Posts tagged as:

finance

Mule Stable demo video

25 February 2010

A demonstration video showing how to get started on the Mule Stable discussion forum. Anyone familiar with Twitter will feel at home straight-away, for everyone else, this video should ease your way into posting in the Stable.

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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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The Mule on Mortgages

13 February 2010

So you’ve saved up a deposit for your first house, you want to take advantage of the government’s first home owner grant while you still can, and the bank is actually prepared to lend you money. But how much should you borrow?

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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 and [...]

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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 for [...]

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Park the Debt Truck!

16 July 2009

About two months ago, I tried to bring some perspective to concerns about growing government debt in Australia. Last week the opposition has rolled out the “debt truck” to add to the hysteria about growing government debt, so I feel compelled to return to the subject for another attempt.
Last time I looked at net debt [...]

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Pinching Debt Data

22 May 2009

Regular readers of the Mule will know that I am a bit of a data-mining junkie. Whenever I come across an interesting chart I start Googling for the underlying data. But, even with well-honed Google skills, it’s not always possible to find the data. Sometimes it is simply not publically available. I ran into just [...]

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Dubai Perspectives

30 April 2009

I’m hoping to try something a little bit different here on the Stubborn Mule: a guest post.
But first some background. Recently I came across this article in the Independent exploring the “dark side” of Dubai. It paints a very grim picture of massive crumbling developments, environmental degredation, Western ex-pats who either revel in luxury or [...]

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Who is to Blame for BrisConnections?

17 April 2009

In the latest instalment of the ongoing debacle that is BrisConnections, Nicholas Bolton shrugged off the mantle of hero to mum and dad shareholders in exchange for a secretly arranged $4.5 million dollars. I have to admit I would have enjoyed the Schadenfreude of seeing Bolton continue to stick it to Macquarie Bank, but whatever [...]

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AIG and DZ Bank: Dumb and Dumber

16 March 2009

To date, in their efforts to make the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) even more disastrous than it already is, the US Government has pumped an extraordinary $170 billion into the American International Group (AIG), the humbled and humiliated insurance giant. AIG’s biggest problems arose from entering into enormous credit default swap (CDS) transactions. The reason [...]

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