My last pop at New Zealand’s regulatory set-up mentioned New Image International, the company that uses multi-level marketing techniques to sell Colostrum as a miracle cure. The New Image product pitch is a generic hoax, as explained last time out:
…major warning signs include:
Read more...
New Zealand is playing host to the sort of large scale miracle cure scam that would get investigated for wire fraud in the US. One company even has a New Zealand stock exchange listing!
Read more...As I mentioned in a Labor Day post, I grew up in an America where manufacturing was still the backbone of the economy. I may be more aware of that than most in my age group by virtue of spending much of my childhood in small towns where the local paper mill was the biggest employer. Similarly, when I went to business school, many of my classmates had worked for major manufacturing firms, and the ones who had been in finance (for the most part, two year credit officer programs at major banks) weren’t seen as having better backgrounds than their classmates.
While as other economies developed, the US share of global production was bound to decline, I’m disturbed by the assumption that labor costs are the sole determinant of success. My contacts is that it is an article of faith in Washington is that the US can be competitive only in finance (and presumably in commodities businesses like agriculture). This story line is terribly convenient, since it gives diseased, greedy, and incompetent American managers and policymakers a free pass.
Read more...By Sell on News, a macro equities analyst. Cross posted from MacroBusiness
I have been reliably informed by Houses & Holes that we are “all going to die”, and rather sooner than we all imagined. Something to do with the economic meltdown in Europe and America, I believe. While I have no reason to doubt such potent insight — after all, death is the best one way bet available — I think it could do with a little refining. What is dying is the industrial era in the developed world, a trend that is obscured by the fact that the developing world is industrialising at an accelerating pace.
Read more...Tolstoy said that happy families are all alike, and it may be true of businesses as well. But while Tolstoy no doubt had an an image of settled domesticity in mind, the 21st century corporate version of happiness is much less appealing.
I thought US-based readers would find this extract from a recent post in the Australian blog MacroBusiness terribly familiar. While America’s extortionate class par none is the too big to fail financial firms, in Australia they have enough of a tradition of regulation that the banks are merely coddled as opposed to completely spoiled (they also never had the opportunity to engage in the wreck-the-economy-for-fun-and-profit exercise we had here that put them firmly in control).
Down under, the cohort that is now at the top of the economic pecking order is the miners. Notice the similarities to behavior we’ve seen over and over again here
Read more...Even if you don’t get all the political and business references, I suspect you’ll appreciate this video. Hat tip readers hum and Hubert:
Read more...Yves here. This long and informative post on the pending train wreck in the Australian financial system might seem to be too narrow a topic for most Naked Capitalism readers, but it makes for an important object lesson. Australia managed to come out of the global financial crisis largely unscathed because its banks did not swill down toxic assets from the US (chump quasi retail investors were another matter) and it benefitted from the commodities boom.
Nevertheless, one might think its bank regulators might see what happened abroad as a cautionary tale. Mortgage debt took center stage in the crisis, and Australia is in the throes of a serious housing bubble. Yet as this post describes, the regulators seem asleep at the switch as to one of its major drivers.
By Deep T., a senior banking insider who is fed up with his colleague’s reliance on public support. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
Previously I have posted on how the major banks recycle capital in The Capital Rort. I want to extend that subject by showing how mortgage ‘rehypothecation’ in Australia has led to the massive expansion in liquidity available to Australian banks which is at the root of the mortgage affordability issues in Australia and has put Australia’s banking system on the unstoppable path to collapse or government bailout.
Read more...Reader Crocodile Chuck highlighted an important post at Houses and Holes, an economics-oriented Australian blog. While Australia is reeling from the immediate impact, the broader impact of 2010-11 weather patterns may have much bigger ramifications for food and energy prices in Australia and abroad.
The post focuses on the possibility, increasingly endorsed by top meteorologists, that the heavy Australian rains are the result of a super La Niña, the last of which was seen in 1973-4,the time of the last severe flooding in Queensland. Super La Niñas are hugely disruptive to agricultural production and can have other nasty knock-on effects (some contend the 1917 La Niña helped spawn the 1918 influenza pandemic).
In this case, the damage of a super La Niña will not only increase food costs at a time when price rises and food scarcity are already a major concern, but will likely extend to energy prices as well. That one-two punch would be particularly devastating to China.
Read more...As I’ve mentioned from time to time, I lived in Sydney for two years, from 2002 to 2004, long enough to get a decent sense of the culture. Australian policies are intriguing. They are either brilliant or stupid, there seems to be perilously little middle ground. For instance, they’ve done away with the penny, a […]
Read more...Australia has less income disparity than the US (not that that is saying much, the US is the most extreme among advanced economies) by virtue of having relatively high minimum wages and cultural opposition to big pay packages. Australians are pretty egalitarian; for instance, they are skeptical that large paychecks are fairly earned (ie. they […]
Read more...It is truly astonishing to watch how determined the economics orthodoxy is to defend its inexcusable, economy-wrecking performance in the runup to the financial crisis. Most people who preside over disasters, say from a boating accident or the failure of a venture, spend considerable amounts of time in review of what happened and self-recrimination. Yet […]
Read more...By Steve Keen, Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney, and author of the book Debunking Economics, cross posted from Steve Keen’s Debt Deflation. The record $6 billion profit that the Commonwealth Bank is expected to announce today is a sign of an economy that has been taken over by […]
Read more...The Financial Times had a forward-thinking comment by Richard Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. It argues that investment in technology and better management can turn many now low end service sector jobs into better paid and higher quality work. One key aspect, which the […]
Read more...I had the pleasure of finally meeting Steve Keen (he and his wife Melina are in New York) and it turns out he is adventuresome eater as well as thinker (he ordered maguro and natto even though I warned him, although I must say this restaurant’s version was actually gaijin friendly). Steve told me about […]
Read more...In case you have any doubts, not only does the US rank badly on health care metrics, the US has ranked at or next to the bottom of this survey in past years. But be careful in pressing these findings too hard on unreceptive audiences; I lost a friend who insisted the US had the […]
Read more...