March 2009

Burning Candles

27 March 2009

The third Earth Hour takes place tomorrow night and once again I have been asked about carbon emissions from candles. So, without wanting to be a party-pooper, I thought I would dig up some calculations from a year ago, courtesy of the friendly family power engineer (you know who you are!). Tomorrow night, many people […]

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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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How Big Are Australian Banks?

4 March 2009

There is no doubt that the big four Australian banks have navigated the global financial crisis better than many banks around the world, particularly in the US and UK. However, there seems to be a pervasive tendency in Australia to overstate the success of the Australian banks. A couple of weeks ago, Michael Duffy wrote […]

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