism.
“I think it’s a confusing term, what does it mean? It means different things to different people” he said. Howard contended we needed to “try harder” to integrate communities of different ethnicity into Australian society.Which is to say, he's a racist and an unreconstructed colonialist bully - which we already knew but there he is again flying the flag for all the racist dingbat boys and girls to go riot in Cronulla. Way to go John, now wrap yourself in a flag and choke.
He even had something negative to say about Julia Gillard's big shining international moment, 'The Misgyny Speech'.
“I thought that was nonsense … the idea that Tony Abbott is anti-women is ridiculous,” he said. Howard said that type of posturing discouraged women from entering politics when more are needed in the parliament, though he said it should not be through quotas. He said Gillard’s speech “did not resonate” with women he knew.Note, "women" he "knew". I rest my case.
The fact that he wanted comment on it in that way spoke volumes about why he had to go and be consigned to history's dust bin. Except I thought this was self-evident in 1987, so I don't know why it took another 20 years for Australia to be finally done with him.
While he was in a mood to diss people and things left, right, and centre, he decided to tell us that Peter Costello didn't have the ticker to take over as Prime Minister. Well, thanks for that non-history lesson John Howard, we surmised that when Peter Costello pulled up stumps in a petulant frenzy and quit politics after that 2007 election.
No, really. With a cavalcade of wretched excuses for mistakes and insults for both Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, it was an interview we really didn't need. if they really want a say in all this, they should've stayed and fought on. It's the worst kind of commentary in a democracy.
And Then There's Bob Carr
Bob Carr wasn't happy that Julia Gillard said he was lazy.
Bob Carr has suggested Julia Gillard's claim that he was a "lazy" foreign minister for Labor could be payback for his decision to switch his support to her leadership rival Kevin Rudd before the 2013 federal election.
And Mr Carr has denied admitting that he struggled to keep up with the demands of modern politics because he was more settled into his retirement than he realised.What do you do? What are we to make of this? Bob Carr isn't exactly somebody who acquitted themselves very well in the last ALP Government. If anything, he's one of those people who should be copping it sweet and slinking off to enjoy his bountiful retirement cheques courtesy of the taxpayer. All of these people, John Howard, Bob Carr, Julia Gillard, need to shut the fuck up and get out of our faces.
I can't think of another time in the last 30years where politics equalled such misery-making. If you go back 40, I guess you get The Dismissal. This, is just The Dismal.
2014/09/21
Dear Julia Gillard... Please STFU
Please Go Into The Night Quietly
Ugh.
If there was one single reason we're having to suffer a Tony Abbott government, it would be because the ALP managed to lose so much ground in 2 terms that nothing was going to get them back into government for a third term - not even a looming Tony Abbott Coalition Government. I don't know how to couch it any other way. Julia Gillard said a good government had lost its way but my memory of it was that she made sure it lost its way and picked her moment to do the Brutus. Everything else is blithe commentary. That includes all the good things Julia Gillard was supposed to have done as Prime Minister, and how well she navigated the hung Parliament and all else.
It just didn't matter then, it matters even less now - the disaster has befallen truly and squarely.
However the jury of history comes in to pronounce its verdict on the Rudd-Gillard government years, one thing that is already certain is that they fucked it up so bad, it brought on the unthinkable. And one year on from that fateful election, all of Australia is still living under the dreaded lobotomised ignorant cynical corporatist Abbott Government. That's all thanks to the ALP for coughing up their lead. Did they choke? Did they lose their minds? Did they decide to martyr themselves on their self-image? All I know is that between the lot of them, they screwed things up solidly, wilfully and painfully - and it's not going to get unscrewed any time soon.
With all of that in mind, I have to say, it really doesn't help for Julia Gillard to bob up and say things like this:
When I recently moved my blog back over, I had the opportunity to read a number of entries from those years and it brought back the sense of quiet desperation that the ALP was simply losing the game by kicking own goals. Except it wasn't a game, and we weren't punters, we were citizens watching in horror.
Quite frankly, it wasn't the tactical things that let her and her government down. It was the inability to do things as a political party in government, as a political party in government should - in other words straight up competence as politicians, and the absence thereof - that let them down. Today, we live with the ongoing misery and inanity and banality-of-evil that is the Abbott Government. It is terrible, it is awful, it is humiliating, it is embarrassing. But it needs to be said loudly and clearly, that Julia Gillard and her ALP government by dint of their deeds were instrumental in bringing about this horror.
So Ms. Gillard, I know you were summoned back into the public eye by the stupid Royal Commission, but please go back to wherever you were hiding and shut the fuck up until at least the Abbott Prime Minister-ship is well and truly over.
Ugh.
If there was one single reason we're having to suffer a Tony Abbott government, it would be because the ALP managed to lose so much ground in 2 terms that nothing was going to get them back into government for a third term - not even a looming Tony Abbott Coalition Government. I don't know how to couch it any other way. Julia Gillard said a good government had lost its way but my memory of it was that she made sure it lost its way and picked her moment to do the Brutus. Everything else is blithe commentary. That includes all the good things Julia Gillard was supposed to have done as Prime Minister, and how well she navigated the hung Parliament and all else.
It just didn't matter then, it matters even less now - the disaster has befallen truly and squarely.
However the jury of history comes in to pronounce its verdict on the Rudd-Gillard government years, one thing that is already certain is that they fucked it up so bad, it brought on the unthinkable. And one year on from that fateful election, all of Australia is still living under the dreaded lobotomised ignorant cynical corporatist Abbott Government. That's all thanks to the ALP for coughing up their lead. Did they choke? Did they lose their minds? Did they decide to martyr themselves on their self-image? All I know is that between the lot of them, they screwed things up solidly, wilfully and painfully - and it's not going to get unscrewed any time soon.
With all of that in mind, I have to say, it really doesn't help for Julia Gillard to bob up and say things like this:
"If anything, the reputation I have from that night is one of political brutality," she says. "Actually, in the moment I was hesitant, a conversation went too long, I certainly fed [Mr Rudd] hope. I shouldn't have done that."
"I know a lot now about what it feels like to lose the prime ministership, so I expected him to feel very, very battered and bruised," she says. "Obviously I was wrong about that."
The former prime minister, whose memoirs are due to be launched this week, also laments her infamous comment during the 2010 election campaign that it was "time for me to make sure that the real Julia is well and truly on display". The remark opened Ms Gillard up to ridicule from the Coalition and raised questions about her political strategy.
"I put my hand up for that 100 per cent," she says. "That's my fault, you know, sort of dumb, dumb error, rookie error maybe. I mean, I wasn't a rookie in politics, I was a rookie at being prime minister."You get the feeling she is trying to mount an argument that it was tactical things that got out of hand. Except I can't really recall the grand strategy bit in her prime ministership. I don't mean to dump on her legacy and achievement more than is necessary, but it has to be said the current jackasses are doing their utmost to unwind a good deal of it, and some of that ground will be lost forever. So it comes back to asking, just where exactly did she think the centre sat in all of this?
When I recently moved my blog back over, I had the opportunity to read a number of entries from those years and it brought back the sense of quiet desperation that the ALP was simply losing the game by kicking own goals. Except it wasn't a game, and we weren't punters, we were citizens watching in horror.
Quite frankly, it wasn't the tactical things that let her and her government down. It was the inability to do things as a political party in government, as a political party in government should - in other words straight up competence as politicians, and the absence thereof - that let them down. Today, we live with the ongoing misery and inanity and banality-of-evil that is the Abbott Government. It is terrible, it is awful, it is humiliating, it is embarrassing. But it needs to be said loudly and clearly, that Julia Gillard and her ALP government by dint of their deeds were instrumental in bringing about this horror.
So Ms. Gillard, I know you were summoned back into the public eye by the stupid Royal Commission, but please go back to wherever you were hiding and shut the fuck up until at least the Abbott Prime Minister-ship is well and truly over.
ISOR = Islamic Sickos Of Rape
Islamist Sickos
They're doing some terrible things in the new Caliphate. There's the beheadings they video and post onYouTube, there's the mass murder and pit graves thing they've done with their prisoners, the slavery they've packed the women and children off into, and this whole business of Koran-or-the-sword with the very narrow-minded version of Islam they're throwing around.
And then there's this.
The thing is, with the beheadings and the mass murders, they were trying to put a political point across. It doesn't make it okay, but the rationale has its own logic. It's terrorism. They're busy putting the terror into terrorism. Our society is so delicate and sensitive, it censors 'Salo', a movie based on the fiction of '120 Days of Sodom'. These people are doing it for real. Still, when you go around setting up a rape prison that's something that can be straight out of a book by the Marquis de Sade, that's just gratuitous sexual violence. What possible rationale could there be but out-and-out depravity?
This leads me to think that maybe war is justified. Maybe we can't just sit idly by and let this medieval savagery mixed with a Sadist Dystopia flourish, and still call ourselves civilised. We have to draw the line somewhere in the sand, otherwise there's no point in having institutions like the UN or the Hague.
But then I seem to recall we said the same sort of things about Saddam Hussein - and that turned out to be this current bit of mess. Tony Abbott is rarely right, but he did have it pegged when he described Syria as baddies fighting baddies. One does not necessarily get involved with the enemy fighting its enemy, and the enemy-of-an-enemy is still your enemy. But here we are, sending troops, right into this conflagration.
It's as if the Middle East is this kind of whirlpool of human misery and the rest of the world simply can't help but be sucked into it, gurgling all the way down. We in the first world would much prefer to sit in the comfort of our suburban existence but the world is simply dragging us off to face the black hole of human consciousness. It's terrifying and nauseating. This war with the the Islamic State of Rapists - or ISOR as I now like to now call them - is going to be a stomach turning existential nightmare.
They're doing some terrible things in the new Caliphate. There's the beheadings they video and post onYouTube, there's the mass murder and pit graves thing they've done with their prisoners, the slavery they've packed the women and children off into, and this whole business of Koran-or-the-sword with the very narrow-minded version of Islam they're throwing around.
And then there's this.
The stories have a sickening similarity. After sustained aerial attack, when soldiers walk into newly emptied, dusty streets in Iraq, dotted with dead bodies and mangled car carcasses, they have found naked women, bound and left on the ground, who have been raped repeatedly.
Then there are the three "rooms of horror" in Mosul prison where clusters of women have been kept locked up and raped at will.
Army chief Lieutenant-General David Morrison told me he is "disgusted" by the reports of sustained sexual violence. The ADF has already begun training its forces to be prepared to confront the aftermath of rape in wars.I don't know about you, but I kind of draw the line when it comes to extending an understanding sort of hand. In a nutshell, these IS people are enacting a real life version of '120 Days of Sodom'. I don't know what the rationale is - I'm not going to be sympathetic with any religious claptrap - when you set up a rape-prison, you're on your own. Justice will come looking for you and it won't be playing nice.
The thing is, with the beheadings and the mass murders, they were trying to put a political point across. It doesn't make it okay, but the rationale has its own logic. It's terrorism. They're busy putting the terror into terrorism. Our society is so delicate and sensitive, it censors 'Salo', a movie based on the fiction of '120 Days of Sodom'. These people are doing it for real. Still, when you go around setting up a rape prison that's something that can be straight out of a book by the Marquis de Sade, that's just gratuitous sexual violence. What possible rationale could there be but out-and-out depravity?
This leads me to think that maybe war is justified. Maybe we can't just sit idly by and let this medieval savagery mixed with a Sadist Dystopia flourish, and still call ourselves civilised. We have to draw the line somewhere in the sand, otherwise there's no point in having institutions like the UN or the Hague.
But then I seem to recall we said the same sort of things about Saddam Hussein - and that turned out to be this current bit of mess. Tony Abbott is rarely right, but he did have it pegged when he described Syria as baddies fighting baddies. One does not necessarily get involved with the enemy fighting its enemy, and the enemy-of-an-enemy is still your enemy. But here we are, sending troops, right into this conflagration.
It's as if the Middle East is this kind of whirlpool of human misery and the rest of the world simply can't help but be sucked into it, gurgling all the way down. We in the first world would much prefer to sit in the comfort of our suburban existence but the world is simply dragging us off to face the black hole of human consciousness. It's terrifying and nauseating. This war with the the Islamic State of Rapists - or ISOR as I now like to now call them - is going to be a stomach turning existential nightmare.
2014/09/20
View From The Couch - 19/Sep/2014
I Was Wrong (Again!)
Some time ago before Tony Abbott came to power, I made the awful observation that a Tony Abbott Prime Ministership may well be a DLP government with all kinds of BA Santamaria-like notions making their way in to the Liberal Party position. That, even if Abbot had own, in some ways the Labor party in one guise or another would leave an imprint on things.
One year along, I have to admit, that was totally hopeful, wishful ,idiotically optimistic blather; clearly it was one of those stages of grief called negotiation. During the process of moving the blog back here, I had to confront the reality that as awful as the Gillard ALP government got, nothing could have prepared us for the ongoing enormous clusterfuck that is the Abbott government. For that I cannot apologise to my readers enough.
It was always going to be bad; it is bad, and it's not going to get better - just worse.
No Such Thing As An Energy Superpower
Pleiades sent in this article about how this notion of an energy superpower is misguided.
Be that is it may, the whole point of having energy in proximity to other resources for doing things as a benefit, has been shot out of the water. We certainly don't do steel any more, and this is in spite of iron ore being as abundant as coal. We don't do chemicals and chemicals is intensive on gas - and we sell what we have already and it's over-priced. Building materials is the third plank but of course this stuff weighs too much to be shipped around the globe - so as with steel it's not really going to be an export winner.
Therefore it's worth noting this bit:
How Risks Layer Up
There was a bit of argy-bargy this week about whether Australia's banking sector is in fact healthy. It's implicitly tied up with whether the big 4 banks are borrowing too much, and further still, whether they are lending out to the wrong areas, feeding a bubble in property (although the worst-treasurer-ever Joe Hockey says it's not a bubble, it's just a shortness of supply). I'm no economist so it's hard to go to charts and demonstrate how the risks are layering up, but I think I can offer up some issues that might make people a little more concerned.
The news this week included reports that house prices are up in Sydney and Melbourne, but the majority of buying was done by investors. First time buyers have declined to historic lows. This suggests - no let's be more blunt - this underlines the fact that the worst-treasuer-ever Joe Hockey is entirely wrong in his statement that it is a shortness of supply. Again, going back to the definition where price inflation is too much money chasing too few assets, it's easier to explain that the ordinary dwelling-buyer has receded to give ground to speculators who are chasing the short supply, pushing up prices. Whether one calls this price inflation a bubble or not is academic next to the rampant speculation going on in the property market.
Amazingly, banks want to be in this market rather than in the business of lending to businesses. So instead of lending to a business that might want to invest in capital and ratchet up production, banks have lined up to lend money to people who are flipping houses. Not only are they doing it as fast as they can, they're doing it as big as they can. It has the net effect of making banks look bigger because they're lending out more money to cover the same few positions. Once again, you see the definition of inflation right there. It's a misallocation of capital.
Here's the thing. If people are using their self-manage super funds to be in property to speculate, that's one thing. But ordinary people have superannuation in funds, which in most part are exposed to equities and indexed, so they too would be exposed to banks. The ordinary folks might even be exposed to REITs who also borrow heavily and put money into property. And every week/month/quarter, the super money keeps going into these funds and gets dispersed and invested, which largely goes to chasing the ever-diminishing pool of assets, pushing up prices even more.
Just for the sake of the argument, even if there isn't a bubble in property, that's a lot of risks lining up onto property. Consider for a moment the mining construction boom is over, manufacturing is beating a retreat under the Abbott government; retail is hurting thanks to competition from on-line merchants,; agriculture is getting bought out by overseas entities in an ever increasing rate; just why should finance and property be so far ahead of the curve when the rest of economy is crawling along? If the whole of Australia is growing at around 3%, wages aren't growing at all, why should property be growing at a 15-18% clip, if not but for a misallocation of capital?
Not only that, what happens when there is a crisis to the banks? A lot of debt positions are going to be wound up and a lot of it is going to happen in the property market first. Not only will property prices be hit, banks will look insecure, the stock market will crash and take people's superannuation with it. The Australian government will probably do everything it can to keep prices inflated, but that's essentially where we are at in Europe and Japan. Nobody wants to take a hit on their major asset, so everybody agrees to socialise the losses and cut welfare.
Do people really think the worst-treasuer-ever Joe Hockey is credible when he says there isn't a property bubble in Australia? Oh, and by the way, we've gone to war now.
Some time ago before Tony Abbott came to power, I made the awful observation that a Tony Abbott Prime Ministership may well be a DLP government with all kinds of BA Santamaria-like notions making their way in to the Liberal Party position. That, even if Abbot had own, in some ways the Labor party in one guise or another would leave an imprint on things.
One year along, I have to admit, that was totally hopeful, wishful ,idiotically optimistic blather; clearly it was one of those stages of grief called negotiation. During the process of moving the blog back here, I had to confront the reality that as awful as the Gillard ALP government got, nothing could have prepared us for the ongoing enormous clusterfuck that is the Abbott government. For that I cannot apologise to my readers enough.
It was always going to be bad; it is bad, and it's not going to get better - just worse.
No Such Thing As An Energy Superpower
Pleiades sent in this article about how this notion of an energy superpower is misguided.
Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry gave a speech on Tuesday outlining the danger that we have fallen under the spell of a narrative which says the route to economic prosperity is built on exports above all else.
Henry pointed out that a focus on improving the competitiveness of our exporters was a good thing, but this was part of achieving the final end-game – improving both present and future Australians’ overall quality of life. Henry noted that this focus on exporters was very useful in helping the general public to see the value in a range of economic reforms which unfolded over the 1980s. Yet these reforms were, in fact, great for the economy as a whole – not just exporters. However, he was worried this heavy emphasis on export competitiveness was now acting to distort public debate in ways which distracted us from the final end-game.
Unfortunately, this government is in real danger of falling for a sub-narrative related to this, one that has its roots in the 1970s but doesn’t make sense today.
A range of statements from this government seem to suggest it believes that Australia’s economic prosperity and competitive advantage rides upon the availability of cheap energy for domestic use.Because the Abbott government is basically a mouthpiece for the corporate control of this country and wants to do the bidding of the rich mining magnates - except Clive who went into politics instead of simply buying it - we keep getting this distorted view that somehow mining and its support industries are somehow the most important thing in the Australian economy. Hence the twin repeals of Carbon Pricing and Mining Rent Resources Tax can be made to look like important planks of an imaginary tax reform agenda when in fact all it does is absolve the same mining magnates from having to pay tax for their polluting ways and pay less on their excess royalties.
Be that is it may, the whole point of having energy in proximity to other resources for doing things as a benefit, has been shot out of the water. We certainly don't do steel any more, and this is in spite of iron ore being as abundant as coal. We don't do chemicals and chemicals is intensive on gas - and we sell what we have already and it's over-priced. Building materials is the third plank but of course this stuff weighs too much to be shipped around the globe - so as with steel it's not really going to be an export winner.
Therefore it's worth noting this bit:
Even if Australia’s major competitive advantage is cheap energy and, particularly, cheap electricity for domestic use – it ain’t worth much. What does seem to be far more valuable is the exporting of energy to others.
If Abbott and Macfarlane think we’re going to get rich on the back of being an affordable energy superpower they’re fooling themselves. So time to abandon that narrative.And that just about sums it up. This illustrates yet another way in which this current government really has no idea what it is doing with industrial policy.
How Risks Layer Up
There was a bit of argy-bargy this week about whether Australia's banking sector is in fact healthy. It's implicitly tied up with whether the big 4 banks are borrowing too much, and further still, whether they are lending out to the wrong areas, feeding a bubble in property (although the worst-treasurer-ever Joe Hockey says it's not a bubble, it's just a shortness of supply). I'm no economist so it's hard to go to charts and demonstrate how the risks are layering up, but I think I can offer up some issues that might make people a little more concerned.
The news this week included reports that house prices are up in Sydney and Melbourne, but the majority of buying was done by investors. First time buyers have declined to historic lows. This suggests - no let's be more blunt - this underlines the fact that the worst-treasuer-ever Joe Hockey is entirely wrong in his statement that it is a shortness of supply. Again, going back to the definition where price inflation is too much money chasing too few assets, it's easier to explain that the ordinary dwelling-buyer has receded to give ground to speculators who are chasing the short supply, pushing up prices. Whether one calls this price inflation a bubble or not is academic next to the rampant speculation going on in the property market.
Amazingly, banks want to be in this market rather than in the business of lending to businesses. So instead of lending to a business that might want to invest in capital and ratchet up production, banks have lined up to lend money to people who are flipping houses. Not only are they doing it as fast as they can, they're doing it as big as they can. It has the net effect of making banks look bigger because they're lending out more money to cover the same few positions. Once again, you see the definition of inflation right there. It's a misallocation of capital.
Here's the thing. If people are using their self-manage super funds to be in property to speculate, that's one thing. But ordinary people have superannuation in funds, which in most part are exposed to equities and indexed, so they too would be exposed to banks. The ordinary folks might even be exposed to REITs who also borrow heavily and put money into property. And every week/month/quarter, the super money keeps going into these funds and gets dispersed and invested, which largely goes to chasing the ever-diminishing pool of assets, pushing up prices even more.
Just for the sake of the argument, even if there isn't a bubble in property, that's a lot of risks lining up onto property. Consider for a moment the mining construction boom is over, manufacturing is beating a retreat under the Abbott government; retail is hurting thanks to competition from on-line merchants,; agriculture is getting bought out by overseas entities in an ever increasing rate; just why should finance and property be so far ahead of the curve when the rest of economy is crawling along? If the whole of Australia is growing at around 3%, wages aren't growing at all, why should property be growing at a 15-18% clip, if not but for a misallocation of capital?
Not only that, what happens when there is a crisis to the banks? A lot of debt positions are going to be wound up and a lot of it is going to happen in the property market first. Not only will property prices be hit, banks will look insecure, the stock market will crash and take people's superannuation with it. The Australian government will probably do everything it can to keep prices inflated, but that's essentially where we are at in Europe and Japan. Nobody wants to take a hit on their major asset, so everybody agrees to socialise the losses and cut welfare.
Do people really think the worst-treasuer-ever Joe Hockey is credible when he says there isn't a property bubble in Australia? Oh, and by the way, we've gone to war now.
2014/09/19
Quick Shots 18/Sep/2014
The Sort-of-Zeppelin Album
I've got myself a copy of "Three Week Hero" by PJ Proby. "Three Week Hero" is that rare album that boasts Led Zeppelin as the session musicians, just as they were on the cusp of turning into Led Zeppelin from being the New Yardbirds. The story is well told so it's not worth rehashing but basically Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones had one last session to do as session musicians and they pulled in the rest of Led Zeppelin - Robert Plant and John Bonham - to round out the backing band.
The funny thing is that it's immediately obvious it's the guys from Zeppelin doing their thing. The instruments are the very same that feature on 'Led Zeppelin I'. The music itself is hopelessly psychedelic hippy-ism so the band just trundles along. The octane value never goes up so the album never grooves or kicks like 'Led Zeppelin I', so it's an odd experience. I guess it's a record that shows how soul destroying session work would have been.
PJ Proby made the observation that he never saw the guys from the band again. I have a hunch I might never listen to this album again.
The Human Stamp Collection Album
The other CD I got form Amazon is this little number. Lots of people from 70s and 80s prog acts make an appearance on this album.I've had it for a couple of days in the car and it's got its moments. It's certainly better than 'Heaven and Earth' by Yes, namely because it actually has a pulse.
It's sort of got a great collection of Bass players going, with Chris Squire, Tony Levin and John Wetton making an appearance. Steve Hillage is also on it as are Rick Wakeman and Geoff Downes. Better still, when they come on, you can instantly tell it's them, which is really cool. Somebody has to make prog albums.
Spiritual BS For The Musically Inclined
I've been trying to get a hold of Rudolf Steiner's lectures on music for some years now. The quest started when I went through a phase of listening to lots and lots of Glenn Gould playing Bach and Oscar peterson playing jazz and Steve Vai playing his way-out guitar. I kind of talked myself into a concept frenzy of reaching for the esoteric in music through music and of course nobody had written anything about such notions except tangentially, Rudolf Steiner's lectures kept being referenced.
Well, here they are in one book and it makes for some seriously whacky - nay whacked out- reading. I can't say I ascribe, say, any of my music to spiritual states of my mind and dreaming lucidly in my sleep. And I sure as heck don't know if Steiner was even passingly familiar with jazz or blues (he was too early in history for rock), so there's really nothing of practical value here, but it does show somebody trying to write something about music without actually being a musician. It's weird - a bit like if I wrote a book on architecture or woodblock printing and ascribed all the creative process to sleeping and lucid dreaming. You'd think I'd gone nuts. Well, that's how nutty this book is.
I've got myself a copy of "Three Week Hero" by PJ Proby. "Three Week Hero" is that rare album that boasts Led Zeppelin as the session musicians, just as they were on the cusp of turning into Led Zeppelin from being the New Yardbirds. The story is well told so it's not worth rehashing but basically Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones had one last session to do as session musicians and they pulled in the rest of Led Zeppelin - Robert Plant and John Bonham - to round out the backing band.
The funny thing is that it's immediately obvious it's the guys from Zeppelin doing their thing. The instruments are the very same that feature on 'Led Zeppelin I'. The music itself is hopelessly psychedelic hippy-ism so the band just trundles along. The octane value never goes up so the album never grooves or kicks like 'Led Zeppelin I', so it's an odd experience. I guess it's a record that shows how soul destroying session work would have been.
PJ Proby made the observation that he never saw the guys from the band again. I have a hunch I might never listen to this album again.
The Human Stamp Collection Album
The other CD I got form Amazon is this little number. Lots of people from 70s and 80s prog acts make an appearance on this album.I've had it for a couple of days in the car and it's got its moments. It's certainly better than 'Heaven and Earth' by Yes, namely because it actually has a pulse.
It's sort of got a great collection of Bass players going, with Chris Squire, Tony Levin and John Wetton making an appearance. Steve Hillage is also on it as are Rick Wakeman and Geoff Downes. Better still, when they come on, you can instantly tell it's them, which is really cool. Somebody has to make prog albums.
Spiritual BS For The Musically Inclined
I've been trying to get a hold of Rudolf Steiner's lectures on music for some years now. The quest started when I went through a phase of listening to lots and lots of Glenn Gould playing Bach and Oscar peterson playing jazz and Steve Vai playing his way-out guitar. I kind of talked myself into a concept frenzy of reaching for the esoteric in music through music and of course nobody had written anything about such notions except tangentially, Rudolf Steiner's lectures kept being referenced.
Well, here they are in one book and it makes for some seriously whacky - nay whacked out- reading. I can't say I ascribe, say, any of my music to spiritual states of my mind and dreaming lucidly in my sleep. And I sure as heck don't know if Steiner was even passingly familiar with jazz or blues (he was too early in history for rock), so there's really nothing of practical value here, but it does show somebody trying to write something about music without actually being a musician. It's weird - a bit like if I wrote a book on architecture or woodblock printing and ascribed all the creative process to sleeping and lucid dreaming. You'd think I'd gone nuts. Well, that's how nutty this book is.
2014/09/18
It's War At Home
Sheikh-ing All Over
Okay, bad gag. But you know what I mean. Today's big news is that upward of 800 Federal and State police were involved in multiple busts of alleged terror cells sympathetic to the ISIS/ISIL//Caliphate. Thwarted by the AFP was a plot to randomly snatch somebody in Martin Place and behead them as a demonstration. The mind boggles, but there you have it. The imagery is almost something out of a comic book tending to gore rather than strictures from scripture. Basically some people out there were being wire-tapped and they plotted to do something savage and stupid, so the AFP got them.
This would be the moment we're supposed to praise the terror laws, including the APEC laws which had (and continue to have ) no sunset clause. I know, we forgot all about them - even I forgot about them until I started moving back here to Blogger - but these same snooping spook laws would have been the ones deployed to nab these ISIS/ISIL/Caliphate sympathisers.
Thanks to the efforts of the AFP, nobody random got beheaded in Martin Place. It's so good to be alert but not alarmed!
Multiculturalism Is Not The Problem
You're going to read it in the papers soon where people are going to take this little conspiracy of crazies as a sign that multiculturalism "failed" in Australia. They're winding up to throw their best junk ball pitch right now as I type this. You know those opportunistic xenophobes are out there.
There's really a simple explanation for this phenomenon of angry radicalisation of these muslim youths: it's cultural alienation. It's really hard growing upon anglo Australia and all the heroes of masculinity are blonde sporting gods or whatever. It's hard growing upon the west when all the movies and TV shows portray your cultural heritage as the potential enemy. A kid from a muslim family will inevitably live in a kind of cultural shadow. Not much gets done to bring them in from the cultural alienation, which explains why a distant call-to-arms may appeal so strongly to these youths.
Australian multi-culturalism is a bit of a fudge. The big demand put on immigrants is that they give up on their cultural heritage and go naked, and instead don the shallow cultural, icons of a largely artificial nation. It's a difficult call. in some ways the cultural distance and chasm is unimaginably large, and unfathomably deep. I don't condone people who run to radicalism as a desperate ploy to shore up self esteem but it's not like I'm without empathy for their plight. They don't need our sympathy - yet they do need us to understand them a lot more.
It's tough to navigate this stuff in Australia and establish a sense of identity. It's hard to feel like you belong in a place that denies you your history or metaphysics. People may say they need to get over it, but it's not easy getting over your family heritage.
Worse still are the people who go around pointing to this sort of thing as a reason way multiculturalism "fails". They say the failure to assimilate is the ultimate failure - but it is often spoken by people who have never experienced any alienation in their lives. Rich white people who went to distinguished private schools, selling down the prospect of people finding a place in Australia because they don't abandon everything that came with them in their cultural suitcase, are not helping.
At best, multi-culturalism in Australia sets up a halfway house safe zone where people can feel a certain amount of legitimacy in holding on to the things that are important from their origins. If the rich white people didn't bleat so loudly about the alleged failure of multiculturalism in Australia, maybe the children of these immigrants wouldn't feel the need to radicalise in the shadows.
Okay, bad gag. But you know what I mean. Today's big news is that upward of 800 Federal and State police were involved in multiple busts of alleged terror cells sympathetic to the ISIS/ISIL//Caliphate. Thwarted by the AFP was a plot to randomly snatch somebody in Martin Place and behead them as a demonstration. The mind boggles, but there you have it. The imagery is almost something out of a comic book tending to gore rather than strictures from scripture. Basically some people out there were being wire-tapped and they plotted to do something savage and stupid, so the AFP got them.
This would be the moment we're supposed to praise the terror laws, including the APEC laws which had (and continue to have ) no sunset clause. I know, we forgot all about them - even I forgot about them until I started moving back here to Blogger - but these same snooping spook laws would have been the ones deployed to nab these ISIS/ISIL/Caliphate sympathisers.
Thanks to the efforts of the AFP, nobody random got beheaded in Martin Place. It's so good to be alert but not alarmed!
Multiculturalism Is Not The Problem
You're going to read it in the papers soon where people are going to take this little conspiracy of crazies as a sign that multiculturalism "failed" in Australia. They're winding up to throw their best junk ball pitch right now as I type this. You know those opportunistic xenophobes are out there.
There's really a simple explanation for this phenomenon of angry radicalisation of these muslim youths: it's cultural alienation. It's really hard growing upon anglo Australia and all the heroes of masculinity are blonde sporting gods or whatever. It's hard growing upon the west when all the movies and TV shows portray your cultural heritage as the potential enemy. A kid from a muslim family will inevitably live in a kind of cultural shadow. Not much gets done to bring them in from the cultural alienation, which explains why a distant call-to-arms may appeal so strongly to these youths.
Australian multi-culturalism is a bit of a fudge. The big demand put on immigrants is that they give up on their cultural heritage and go naked, and instead don the shallow cultural, icons of a largely artificial nation. It's a difficult call. in some ways the cultural distance and chasm is unimaginably large, and unfathomably deep. I don't condone people who run to radicalism as a desperate ploy to shore up self esteem but it's not like I'm without empathy for their plight. They don't need our sympathy - yet they do need us to understand them a lot more.
It's tough to navigate this stuff in Australia and establish a sense of identity. It's hard to feel like you belong in a place that denies you your history or metaphysics. People may say they need to get over it, but it's not easy getting over your family heritage.
Worse still are the people who go around pointing to this sort of thing as a reason way multiculturalism "fails". They say the failure to assimilate is the ultimate failure - but it is often spoken by people who have never experienced any alienation in their lives. Rich white people who went to distinguished private schools, selling down the prospect of people finding a place in Australia because they don't abandon everything that came with them in their cultural suitcase, are not helping.
At best, multi-culturalism in Australia sets up a halfway house safe zone where people can feel a certain amount of legitimacy in holding on to the things that are important from their origins. If the rich white people didn't bleat so loudly about the alleged failure of multiculturalism in Australia, maybe the children of these immigrants wouldn't feel the need to radicalise in the shadows.
2014/09/17
It's War (Again)
I'm Away From Blogging For A Week And You Start A War?
Most of the wars since 1901 have been declared one way or another. The ones that weren't tended to be way too short or way too locking in legitimacy to gain popular support. At least this is what history books told you.
This week I found myself asking myself "hang on, did we just go to war? With the Islamic State?" I don't know about you, but it seemed that was exactly what has happened. It was odd that one minute Tony Abbott was going on about raising the terror alert to 'high' and the next thing you know we're sending planes and pilots and military advisers to Iraq, in order to fight the IS.
The ALP took a bipartisan stand against IS, but I don't think they really debated any point before the troops were dispatched. It was almost as if the flurry of activity to send troops and planes and bombs overwhelmed our poor little Prime Minister's head he forgot to actually declare war. Or perhaps it was simply that they do not wish to confer upon ISIS/ISIL/ /Islamic State/The Caliphate (and whatever else it wants to call itself) a proper stately status. And so it is off to war we go.
I don't want to say this too loudly but the whole blogging thing for me started about the time the West decided to go to Iraq in the first place so coming back here to blogger and seeing a war kicking off in Iraq again makes it all 'Deja Vu All Over Again'.
A lot of theories are going around about just what is going on with IS. All the beheadings and mass murder of prisoners hasn't exactly endeared themselves to the world, and the whole propaganda they are running to recruit Islamists to fight with them, is entirely hostile to just about everybody except other violent Islamists. Rumour has it that IS were the Islamists that even Al-Qaeda thought were too hard core. Now they have oil and they're selling the stuff on the black market to the tune of US$2m a day. Statehood can be lucrative if you can get yourself an Iraqi oil well.
Beheadings and mass killings in this day and age really is over the top and harks back to medieval horrors. The fact that they do this on video and post it on YouTube makes you appreciate just how far we haven't come from the year 1014AD. Hence, I understand the urge to go and blast the living daylights out of these savages - using the full savagery of modern weaponry. It just strikes me that this is one of those wars with no proper exit scenario. The other side is wanting a full apocalypse. Go Figure. Indeed, you could easily argue this is Gulf War Phase III and nothing is going to change. We're just up for more expenditure and caskets.
The most irritating thing about all this might be that Tony Abbott is banking on being a war time statesman with all of this stuff, which sits in line with the thought that patriotism is the first refuge of the scoundrel. We can begin to understand the recent budget as a 'pre-emptive' war time budget.
Most of the wars since 1901 have been declared one way or another. The ones that weren't tended to be way too short or way too locking in legitimacy to gain popular support. At least this is what history books told you.
This week I found myself asking myself "hang on, did we just go to war? With the Islamic State?" I don't know about you, but it seemed that was exactly what has happened. It was odd that one minute Tony Abbott was going on about raising the terror alert to 'high' and the next thing you know we're sending planes and pilots and military advisers to Iraq, in order to fight the IS.
The ALP took a bipartisan stand against IS, but I don't think they really debated any point before the troops were dispatched. It was almost as if the flurry of activity to send troops and planes and bombs overwhelmed our poor little Prime Minister's head he forgot to actually declare war. Or perhaps it was simply that they do not wish to confer upon ISIS/ISIL/ /Islamic State/The Caliphate (and whatever else it wants to call itself) a proper stately status. And so it is off to war we go.
I don't want to say this too loudly but the whole blogging thing for me started about the time the West decided to go to Iraq in the first place so coming back here to blogger and seeing a war kicking off in Iraq again makes it all 'Deja Vu All Over Again'.
A lot of theories are going around about just what is going on with IS. All the beheadings and mass murder of prisoners hasn't exactly endeared themselves to the world, and the whole propaganda they are running to recruit Islamists to fight with them, is entirely hostile to just about everybody except other violent Islamists. Rumour has it that IS were the Islamists that even Al-Qaeda thought were too hard core. Now they have oil and they're selling the stuff on the black market to the tune of US$2m a day. Statehood can be lucrative if you can get yourself an Iraqi oil well.
Beheadings and mass killings in this day and age really is over the top and harks back to medieval horrors. The fact that they do this on video and post it on YouTube makes you appreciate just how far we haven't come from the year 1014AD. Hence, I understand the urge to go and blast the living daylights out of these savages - using the full savagery of modern weaponry. It just strikes me that this is one of those wars with no proper exit scenario. The other side is wanting a full apocalypse. Go Figure. Indeed, you could easily argue this is Gulf War Phase III and nothing is going to change. We're just up for more expenditure and caskets.
The most irritating thing about all this might be that Tony Abbott is banking on being a war time statesman with all of this stuff, which sits in line with the thought that patriotism is the first refuge of the scoundrel. We can begin to understand the recent budget as a 'pre-emptive' war time budget.
I'm Back!
It's Official - In As Much As You Can Be With Blogging
It took a while but I've imported across the stuff from the wordpress incarnation of the blog on to here. I've also imported the 'Flaming Horses' material as well as the 'Spacefreaks' blog of old. You can now go through ALL of the things I've blogged about for a decade, backed up with google search.
Blogging is a weird thing where you generate content for no real reason other than to keep track of your own thinking. Having done it for as long as I have, I get to traipse down memory lane with a bit more forensic accuracy about my thinking. This is a good thing. The bad thing is discovering that maybe you haven't become smarter at all.
Anyway... Here's to more blogging.
I still doubt I'll make any money but hey, if you want to help me out, you know what you have to do.
It took a while but I've imported across the stuff from the wordpress incarnation of the blog on to here. I've also imported the 'Flaming Horses' material as well as the 'Spacefreaks' blog of old. You can now go through ALL of the things I've blogged about for a decade, backed up with google search.
Blogging is a weird thing where you generate content for no real reason other than to keep track of your own thinking. Having done it for as long as I have, I get to traipse down memory lane with a bit more forensic accuracy about my thinking. This is a good thing. The bad thing is discovering that maybe you haven't become smarter at all.
Anyway... Here's to more blogging.
I still doubt I'll make any money but hey, if you want to help me out, you know what you have to do.
2014/09/13
Bringing It On Home
Why Did I Even Leave?
Yes, why did I even leave Blogger four and a half years ago? At the time I needed a change. I was feeling stale and wanted to change the tone of my blogging.
People were telling me how good Wordpress was, and amongst other things, the Yankees had won the World Series in 2009 and it just seemed like the right time to wind up the previous Blog - 'Flaming Horses'. Thus I tottered off for new pastures and have been writing 'the Art Neuro Weblog' over there ever since, but recently I've come to miss a few things from Blogger - namely a proper search function. If there's one thing Blogger can boast, it's a search function powered by Google itself, and so it seems one is crazy not to avail one self of this strength.
Five years ago when Wordpress was still young, it was more of a purist writing thing - at least for me - and a lli wanted to do was write in a more writerly manner rather than the social graffiti mannerI had been pursuing until then. I've now come to the conclusion this was a wrong choice. The power of blogging is reflected in social reach and not how witty I can be on a page that hardly anybody reads.
They're really not good enough reasons on their own and today, I think that I might have even missed an opportunity for something while I've been there. In the intervening years Google has decided to offer up things like Google+ and ways of linking things into your YouTube channel. It flips me out that more people pass through the pages of 'Flaming Horses' (which I abandoned four and a half years ago), than they do my current Wordpress blog (even with all the tags on every article!).
These are great and wonderful things that I haven't quite embraced because I was over there and not over here. I blogged a bit more about politics and wrote a few more self-important things but really, I want to feel a little less like an amateur columnist and more of a proper blogger. Run free and breezy with the dogs (and puppy photos or whatever).
The upshot of all this is that I'm in the middle of moving across my four-and-a-half-years' worth of Wordpress-blogging back to Blogger, right here on this blog where it all started. I've even rolled in 'the Speacefreaks Blog' and 'Flaming Horses' as well as other minor blogs such as'What Did We Do Before Wikipedia' and 'Spacefreaks Redux'.
Anyway, all this is to say I hope to be back here by the end of this month.
Yes, why did I even leave Blogger four and a half years ago? At the time I needed a change. I was feeling stale and wanted to change the tone of my blogging.
People were telling me how good Wordpress was, and amongst other things, the Yankees had won the World Series in 2009 and it just seemed like the right time to wind up the previous Blog - 'Flaming Horses'. Thus I tottered off for new pastures and have been writing 'the Art Neuro Weblog' over there ever since, but recently I've come to miss a few things from Blogger - namely a proper search function. If there's one thing Blogger can boast, it's a search function powered by Google itself, and so it seems one is crazy not to avail one self of this strength.
Five years ago when Wordpress was still young, it was more of a purist writing thing - at least for me - and a lli wanted to do was write in a more writerly manner rather than the social graffiti mannerI had been pursuing until then. I've now come to the conclusion this was a wrong choice. The power of blogging is reflected in social reach and not how witty I can be on a page that hardly anybody reads.
They're really not good enough reasons on their own and today, I think that I might have even missed an opportunity for something while I've been there. In the intervening years Google has decided to offer up things like Google+ and ways of linking things into your YouTube channel. It flips me out that more people pass through the pages of 'Flaming Horses' (which I abandoned four and a half years ago), than they do my current Wordpress blog (even with all the tags on every article!).
These are great and wonderful things that I haven't quite embraced because I was over there and not over here. I blogged a bit more about politics and wrote a few more self-important things but really, I want to feel a little less like an amateur columnist and more of a proper blogger. Run free and breezy with the dogs (and puppy photos or whatever).
The upshot of all this is that I'm in the middle of moving across my four-and-a-half-years' worth of Wordpress-blogging back to Blogger, right here on this blog where it all started. I've even rolled in 'the Speacefreaks Blog' and 'Flaming Horses' as well as other minor blogs such as'What Did We Do Before Wikipedia' and 'Spacefreaks Redux'.
Anyway, all this is to say I hope to be back here by the end of this month.
2014/09/11
Science In Australia
The Cause Of Science
This one came in from Pleiades, and I'd meant to post it up but I've been mightily distracted. It's basically a rebuttal to all the people who run around with economic rationalist notions that science budgets should be cut.
If you really want an in-depth look, here is the actual recommendation tabled. I've spent most of my working career in the arts, and it still incenses me that this government has made very little provision to keep R&D going or for the CSIRO to continue doing the important things it does. I know the government wants to cut everything, but it's clear they have been much too cavalier about the cuts they've made to science and technology. Starting from the disavowal of the NBN down, this government has been a disaster when it comes to developing anything cerebral as a future direction for this country. Instead they've fixated upon more roads. That, and doing he bidding of whoever lobbies with the most dollars.
This one came in from Pleiades, and I'd meant to post it up but I've been mightily distracted. It's basically a rebuttal to all the people who run around with economic rationalist notions that science budgets should be cut.
There is a view in this country that too much thinking about the sort of Australia we want gets in the way of the “market signals” – the invisible rays that persuade 15 year olds to study physics, or not, that attract graduates into science teaching, or not; and convince the market to wear the risk of bold new ideas, or not.
It adds up to the message that she’ll be right. And it would be an easy message for a chief scientist to sell – if it wasn’t contradicted by the evidence.
Yes, logic says Australian businesses have an incentive to innovate. Three in five of them still say they don’t, while just one in five say that they have introduced new or significantly improved goods or services. Yes, all the research demonstrates that industry and researchers benefit from working together. Our record on collaboration is now one of the poorest in the OECD.
Yes, it makes sense to study a science at senior levels. Australian schools show a decline in the rates of participation in “science” subjects to close to the lowest level in 20 years.
If you really want an in-depth look, here is the actual recommendation tabled. I've spent most of my working career in the arts, and it still incenses me that this government has made very little provision to keep R&D going or for the CSIRO to continue doing the important things it does. I know the government wants to cut everything, but it's clear they have been much too cavalier about the cuts they've made to science and technology. Starting from the disavowal of the NBN down, this government has been a disaster when it comes to developing anything cerebral as a future direction for this country. Instead they've fixated upon more roads. That, and doing he bidding of whoever lobbies with the most dollars.
2014/09/09
News That's Fit To Punt - 08/Sep/2014
ICAC Is Still The Gift That Keeps Giving
This is good. Turns out the tentacles of developers and other business interests trying to directly influence the outcomes of policies through donations and bribes, goes right through the office of Pete Credlin, Tony Abbott's chief of staff. A few days ago, I blithely wrote that we've come to the point where vested interests just walk right in and tell the Government what they want, and the Government just writes up policy the way the political donors want it. It wasn't an ambit claim; it's pretty much borne out in the emails as revealed at ICAC.
I wasn't kidding. The joke is that people keep turning a blind eye to this stuff and saying "we're just good friends." or whatever plausible deniability they can issue. That's the problem with plausible deniability: it breeds contempt faster than familiarity. It's like anything else.
If That Wasn't Skullduggery Enough, There's Always Christopher Pyne
The hung parliament that Julia Gillard presided over was a terribly difficult thing. power hung so close and yet so elusively far from the opposition of the time. Naturally, people would push hard to get things to happen, and perhaps change the very government.
Such intrigue would have been irresistable to the like of Chris Pyne, and so today we find that Chris Pyne offered James Ashby a job and a lawyer to go after Pete Sipper, the Speak of the House at the time. What a guy!
It's grubby, it's scandalous, and it probably won't bring down this wretched government. Oh well, such is life in the antipodes.
Scotland Might Actually Go Independent
The latest shock poll suggests the Yes vote is getting ahead of the no vote. It's so strange to contemplate what this could mean in practical, financial terms. Can an independent Scotland issue a currency of its own? If so, how does it stop it becoming a basket case currency overnight? How will the independent Scottish Parliament stop Scotland from becoming a kind of economic basket case over night? Wouldn't the wealthy south benefit greatly i it didn't have to financially support the North? Doesn't this suggest that the road of independence might be fraught with terrible risks and pitfalls? Will they be able to negotiate with the EU fast enough to join seamlessly? Can it even be done? What would England say? What happens at the border? Will England set up a customs gate near Hadrian's Wall? All these questions make things incredibly interesting.
Of course, the monarch of the United Kingdom HM Queen Elizabeth II couldn't possibly be countenancing all this with great majestic joy. one imagines she would be fuming hat things are going to be close, let alone, go towards Scottish independence. It's so strange how this is coming about in the way that it is.
This is good. Turns out the tentacles of developers and other business interests trying to directly influence the outcomes of policies through donations and bribes, goes right through the office of Pete Credlin, Tony Abbott's chief of staff. A few days ago, I blithely wrote that we've come to the point where vested interests just walk right in and tell the Government what they want, and the Government just writes up policy the way the political donors want it. It wasn't an ambit claim; it's pretty much borne out in the emails as revealed at ICAC.
The ICAC has heard that Brickworks used the Free Enterprise Foundation, a shadowy Canberra-based organisation, to channel $125,000 in illicit donations to the NSW Liberals for the March 2011 state election.
Since 2009, property developers have been banned from donating to NSW political parties, but it is legal for such donations to go to federal parties.
One of the previously suppressed emails reveals that, on March 1, 2011, Mr Nicolaou sent Ms Credlin an email titled
"Re Carbon Tax" advising that Brickworks was "a very good supporter of the Party."
Mr Nicolaou attached an earlier message from the company's managing director, Lindsay Partridge, which read:
"Paul, Tell Tony to stick to his guns on no carbon tax.
I am running an internal fight with the BCA [Business Council of Australia] who seem to be driven by a few companies who will make bundles out of the tax."
Ms Credlin replied enthusiastically to Mr Nicolaou's request.
"Lindsay provided a great line for Question Time. Do you have a number that I might be able to contact him on and see if he was happy for us to use it … " she said.
I wasn't kidding. The joke is that people keep turning a blind eye to this stuff and saying "we're just good friends." or whatever plausible deniability they can issue. That's the problem with plausible deniability: it breeds contempt faster than familiarity. It's like anything else.
If That Wasn't Skullduggery Enough, There's Always Christopher Pyne
The hung parliament that Julia Gillard presided over was a terribly difficult thing. power hung so close and yet so elusively far from the opposition of the time. Naturally, people would push hard to get things to happen, and perhaps change the very government.
Such intrigue would have been irresistable to the like of Chris Pyne, and so today we find that Chris Pyne offered James Ashby a job and a lawyer to go after Pete Sipper, the Speak of the House at the time. What a guy!
It's grubby, it's scandalous, and it probably won't bring down this wretched government. Oh well, such is life in the antipodes.
Scotland Might Actually Go Independent
The latest shock poll suggests the Yes vote is getting ahead of the no vote. It's so strange to contemplate what this could mean in practical, financial terms. Can an independent Scotland issue a currency of its own? If so, how does it stop it becoming a basket case currency overnight? How will the independent Scottish Parliament stop Scotland from becoming a kind of economic basket case over night? Wouldn't the wealthy south benefit greatly i it didn't have to financially support the North? Doesn't this suggest that the road of independence might be fraught with terrible risks and pitfalls? Will they be able to negotiate with the EU fast enough to join seamlessly? Can it even be done? What would England say? What happens at the border? Will England set up a customs gate near Hadrian's Wall? All these questions make things incredibly interesting.
Of course, the monarch of the United Kingdom HM Queen Elizabeth II couldn't possibly be countenancing all this with great majestic joy. one imagines she would be fuming hat things are going to be close, let alone, go towards Scottish independence. It's so strange how this is coming about in the way that it is.
2014/09/07
View From The Couch - 06/Sep/2014
Lessons For A Saturated Economy
I found this commentary about the impact of the property bubble in the Sydney Morning Tabloid this week. it's written from the perspective of the younger people who cannot get into the market. A lot of people seem to think it's young people whining, but there are lessons in history from all this property bubble business (that all these banks are denying exists here). The experience in Japan in the late 1980s through to earl 1990s was pretty instructive. The Bubble and the aftermath of the Pop created economic havoc on the Japanese Gen-X who were coming into the workforce at the time. This resulted in high youth unemployment as well as low rates of marriage and birthrates - and effectively brought forward the peak population date of Japan. The resulting impact of that event was that all the projections the government had made about pension plans and how the labour force was going to support the retiring Baby Boomers went out the window. Much of the low growth and sluggish economy of Japan in the aftermath of The Bubble can be put down to a generation of working people essentially placed out of options and never finding the traction that earlier generations had.
I have friends who are basically economic refugees from Japan. They got out because there were no immediate options that were rewarding or befit their education. Many ended up without kids, others delayed having kids. The 90s and early 2000s saw a remarkable exodus of young, educated Japanese people, who are now not over there contributing to economic growth.
The process of writing off and paying down debts in Japan has been grueling, and worse still government intervention into what they called PKOs - price keeping operations for assets - has distorted the markets leaving what can only be called zombie companies.
The PKO money came out of the government to shore up the asset values of shares and property which is to say, they socialised the debts. The Japanese government under Ryutaro Hashimoto argued that this was necessary to stop a disorderly exit, which is to say, it allowed some investors to keep their bubble profits to pay off the bubble debts instead of getting wiped out. You wonder how those parties got to enjoy such favourable treatment, but then if you see how entwined Japanese heavy industry, banking and the old MITI was in its day, it was one of those things that people acknowledged tacitly without putting up a big fight. After all, what happens to Japan should Mistubishi or Sumitomo should fail? The option cost of bailing out those companies essentially ate the future of Japan. And that's just Japan. The GFC has exposed the same problem in advanced economies across Europe and North America as well as Australia and New Zealand.
The point of all this is to say, private sector debt has a way of becoming public sector debt, and "too big to fail" essentially eats the future. A few things are very clear from the property bubble in Australia is that the private sector debt is bigger than it has ever been, and should it get called in, it would wipe out our four major banks (BASEL II and III notwithstanding). Because those banks are still in the TBTF category, the government will socialise those losses by bailing them out, and then we'll see our future spending go up in smoke to preserve the inflated prices everybody paid for their houses.
The finer point of all this is, if you don't think there's a housing bubble, then that's one problem. If you do think that there is a housing bubble but think it's just a matter of the market correcting itself, then you'll be in for a surprise.
Ross Garnaut Says: There Is a Bubble - But So What? Cut Rates
This one's related but really interesting. Ross Garnaut thinks there is indeed a bubble going on in the housing market, and that the Reserve Bank of Australia is keeping a close eye on it. Basically, Garnaut is saying the rest of the economy outside of housing could do with the lowering of rates. The rates being as they are keeps the Australian Dollar too high, and makes Australia's economy less competitive. The only thing keeping the rates where they are, is this deep concern that there is a housing bubble going on, so the rates need to sit at as high a place a possible given the parameters. Instead Garnaut is saying if the RBA cuts rates, then the rest of economy would be able to compete and grow, and the housing bubble should be dealt with specific measures. He also says governments should stop favouring housing for the purposes of capital adequacy.
It's an interesting idea that evokes the old definition of inflation. Inflation, is essentially too much money chasing too few assets. This explains exactly why housing bubbles happen. Given that housing is given a privileged position in measuring capital adequacy, banks are better off lending out mortgages than lending out business loans for capital expenditure. The money headed to mortgages become much easier money by dint of a definitions for capital adqaucy. This devalues businesses against property ownership, even though property ownership in of itself - especially home ownership - can't contribute to the economy in the way that a productive business can. Things like negative gearing simply make it worse. So all the money goes into the property market but of course the overall supply side of the property market itself can only grow at a certain rate. As more money gushes into the property market, it can do nothing but create a condition where the prices of homes inflates. Too much money chasing too few assets.
Is China Finally Wobbling (Just A Little bit?)
It's been like five and a half years since the market bottom following the Lehmann Shock which triggered the GFC. Since then the world has looked on... make that Australia... Australia has looked on to China to keep its economy afloat. China in turn obliged by doing massive stimulus spending, which resulted in it sustaining its 7%+ annual GDP growth rate. There are some who think China has been inflating its GDP figures for years to get more investment, and think there is a 30%discrepancy between what China's real size as an economy is and what the stated size is. That would explain the vast lack of growth in consumer spending that China has so needed to move from an export-driven economy to a consumer driven economy.
China subsequently pushed all levels of government to take on debt and give stimulus to the market and that has resulted in a massive ballooning of debt in China to fund this 7+% growth. Since the GFC, year after year, economists, investors, traders ad analysts of all persuasions have pointed at China and said it is unsustainable. Somehow China never imploded or popped or collapsed. All those ghost cities built in the middle of nowhere with speculation money? No problem. All that re-hypothecated collateral minerals that went missing? No problem. All those companies that started going sour and failed to pay their bonds? Government intervention has saved the day. If you had bet on China to unravel in the last few years, you would have lost money on all those bets. It would've been hard losses to take too, because rationally speaking, China had every reason to come unstuck. The proof was in the pudding, and the pudding's been magic so far.
Now, there are signs the magic pudding isn't going to hold up. I don't know how China is going to kick the can down the road next time, but they may yet have a way of doing so. After all, one of the interesting aspects of the great recession has been the way things just keep going on in spite of the numbers. If China can't kick the can down the road, this is going to be it for the 23 long years of economic growth in Australia. The cracks are already showing up in commodity prices. Iron ore - the biggest corollary to the health of Chinese industry has sunk to a five year low. This is going to hit our export figures. Falling commodity prices should bring the value of Australian Dollar down. Things are about to get very bumpy.
I can report to you that the money-go-around in Sydney has stopped to a snail's pace. There are a lot of companies sitting on unpaid bills, the companies themselves waiting to receive payment to pay those bills. I have to say it hasn't been this slow since August 2007, which was exactly the peak of the market before the GFC. I'd start selling shares this month if I had any to sell.
I found this commentary about the impact of the property bubble in the Sydney Morning Tabloid this week. it's written from the perspective of the younger people who cannot get into the market. A lot of people seem to think it's young people whining, but there are lessons in history from all this property bubble business (that all these banks are denying exists here). The experience in Japan in the late 1980s through to earl 1990s was pretty instructive. The Bubble and the aftermath of the Pop created economic havoc on the Japanese Gen-X who were coming into the workforce at the time. This resulted in high youth unemployment as well as low rates of marriage and birthrates - and effectively brought forward the peak population date of Japan. The resulting impact of that event was that all the projections the government had made about pension plans and how the labour force was going to support the retiring Baby Boomers went out the window. Much of the low growth and sluggish economy of Japan in the aftermath of The Bubble can be put down to a generation of working people essentially placed out of options and never finding the traction that earlier generations had.
I have friends who are basically economic refugees from Japan. They got out because there were no immediate options that were rewarding or befit their education. Many ended up without kids, others delayed having kids. The 90s and early 2000s saw a remarkable exodus of young, educated Japanese people, who are now not over there contributing to economic growth.
The process of writing off and paying down debts in Japan has been grueling, and worse still government intervention into what they called PKOs - price keeping operations for assets - has distorted the markets leaving what can only be called zombie companies.
The PKO money came out of the government to shore up the asset values of shares and property which is to say, they socialised the debts. The Japanese government under Ryutaro Hashimoto argued that this was necessary to stop a disorderly exit, which is to say, it allowed some investors to keep their bubble profits to pay off the bubble debts instead of getting wiped out. You wonder how those parties got to enjoy such favourable treatment, but then if you see how entwined Japanese heavy industry, banking and the old MITI was in its day, it was one of those things that people acknowledged tacitly without putting up a big fight. After all, what happens to Japan should Mistubishi or Sumitomo should fail? The option cost of bailing out those companies essentially ate the future of Japan. And that's just Japan. The GFC has exposed the same problem in advanced economies across Europe and North America as well as Australia and New Zealand.
The point of all this is to say, private sector debt has a way of becoming public sector debt, and "too big to fail" essentially eats the future. A few things are very clear from the property bubble in Australia is that the private sector debt is bigger than it has ever been, and should it get called in, it would wipe out our four major banks (BASEL II and III notwithstanding). Because those banks are still in the TBTF category, the government will socialise those losses by bailing them out, and then we'll see our future spending go up in smoke to preserve the inflated prices everybody paid for their houses.
The finer point of all this is, if you don't think there's a housing bubble, then that's one problem. If you do think that there is a housing bubble but think it's just a matter of the market correcting itself, then you'll be in for a surprise.
Ross Garnaut Says: There Is a Bubble - But So What? Cut Rates
This one's related but really interesting. Ross Garnaut thinks there is indeed a bubble going on in the housing market, and that the Reserve Bank of Australia is keeping a close eye on it. Basically, Garnaut is saying the rest of the economy outside of housing could do with the lowering of rates. The rates being as they are keeps the Australian Dollar too high, and makes Australia's economy less competitive. The only thing keeping the rates where they are, is this deep concern that there is a housing bubble going on, so the rates need to sit at as high a place a possible given the parameters. Instead Garnaut is saying if the RBA cuts rates, then the rest of economy would be able to compete and grow, and the housing bubble should be dealt with specific measures. He also says governments should stop favouring housing for the purposes of capital adequacy.
"It is ludicrous to be worried about lending risks in the housing sector on the one hand while at the same time requiring banks to put more capital aside when they are lending to BHP," he said.
"And there are several reasons to do something about negative gearing. There are budget reasons, and reasons to do with keeping within reach the old Australian dream of widespread home ownership.
"It would also contribute to putting a lid on the housing bubble so we could reduce interest rates and the exchange rate as required by the rest of the Australian economy.
"But the problems can't be solved by the Reserve Bank alone. It requires co-ordination of prudential regulation, monetary policy and fiscal policy."
It's an interesting idea that evokes the old definition of inflation. Inflation, is essentially too much money chasing too few assets. This explains exactly why housing bubbles happen. Given that housing is given a privileged position in measuring capital adequacy, banks are better off lending out mortgages than lending out business loans for capital expenditure. The money headed to mortgages become much easier money by dint of a definitions for capital adqaucy. This devalues businesses against property ownership, even though property ownership in of itself - especially home ownership - can't contribute to the economy in the way that a productive business can. Things like negative gearing simply make it worse. So all the money goes into the property market but of course the overall supply side of the property market itself can only grow at a certain rate. As more money gushes into the property market, it can do nothing but create a condition where the prices of homes inflates. Too much money chasing too few assets.
Is China Finally Wobbling (Just A Little bit?)
It's been like five and a half years since the market bottom following the Lehmann Shock which triggered the GFC. Since then the world has looked on... make that Australia... Australia has looked on to China to keep its economy afloat. China in turn obliged by doing massive stimulus spending, which resulted in it sustaining its 7%+ annual GDP growth rate. There are some who think China has been inflating its GDP figures for years to get more investment, and think there is a 30%discrepancy between what China's real size as an economy is and what the stated size is. That would explain the vast lack of growth in consumer spending that China has so needed to move from an export-driven economy to a consumer driven economy.
China subsequently pushed all levels of government to take on debt and give stimulus to the market and that has resulted in a massive ballooning of debt in China to fund this 7+% growth. Since the GFC, year after year, economists, investors, traders ad analysts of all persuasions have pointed at China and said it is unsustainable. Somehow China never imploded or popped or collapsed. All those ghost cities built in the middle of nowhere with speculation money? No problem. All that re-hypothecated collateral minerals that went missing? No problem. All those companies that started going sour and failed to pay their bonds? Government intervention has saved the day. If you had bet on China to unravel in the last few years, you would have lost money on all those bets. It would've been hard losses to take too, because rationally speaking, China had every reason to come unstuck. The proof was in the pudding, and the pudding's been magic so far.
Now, there are signs the magic pudding isn't going to hold up. I don't know how China is going to kick the can down the road next time, but they may yet have a way of doing so. After all, one of the interesting aspects of the great recession has been the way things just keep going on in spite of the numbers. If China can't kick the can down the road, this is going to be it for the 23 long years of economic growth in Australia. The cracks are already showing up in commodity prices. Iron ore - the biggest corollary to the health of Chinese industry has sunk to a five year low. This is going to hit our export figures. Falling commodity prices should bring the value of Australian Dollar down. Things are about to get very bumpy.
I can report to you that the money-go-around in Sydney has stopped to a snail's pace. There are a lot of companies sitting on unpaid bills, the companies themselves waiting to receive payment to pay those bills. I have to say it hasn't been this slow since August 2007, which was exactly the peak of the market before the GFC. I'd start selling shares this month if I had any to sell.
2014/09/05
Sydney Morning Jokers
Comic Sans, Furious Backlash
It's only a font. But it is a seriously loaded-with-meaning font. After it made an appearance on the front pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, it has turned into internet fodder to mock the Sydney Morning Herald. Let's face it, the SMH has been going down hill for some time, and really did itself no favours by backing Tony Abbott at the last federal Election (yes, that again, but it's hard to forgive).
Since then Darren Goodsir, the editor has come forth defending his choice of font saying he was trying to illustrate how comical the idiotic answers were by the corrupt politicians. That may be true, and it is not for us pretend to understand the motivations of an editor who opts to go with comic sans on the front page. One thing that is abundantly clear is that Darren Goodsir clearly does not take the Sydney Morning Herald with all its history, prestige and standing all that seriously. For years the SMH tried to affect a dignified tone until it ran out of editors of a certain generation who could administer a high style. Through the 90s it gave way to a more vernacular, breezy style - so much so that when you read articles syndicated from the New York Times in the SMH, you're struck by how far down the style hill the Herald staff has allowed themselves to roll.
It's a shame, because the Sydney Morning Herald has already lost its important prestige paper size of being a broadsheet thanks to the decline of newspapers worldwide. In this context Darren Goodsir's choice is understandable but goes to show there really isn't much left at the Sydney Morning Herald that is high-minded or that which takes itself seriously. And if this is the big paper that stands apart from the already-dreadful-and lowbrow Murdoch papers, then the outlook on print media reportage in this country is pretty damn bleak. It's easy to see that Darren Goodsir and his choice to put comic sans on the front page is symptomatic of a wider decline in journalistic standards. It's not just his fault per se. It simply illustrates just how far things have fallen.
It's really quite sad because they used to be the establishment. Now they're pandering.
It's only a font. But it is a seriously loaded-with-meaning font. After it made an appearance on the front pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, it has turned into internet fodder to mock the Sydney Morning Herald. Let's face it, the SMH has been going down hill for some time, and really did itself no favours by backing Tony Abbott at the last federal Election (yes, that again, but it's hard to forgive).
Since then Darren Goodsir, the editor has come forth defending his choice of font saying he was trying to illustrate how comical the idiotic answers were by the corrupt politicians. That may be true, and it is not for us pretend to understand the motivations of an editor who opts to go with comic sans on the front page. One thing that is abundantly clear is that Darren Goodsir clearly does not take the Sydney Morning Herald with all its history, prestige and standing all that seriously. For years the SMH tried to affect a dignified tone until it ran out of editors of a certain generation who could administer a high style. Through the 90s it gave way to a more vernacular, breezy style - so much so that when you read articles syndicated from the New York Times in the SMH, you're struck by how far down the style hill the Herald staff has allowed themselves to roll.
It's a shame, because the Sydney Morning Herald has already lost its important prestige paper size of being a broadsheet thanks to the decline of newspapers worldwide. In this context Darren Goodsir's choice is understandable but goes to show there really isn't much left at the Sydney Morning Herald that is high-minded or that which takes itself seriously. And if this is the big paper that stands apart from the already-dreadful-and lowbrow Murdoch papers, then the outlook on print media reportage in this country is pretty damn bleak. It's easy to see that Darren Goodsir and his choice to put comic sans on the front page is symptomatic of a wider decline in journalistic standards. It's not just his fault per se. It simply illustrates just how far things have fallen.
It's really quite sad because they used to be the establishment. Now they're pandering.
2014/09/04
News That's Fit To Punt - 03/Sep/2014
Why? Because Fuck You
Everything this Federal Government does is tainted by a sort of grubby conflict of interest. Of course that's not confined to the Federal Government, because the greater conflict of interest might actually be Clive Palmer who owns a dirty big mining company, gets to make deals where a tax like the mining tax can get repealed. It's hard to imagine a more egregious and gratuitous case of helping yourself because you can.
The deal has meant that the government will halt the rise of superannuation. Naturally, with the sensibility of a cheesy movie villain, Tony Abbott tried to sell this as more cash in hand for employees which, frankly made me choke on my lunch. I'm sorry to tell you Mr. Prime Minister, but that's money that'll stay in the pockets of companies. Paul Keating has lambasted the government but honestly, if he wanted to still have a meaningful voice, he should've stayed on in parliament after 1996.
The repeal of the Mining Tax was of course one of the platforms of the Coalition so we ought not be surprised, but really, it is pretty disgusting how the Coalition are totally happy to sell out Australian citizens in favour of a gaggle of mining billionaires - Clive Palmer among them - and try to sell it as being good for the worker. Can it get any worse?
Yes it can. Here's how.
An Inconvenient Ruse
The emissions for energy generation jumped the most in eight years, since the end of the carbon tax.
So much for Al Gore coming to lend a hand in fighting the good fight against global warming. Thanks to the repeal, polluters have gone back to a kind of burn-baby-burn mentality and now it's out of control. Of course the plan by this government is also to smash the renewables industry, and directly pay these polluters to stop polluting.
It's like government by stupidity. You'd never have guessed thing would get this bad. No sane mind would have guess it would get this bad. But this unrelenting awfulness - "Operation Ongoing Enormous Clusterfuck" according to FDOM - was their platform! Grin and bear it.
Pink Batts Coming Home To Roost
Pleiades swung this one at me today. The best bit of news might be how the Royal Commission into the Pink Batts has yielded interesting results. In as much as it was a blatant witch hunt, it looks like it delivered a result that was assumed by the proponents of the Commission. Here's something from Crikey which is behind a pay wall:
That means occupational health and safety is now firmly a problem for the Federal Government. Every time somebody dies in an accident, he article suggests a ministerial head is going to roll. Worse still, the responsibility for the failure didn't just get sheeted home to the Rudd Government, it also got sheeted home to the Howard Government, and last I checked Tony Abbott was the health minister in the government. This thing is going to boomerang right back at him.
The Housing Bubble That Isn't But Of Which We Must Be Wary
For months - no make that years! -we've been hearing that Australia does not have a housing bubble problem. All the economists who have come and pointed out the great anomalies of housing prices in Australia have been laughed out of the public discourse while the anomalies only get bigger. As late as last month Glenn Stevens of the RBA was talking down any possibility that what we had on our hands was an actual bubble! No, he simply reiterated that sometimes the property market goes down. This month he's taking a different tack and saying there might be nasty shocks. Included in that link is a bit covering China where he cites a downturn in China might manifest itself as a nasty shock. If that wasn't enough, David Gonski of the ANZ Bank told the Australian British Chamber of Commerce that booming prices cannot possibly continue forever (now there's a brave call).
And lo an behold there's news that China's real estate market is going screwy. Some might even say it is crashing like it was a Global Financial Crisis. Speaking of crashing, the commodities market in China is crashing. I wonder if those things combined would form this so-called 'Nasty Shock' Glenn Stevens is talking about? Or will Sydney's housing prices simply just shrug it off and keep climbing?
Stay tuned for more fun!
Everything this Federal Government does is tainted by a sort of grubby conflict of interest. Of course that's not confined to the Federal Government, because the greater conflict of interest might actually be Clive Palmer who owns a dirty big mining company, gets to make deals where a tax like the mining tax can get repealed. It's hard to imagine a more egregious and gratuitous case of helping yourself because you can.
The deal has meant that the government will halt the rise of superannuation. Naturally, with the sensibility of a cheesy movie villain, Tony Abbott tried to sell this as more cash in hand for employees which, frankly made me choke on my lunch. I'm sorry to tell you Mr. Prime Minister, but that's money that'll stay in the pockets of companies. Paul Keating has lambasted the government but honestly, if he wanted to still have a meaningful voice, he should've stayed on in parliament after 1996.
The repeal of the Mining Tax was of course one of the platforms of the Coalition so we ought not be surprised, but really, it is pretty disgusting how the Coalition are totally happy to sell out Australian citizens in favour of a gaggle of mining billionaires - Clive Palmer among them - and try to sell it as being good for the worker. Can it get any worse?
Yes it can. Here's how.
An Inconvenient Ruse
The emissions for energy generation jumped the most in eight years, since the end of the carbon tax.
So much for Al Gore coming to lend a hand in fighting the good fight against global warming. Thanks to the repeal, polluters have gone back to a kind of burn-baby-burn mentality and now it's out of control. Of course the plan by this government is also to smash the renewables industry, and directly pay these polluters to stop polluting.
It's like government by stupidity. You'd never have guessed thing would get this bad. No sane mind would have guess it would get this bad. But this unrelenting awfulness - "Operation Ongoing Enormous Clusterfuck" according to FDOM - was their platform! Grin and bear it.
Pink Batts Coming Home To Roost
Pleiades swung this one at me today. The best bit of news might be how the Royal Commission into the Pink Batts has yielded interesting results. In as much as it was a blatant witch hunt, it looks like it delivered a result that was assumed by the proponents of the Commission. Here's something from Crikey which is behind a pay wall:
First, Hanger found the training regime and regulations at the time of the first of four fatalities in October 2009 to have been seriously inadequate:
"With the exception of South Australia, which had a licensing regime for insulation installers, there was no insulation-industry specific regulation beyond the generally applicable occupational health and safety regulation."
But here’s the thing: then-minister for the environment Peter Garrett and his staff had spent most of 2009 tightening regulations and procedures. Hanger listed more than 40 interventions to address safety deficiencies -- all completed before October. So if the safety framework was still deficient by then, it must have been woefully, if not criminally, inadequate prior to 2008. Having presided over industry growth to the level of about 200,000 new and existing houses insulated annually, the previous Coalition government cannot escape culpability.
Secondly, Hanger opened wide the door to those wanting compensation for the program’s sudden termination:
"I find as follows:
"... the effect of the losses was to devastate many long-standing businesses ... and to cause as well personal financial collapse and severe despair and emotional harm;
"that harm and such circumstances justifies pre-existing businesses being compensated."
If compensation is won, it will be the Abbott government scrambling to find the funds.
This has a certain rough justice about it, of course. There is an argument that the scheme was not intrinsically dangerous and was not failing, rather that it suffered from extreme misreporting from the outset, by both Coalition MPs and a feral media.
Thirdly, the Commissioner was scathing about Abbott’s staff in the course of the inquiry:
"The Commonwealth did not suggest one witness that ought to be called. It did not generally volunteer documents that were not the subject of a summons to produce. It did not elicit any evidence of its own volition. All of this is despite the fact that it was the repository of the critical documents and the corporate knowledge of what had transpired."
Not even Peter Garrett copped such a shellacking:
"Furthermore, the Commonwealth hampered the work of those assisting me by the way in which documents were produced ... Other than in response to a specific request from the Commission, there seemed no logic in the order in which documents were produced. The Commission asked that documents be produced chronologically, however the Commonwealth did not oblige."
Finally, the Commissioner made it clear that if the federal government initiated the program, then safety is definitely its problem. Never mind the long history of state responsibility.
"There was much debate about whether workplace health and safety issues were a matter that was of any concern to the Australian Government, or whether it was more properly the concern of the States and Territories. It was said, by a number of federal public servants, that the Australian Government had no regulatory power in the field of workplace health and safety, and therefore that it was not a risk that the Australian Government could control. In my view, this attitude was deplorable."
That means occupational health and safety is now firmly a problem for the Federal Government. Every time somebody dies in an accident, he article suggests a ministerial head is going to roll. Worse still, the responsibility for the failure didn't just get sheeted home to the Rudd Government, it also got sheeted home to the Howard Government, and last I checked Tony Abbott was the health minister in the government. This thing is going to boomerang right back at him.
The Housing Bubble That Isn't But Of Which We Must Be Wary
For months - no make that years! -we've been hearing that Australia does not have a housing bubble problem. All the economists who have come and pointed out the great anomalies of housing prices in Australia have been laughed out of the public discourse while the anomalies only get bigger. As late as last month Glenn Stevens of the RBA was talking down any possibility that what we had on our hands was an actual bubble! No, he simply reiterated that sometimes the property market goes down. This month he's taking a different tack and saying there might be nasty shocks. Included in that link is a bit covering China where he cites a downturn in China might manifest itself as a nasty shock. If that wasn't enough, David Gonski of the ANZ Bank told the Australian British Chamber of Commerce that booming prices cannot possibly continue forever (now there's a brave call).
And lo an behold there's news that China's real estate market is going screwy. Some might even say it is crashing like it was a Global Financial Crisis. Speaking of crashing, the commodities market in China is crashing. I wonder if those things combined would form this so-called 'Nasty Shock' Glenn Stevens is talking about? Or will Sydney's housing prices simply just shrug it off and keep climbing?
Stay tuned for more fun!
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