finance

Junk Charts #4 – Puns are dangerous

31 August 2010

Design guru Edward Tufte famously lambasted pie charts in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and went on to say the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them While pie charts do have their defenders, the basis for the contempt in which pie charts are held by Tufte and others is [...]

3 comments Read the full article →

Infrastructure Bonds

17 August 2010

With Australia’s Federal election looming, the opposition has today proudly announced a new policy to fund infrastructure without actually increasing Government debt! What are we to make of this? It’s hard to determine the details from a media announcement, but based on the text posted by Peter Martin on his blog, it would seem that [...]

16 comments Read the full article →

High-frequency trading

15 June 2010
Mule Variations

Is high-frequency trading a great innovation that improves the efficiency of the market, or is it something we should be worried about?

14 comments Read the full article →

RSPT – A Fair Valuation Based on True Value of New and Existing Mines

12 June 2010

Guest author James Glover takes another look at the resources tax and concludes that the tax for existing mines should be lower.

14 comments Read the full article →

No move expected by the Reserve Bank

31 May 2010

Over recent months there have been a few informal polls on the Mule Stable on whether or not the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) would be moving interest rates. There will be another monthly policy decision tomorrow and this time I decided to make poll a bit more structured, courtesy of the PollDaddy website. If [...]

1 comment Read the full article →

Junk Charts #3 – US Business Lending

23 February 2010
Thumbnail image for Junk Charts #3 – US Business Lending

Clusterstock’s “Chart of the Day” has a chart showing business lending “falling like a knife”. But closer examination of the chart reveals that it is in fact quite misleading.

11 comments Read the full article →

Blame Greece’s Debt Crisis on the Euro

Thumbnail image for Blame Greece’s Debt Crisis on the Euro 18 February 2010

Ever since they joined the European monetary union and adopted the Euro as their currency, they lost the power to create their own money. The Euro is the real reason Greece finds itself facing a debt crisis.

9 comments Read the full article →

Banks, Central Banks and Money

18 December 2009

One misconception about the mechanics of money that I mentioned in my last post is the idea that banks can hoard their reserves at the central bank* rather than lending them out. Here I will explain why this idea simply does not make sense, but no more casinos and gaming chips. No more senior croupiers [...]

8 comments Read the full article →

Cash on the Sidelines?

12 October 2009

Last week, the Australian Financial Review was doing its best to spruik the ongoing prospects for the Australian share market in their front page article “Cashed-up funds have $70bn to invest”. The article is only available online to subscribers, but this quotation sums it up: analysts cite the volume of cash stockpiled as a reason [...]

6 comments Read the full article →

Curb Bonuses: They Don’t Work Anyway

28 September 2009

As the G20 starts to get serious about curbing executive bonuses, we can expect banking lobbyists to get more strident in their attempts to resist these incursions into their cosy remuneration practices. This has, in fact, already begun. In a recent example, Deutsche Bank Chief Executive Josef Ackermann was resorting to cliché, claiming that “the [...]

11 comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries