The acclaimed Richard Koch of The 80/20 Principle fame suggested thinking of life as a lottery, for which you can buy two types of ticket: red tickets – expensive & time-consuming to obtain, but the conventional route to success. Most people can only acquire a small number of red tickets, as they require a good deal of hard…
At the G20 Summit in London in 2009, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown struck a historic deal to tackle the global financial meltdown, at the time hailed by President Obama as a turning point for the global economic recovery. Following days of intense and stressful negotiation, Brown was able to announce that $1 trillion would be…
One of the unexpected outcomes of this record construction cycle has been that Melbourne’s assumed structural oversupply of dwellings never really arrived, except for high-rise apartments in some isolated pockets. Why were the forecasts and forecasters wrong? Partly because of the weakness of the respective economies or Perth, Darwin, and Adelaide, Melbourne began to attract…
Data released by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) showed that just shy of 2.1 million Australians declared an interest in a rental property for the 2016 financial year. The number declaring a net rental loss to the tax office has declined over the past four years of available figures, mainly due to lower mortgage rates….
Inside Story’s Tim Colebatch revisited a pet theme last week — immigration — in particular citing the following snippet from a Treasury report Shaping a Nation (a report which was intended to highlight the benefits of immigration), with his own comment added beneath: ‘”Recent migrants accounted for two-thirds (64.5 per cent) of the approximately 850,000 net jobs…
Housing finance to slow The Royal Commission into Banking is going to squeeze mortgage lending. The Housing Finance figures were released for February 2018 this week, reported as “Housing finance falls in February” (Australian), “Falls felt for February” (Rate City), and so on. Interesting interpretations, given that housing finance was…well, up! Anyway, having allowed a few days…
I’ll never forget the first time I set foot in a casino as an unworldly teenager, as the mate I went with immediately won an improbable 35 to 1 payout on a single number bet. I strongly suspected he had no idea what he was doing, but no matter, we were well fortified and so…
I was having a yarn on Twitter this week with some smart finance types & recounted a Charlie Munger quote about there being only 3 ways to go broke: ‘Ladies, liquor, & leverage’. Sidekick Warren Buffett quipped that Munger only added the first two because they begin with ‘L’, implying that that the only way…
‘Don’t just do something; stand there!’ This delightful piece of wordplay has been around since at least the end of WWII, and has variously been attributed to Clint Eastwood, Dwight Eisenhower, and even Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit. In terms of how this counter-intuitive phrase relates to investing, consider how investors are wont to trade too…
There’s so much more commentary around than there used to be that I should probably direct a bit more attention to trying to blog about things that don’t get a whole lot of coverage elsewhere. Here are a four things that sprang to mind last week. Firstly, it looks to be as though household debt…