finance

Playing with trains – a North-West rail link

4 October 2010
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Sydney-siders are losing patience with broken government promises to improve rail infrastructure, but if we had a blank sheet of paper, what would a North-West rail link look like? In this guest post, @pfh007 returns to his beer coaster calculations to examine the prospects for improving Sydney’s rail infrastructure.

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Will the Reserve Bank hike rates next week?

1 October 2010

Over the last few months, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) board meetings have not provided any real surprises, but coming up next week is the most interesting meeting in a while. The cash rate is currently 4.5%, but there have been enough noises from the bank’s governor and other RBA board members about the [...]

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When is a bet a derivative?

29 September 2010
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Six months ago, the ASIC was rattling its sabre, threatening to “shut down” online betting agency Centrebet if they continued to allow punters to bet on stock market and interest rate moves. In this post, the Mule wonders why hasn’t Sportsbet come in for the same treatment?

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Purchasing Power Parity postponed

21 September 2010

The Australian dollar has been going for a bit of a run over the last few weeks and many commentators are concerned that it has become over-valued. A widely quoted Bloomberg article published yesterday argued that the Aussie is 27% over fair value compared to the US dollar. Australian Dollar vs US Dollar (Jun 2009 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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RSPT RIP – Long Live the MRRT

2 July 2010

In the third in a series of guest posts on the subject of Australian mining tax, Zebra (James Glover) considers the changes to the proposed tax the new prime minister, Julia Gillard, has negotiated with miners.

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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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Are Australia’s banks about to collapse?

28 May 2010
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Steve Keen is predicting the worst for Australia’s property market. Some argue that this spells disaster for Australian banks. Are they really in trouble?

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