Quite a few months ago now I took part in a session on water at the Melbourne Writers Festival, where I got to meet Gwynne Dyer, whose work on international politics I’ve been reading for many decades and also Maude Barlow from Canada and Paul Sinclair of ACF. Peter Mares chaired the session and subsequently broadcast it on The National Interest. You can read the transcript here. There was a lot of agreement but also some fairly sharp disagreement: Maude Barlow took a localist line on food production while I stressed the need for Australia to remain an exporter of food (the audience tended to agree with Maude).
Year: 2008
The great risk shift
I’ve spent the last couple of days at a workshop sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia on shifting allocations of risk. Most of the papers were well underway when the collapse of global financial markets implied the need for a radical revision of thinking. So a lot of discussion was prefaced with “at least until the onset of the crisis, this trend was ….” Here’s my paper.
In memoriam
Sad news from Calculated Risk. Doris Dungey, who blogged as ‘Tanta’, has died of cancer. She was an insightful commentator on a lot of issues, but particularly those related to the crisis in real estate and mortgage markets.
A long recession
The National Bureau of Economic Research Business Cycle Dating Committee has just announced its judgement that the current US recession began in December 2007. A year old, and the decline is just beginning to accelerate. As these forecasters quoted in the NY Times say, the recession is virtually certain to be the longest since World War II (in fact, since the 1929-33 slump), and quite possibly the deepest as well.
The only silver lining I can see is that we might not hear any more silliness about the “technical definition” of a recession being two quarters of negative growth.
Monday Message Board
It’s time once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual civilised discussion and no coarse language.
Looking through my wardrobe
I have a lot of T-shirts, almost none of them bought in clothes shops. They celebrate or advertise defunct sporting teams, (mostly) unsuccessful political campaigns, obsolete versions of operating systems and long-gone folk music festivals. What’s in your wardrobe?
Weekend reflections
It’s time (on time for once) for weekend reflections, which makes space for longer than usual comments on any topic. As always, civilised discussion and no coarse language.
Terror attacks in Mumbai
The news from Mumbai is still unclear, but extremely grim. Scores of people are dead, and hundreds wounded in yet another murderous terror attack.
As the cycle of war and terror has gone on, it’s become increasingly clear that the kind of easy evasion involved in slogans like “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” is no more tenable than the bogus arguments for war put forward by Bush and his followers. Terror attacks like this one are always crimes regardless of the purported cause, regardless of whether the terrorists deal death hand to hand or with bomber planes, and regardless of whether they are individual criminals, political or religious groups, or national governments.Phenomenon movie full
This sounds scary
I haven’t had time to digest the implications of this story which has been around for at least a month, but only now seems to be attracting attention (I’ve seen it in a few different places today). Apparently, short sellers in the US Treasury bond market are failing to deliver the securities they’ve sold. As long ago as 1 October, the shortfall was more than $2 trillion by one report. Via Felix Salmon, here’s Helen Avery in Euromoney.
I’m not an expert on this stuff, but it seems to raise the question of whether bond markets can and should continue to exist in their current form. Maybe the US and other Treasuries should be selling bonds directly, and offering repurchase options to provide liquidity, perhaps using the banks they’ve already part-nationalised to handle the mechanics.
Victoria's PPP that lost two of its Ps
I couldn’t go past this neat headline on a piece by Michael West in the Age . The central point is that the impending failure of both financier Babcock and Brown and bond insurer FGIC will leave the Vic government holding the risk on a PPP hospital project. Money quote
Maybe the Government ought to have issued its own bonds, with a state guarantee and consequent cheap funding cost, because this now looks like a PPP that lost two of its Ps.
That’s what I thought at the time.
John Quiggin 