finance

Ring-fencing rogue traders

25 September 2011

Kweku Adoboli managed to cost UBS over $2 billion with his rogue trading, and has now cost chief executive Oswald Grübel his job. While this time the buck stopped at the top, it is more than can be said for many previous rogue trading cases. Grübel was called out of retirement to take the helm [...]

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Gibbons and welfare

5 June 2011

Regular contributor James Glover, aka Zebra, returns in a post that manages to combine gibbons, tax and a beer coaster. A question I often ask myself is how could gibbons possibly develop a civilisation comparable to our own? Gibbons are solitary creatures so do not form troops, groups or tribes. Developing and passing on knowledge [...]

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Why deficits are bad

2 June 2011

There have been many posts here on the blog arguing that government debt and deficits should not be feared, at least not in countries with their own free-floating currency and without foreign currency public debt*. In doing so, I have never discussed the reasons people may have for holding a contrary view. But I have [...]

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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?

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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.

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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 [...]

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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.

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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.

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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