As you read this I’ll be moving house, upgrading from 2nd class rental scum to 1st class mortgage slave, whilst battling the flu and unskilled Queensland drivers meandering down the Bruce Highway.
This weekly post will actually contain several charts, and to start with, a curious observation of GDP per capita correlated to a belief in evolution. No surprises that the USA is a member of Extremistan (or Fundamentalistan), as an outlier.
A reason why our “godless Communist” Chinese cousins are doing so well?
Next, an interesting correlation between the quoted share price of Sotheby’s, the auction house, and economic crises. (I love how the NYSE code for Sotheby’s is “BID”. Another ironic code is Australian-based online travel quoter Wotif – WTF!)
And finally, as the developed world wrings its hands about contagious sovereign/public debt crises, what’s going on in the land of “its different here” OZ?
22% doesn’t seem much does it? So why the fuss over going back to surplus as quick as possible? Let’s put that in context, with the excellent (if plodding to read) research by Reinhart and Rogoff on sovereign debt:
Note that federal public debt broke its entire uptrend from the 1950’s onwards, culminating in the economic “stewardship” (sic) of Howard/Costello, whereby public debt was effectively transferred to private debt. Theoretically a good proposition, to paraphrase Kerry Packer, have you seen how government spends money, but has the record build up of private debt set the country up for a transfer back to the public book, or is this time different?