Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Currency

  • ECONOMICS

    In finance, story matters most

    • David James
    • 16 November 2022
    1 Comment

    Financial markets are made up of human beings and human beings have always been storytellers — long before science, or modern finance, or accounting even existed. Accordingly, the main skill of successful analysts, advisers, financial gurus and commentators is the construction of compelling narratives. They are, if not exactly creators of fairy stories, not too far removed from it. 

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Real world problems can’t be solved by finance fictions

    • David James
    • 18 October 2022
    3 Comments

    The world is facing cross-currents: a collapsing financial system that is balanced by the benefits of massive, long term improvements in production efficiencies, mainly because of technological advances. It is a bad news/good news story that can only be seen accurately if the intractable errors of contemporary economics are jettisoned. We are in a battle between finance fictions and reality. 

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Patterns of war and peace

    • Barry Gittins
    • 13 October 2022

    Why is it that we so often don’t learn from the last war’s mistakes? Time and again, humans are drawn into patterns of behaviour that echo those of the past, and that lead once again to armed conflict. It's too easy to shy away from examining the moral failure that is war. When we eulogise the fallen, do we forget why they were butchered in the first place?

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Why we need new rules for money

    • David James
    • 23 August 2022
    4 Comments

    Now that it is becoming hard to avoid just how much trouble the global financial system is in, it is interesting to speculate about what should be done about it. The first thing to understand about the global financial system is that the assumptions that were used to shape it are demonstrably false.

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Why debt forgiveness may be inevitable

    • David James
    • 25 July 2022
    3 Comments

    Monetary authorities are caught in an impossible situation. Inflation is rising: it is over 5 per cent in Australia and over 9 per cent in the United States. Inflation is often seen as a way out of excessive debt because it erodes the real value of money and therefore the real value of the debt. But what is increasingly being discussed are ways to cancel the debt.

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Rising interest rates point to a larger problem

    • David James
    • 28 June 2022
    3 Comments

    The question that should be posed is how effective has the Reserve Bank been at ‘managing’ the economy and financial system? ‘Not very’, has to be the answer. Not that the RBA is alone. The same pattern has been seen across the developed world. Central banks have one weapon at their disposal, the cost of money (the interest rate), and there is not much evidence they have used this tool to make their systems sustainable. Mostly, they have made matters worse. 

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Longing for the multiverse

    • Cherie Gilmour
    • 02 June 2022
    1 Comment

    At a time when a second baby meant my own choices were fading into the background, I thought a lot about Nora and her life-jumping. What if I’d had kids later? What if I’d finished that degree? What if I’d taken that job? What if, what if, what if… The multiverse casts a web of different lives, all endlessly diverging like branches from a tree. 

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    Can financial fictions survive reality?

    • David James
    • 31 May 2022
    2 Comments

    As commodity prices and inflation soar in the ‘real’ world we may be witnessing a prelude to another 2008-style crisis triggered by the foreign exchange markets. The risks certainly look similar and can be described with a simple question. Can the fictions produced by out-of-control financial actors survive reality? 

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    The war in Ukraine: A Roundtable

    • Andrew Hamilton, David Halliday, Michele Frankeni, Stewart Braun
    • 19 May 2022
    5 Comments

    We are now three months into the Ukraine war. From an invasion it has turned into a war of attrition that has cost many lives, displaced civilians, destroyed cities, and led to sanctions and the making of alliances with effects that have spread suffering far beyond Ukraine. In this Roundtable, Andrew Hamilton SJ, David Halliday, Michele Frankeni and Dr Stewart Braun explore the ethics of the war and likely paths to peace.  

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    How will Russia sanctions impact the global economy?

    • David James
    • 22 March 2022
    5 Comments

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to severe financial sanctions being imposed on the country that are likely to have lasting consequences. Problem is, they may not be the ones the sanctioners are expecting. They may even come to regret what they have done.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    United by our national scapegoat

    • Joel Hodge
    • 20 January 2022
    25 Comments

    It is unusual when political enemies unite. We should take note of them. The spectacular deportation of Australian Open tennis champion, Novak Djokovic, is one such unusual moment. Feeling had risen to a mob-like fervour. One is left wondering why?

    READ MORE
  • ECONOMICS

    The battle for the future of money

    • David James
    • 07 September 2021
    4 Comments

    There is a three-way battle looming over the future of money and the stakes could scarcely be higher. Conventional money, mainly debt created by banks — the ‘folding stuff’ is only a tiny proportion of the total — is in trouble. Total global debt is now so large relative to the world economy it cannot be serviced, which is why monetary authorities have resorted to dropping interest rates. When they almost hit zero, the next step was quantitative easing (QE): printing money by getting the central bank to buy back government and corporate bonds and putting them on its ‘balance sheet’. 

    READ MORE