Keywords: Western Literature
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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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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 27 October 2020
20 Comments
The leaders of these nations, as well as acting amorally, have also apparently thrown the ideal of common civility to the winds. What are we to make of heads of government who hurl insults and are economical with the truth, use the gag continually, and turn their backs when those in opposition are speaking?
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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
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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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 04 February 2020
3 Comments
A shift is afoot in the west's financial markets that represents the most important economic change since the emergence of the new financial instruments in the 1990s that ultimately led to the global financial crisis. It is likely to result in a new way of thinking about money, which will change the substructure of developed economies.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Tim Robertson
- 16 October 2019
8 Comments
Chinese interference in Australian politics is an issue of genuine concern. But why is the hysteria exclusive to China? Like the outrage surrounding the awarding of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature to Mo Yan, accused of working within the bounds of China's censorship program, why don't we hold our own government to the same level of scrutiny?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Mark Tredinnick
- 30 September 2019
11 Comments
I'm a white man in a white man's world, his mother tongue the lingua franca everywhere. I may not be rich, but I am more or less free, and my calling has let me travel the world. It's easy for me, not having had to fight for mine, to ask us to go deeper than identity when we write. But when James Baldwin says the same thing, it compels.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 07 September 2019
6 Comments
One of the ironies of the intensifying tariff war between America and China is that that neither of the two giants seems to have a viable economic model. Both countries' systems are based on dodgy financial engineering and printing money, or just inventing new types of money out of thin air.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Neve Mahoney
- 05 August 2019
3 Comments
Translations have a knack for defamiliarising English and how we think language and storytelling works. They also expose English-speaking readers to literary movements and times in history of which they might not otherwise have much knowledge. Work is being done to broaden the published translations we read.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- B. N. Oakman
- 29 July 2019
A voice made for poetry, asking of you post surgery, your whereabouts in the labyrinth of cures. I spoke of blind turns and errors, of kindness, though mainly your courage. He recalled his one big scare, declared he'd not want to swap.
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ECONOMICS
While money can be transacted for things that are bad — air pollution, road deaths, cigarette ads — as long as more transactions occur, it creates the illusion the economy is growing, which, ipso facto, is good. Thus, Japan's GDP rose sharply after the tsunami disaster. New Zealand's initiative will track better what is really happening in the country.
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ECONOMICS
The globe is being split into two, with Australia nervously sitting between the two sides: America and China. At least we have a trade deficit with America so are not an immediate target. But we might want to consider becoming more self-sufficient and broadening our industrial base.
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