November 2010

Coffee meeting

30 November 2010

No, I’m not writing this post over a macchiato. The title of the post has nothing to do with caffeinated beverages. Rather, it refers to the annual conference of “CofFEE”, the Centre of Full Employment and Equity, a research centre at the University of Newcastle. The director of the center is Bill Mitchell, who may […]

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Do your block in!

25 November 2010

Sydney’s property market is a subject that has found its way onto the Stubborn Mule more than once. In this post, regular guest contributor Zebra (James Glover) manages to combine property and television with some now-traditional beer coaster calculations. Channel 9’s high rating renovation show The Block just finished its successful second series on Wednesday […]

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Bank funding costs

16 November 2010

Digging into the data suggests that banks are not lying about their funding costs going up, but are they charging too much on mortgages anyway?

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Sister can I lend you a dime?

15 November 2010

Today’s post is written by Zebra (James Glover), an occasional contributor to the Stubborn Mule, who turns his mind this time to microcredit, and the internet lending site Kiva. Dolly lives in a mobile home and works in the fast food industry. I met her on the internet 5 weeks ago and almost immediately I […]

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Standard variable rate mortgages

9 November 2010

The last post looked at the increasing margins on Australian mortgages and small business loans. On the way is another post that tries to estimate how much the banks’ own margins have been increasing. Interesting though that may be, the real problem with Australian mortgages has nothing to do with whether bank margins are or are […]

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Banks, banks, banks

5 November 2010

There has been a frenzy of bank bashing in Australia over the last few weeks. The attacks intensified on Tuesday when the Commonwealth Bank decided to raise their standard mortgage rate by 0.45%. As the national broadcaster did not want us to miss, this was almost double the Reserve Bank’s interest rate increase of 0.25%. […]

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The dangers of prediction

2 November 2010

The recent post about Australia’s coal supplies took issue with the convention of quoting coal and other commodity reserves in terms of years remaining at current production levels. The problem is that it is too easy to assume that these figures give a good indication of how long the reserves will actually last, when in […]

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Disappointing the punters

1 November 2010

Some readers will recall last year’s astonishing correct tip for the Melbourne Cup here on the Mule. I was vaguely contemplating an equally spurious analysis this year, but inspiration has eluded me and so I will instead rest on my thoroughly undeserved laurels and preserve my perfect prediction record.

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