Keywords: Digital Currency
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AUSTRALIA
- Max Jeganathan
- 24 March 2025
Amid rising hate speech and tighter laws, something deeper festers. In a culture wired for outrage and shaped by tribal algorithms, we’re learning not just to disagree, but to despise. What happens when identity is built on enmity, and public debate becomes less about ideas and more about who we’re against?
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AUSTRALIA
- Mark Gaetani
- 26 February 2025
As cash fades from everyday transactions, its decline underscores a growing divide in access. With digital payments dominating and cash use dropping sharply, questions loom over the future of currency in an increasingly cashless society, and who might be left behind.
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AUSTRALIA
- Binoy Kampmark
- 04 February 2025
Smartphones dictate access to commerce, communication, and even education, and face-to-face transactions have all but disappeared. Have we willingly surrendered choice for convenience? As digital payments become the norm, are those choosing to live without a smartphone excluded from modern society?
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INTERNATIONAL
- David Halliday
- 19 August 2024
1 Comment
After a year in court, a U.S. Judge concluded that Google has a monopoly over search and had illegally maintained its monopoly by making massive payments to other companies to be their default search engine. Everyone in tech is quietly watching for what happens next, because how the U.S. Department of Justice treats Google will set the example for the other giants standing astride the world.
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ECONOMICS
It is a truism to say that the way money is constructed defines the power structure under which we live. But allowing private actors to manipulate and game the financial system has not just given them extraordinary power, it has undermined the way money itself is understood.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Max Jeganathan
- 21 November 2023
1 Comment
The spectacular rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is a story that began with unfettered brilliance and financial wizardry, but quickly unraveled into an all-too familiar cautionary tale of swindlers, conmen, and morally vacuous ambition.
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ECONOMICS
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.
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ECONOMICS
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.
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ECONOMICS
- 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’.
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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
- 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
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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