Section: Economics
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 09 February 2021
5 Comments
The controversy over the shares of US video game company GameStop has again exposed what has long been obvious: there is something seriously rotten in the state of the world’s financial markets. It was a battle between a hedge fund, Melvin Capital, which manages $US13 billion, and a small group of ‘amateur’ investors who communicated with each other on a Reddit forum called WallStreetBets.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 10 December 2020
1 Comment
The world’s financial markets are afflicted by a deep irrationality that imperils their very existence. On the surface, finance looks logical enough with its numbers, charts, mathematics, forecasts, ‘modelling’ and so on. But this only masks the fact that the system itself has been working on underlying assumptions that are either contradictory — such as that you can ‘deregulate’ finance when finance consists of rules — narrow minded or absurd.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 17 November 2020
5 Comments
There is a common error about economics that, if not corrected, has far reaching consequences. It is the widely held belief that economic growth and consumption are the same. They are not.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 20 October 2020
3 Comments
The global economy was already teetering on the edge of such a debt crisis before the coronavirus hit. The economic shutdowns have accelerated the damage.
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ECONOMICS
- Joe Zabar
- 24 September 2020
3 Comments
The havoc COVID-19 has wreaked on our economy has been less damaging than for some other countries. While international comparisons may help us feel better about our circumstances, the reality is that Australia’s economy is in trouble and will need more than economic first aid through measures like JobKeeper to get us back on track to recovery.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 17 September 2020
5 Comments
The issue of class, economic inequality, has for some time been conspicuously absent in contemporary political debate. In the wake of COVID-19, which will greatly exacerbate income and wealth disparities, such inattention must be addressed.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 20 August 2020
6 Comments
There will be Great Reset in finance and economics. It is inevitable because the shock has been so great. The first problem is what to do with global debt, which was already at unsustainable levels before the virus hit: over 320 per cent of global GDP. The only way to prevent system-wide failure has been to lower interest rates to near zero levels.
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ECONOMICS
- Andrew Hamilton
- 13 August 2020
6 Comments
Amid the disruption of predictable life wrought by the coronavirus, governments have focused on jobs. Jobs lost in the response to the virus, and jobs created as we emerge from the crisis. The focus is worthy — behind each job lost is a person whose life has become anxious and uncertain. The language, however, is concerning. Defining the challenge as one of creating jobs expresses an understanding of work, the inadequacy of which the coronavirus has laid bare.
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ECONOMICS
The full economic impact of the coronavirus lockdowns will not be fully felt until the end of the year, but it will be devastating. The Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, is already estimating that the effective employment rate is 13.3 per cent; it may be headed for as high as 20 per cent. It raises a question, not just in Australia, but in many developed countries. Will there be a significant middle class left after such economic destruction?
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ECONOMICS
- Bree Alexander
- 09 July 2020
3 Comments
What then, does the case for full employment look like? This is not just an economic question, but too of having access to a decent wage that allows all people to live a decent life.
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ECONOMICS
- Nicola Heath
- 30 June 2020
2 Comments
It turns out that the COVID-19 economic crisis is disproportionately affecting women — so much so that some have dubbed it a ‘pink-collar recession’. Unemployment figures show that since February, 457,517 women have lost their jobs compared to 380,737 men.
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ECONOMICS
A commonly heard phrase, or rather media cliché, is that after the COVID-19 crisis ‘things will never be the same.’ It is an understandable sentiment, given the seemingly unprecedented nature of recent events. But how novel is what happened, and how much will actually change?
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