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Keywords: Fund Managers

  • ECONOMICS

    New app will breed capitalists, and that might be a good thing

    • Lucas Smith
    • 14 August 2015
    4 Comments

    G. K. Chesterton said that 'too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists'. In our young century, we have lost capitalists, and wealth has coagulated to a seemingly smaller and smaller number of financiers, oligarchs and corporations. The stock market is where entrenched wealth is kept and made. An industry-shattering share-trading app is set to help deepen our pool of capitalists.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    How super hurts the poor and middle income earners

    • Brian Toohey
    • 27 March 2015
    6 Comments

    Although the age pension will cost about $49 billion in 2017-18, it is means tested. In contrast, superannuation concessions are heavily biased in favour of high income earners. Both sides of politics pander to the wealthy and the cosseted finance sector, which want certainty that nothing will stand in the way of their super bonanza.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Who will feel better after Medibank privatisation?

    • David James
    • 13 October 2014
    7 Comments

    Federal Finance Minister Mathias Cormann announced 'the scoping study found no evidence that premiums would increase as a result of the sale' of Medibank Private. But the sale is being presented as a way to make the fund more efficient. If successful, Medibank Private will become even more dominant than it is at present and there will be pressure to raise premiums to achieve its purpose of keeping shareholders happy.

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  • ECONOMICS

    SMSFs offer 'pension fund socialism'

    • David James
    • 13 August 2014
    1 Comment

    In 1976 management thinker Peter Drucker said the real owners of the stock market were workers, through their pension funds. A similar broadening of ownership has occurred in Australia since the creation of compulsory superannuation. But intermediaries called fund managers still stood between the people and ultimate control of their financial destiny, until the rise of the Self Managed Super Fund (SMSF).

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  • ECONOMICS

    Super's evil empire on shaky ground

    • Brian Toohey
    • 11 June 2014
    15 Comments

    The superannuation industry inhabits a cosseted world in which the money pours in thanks to a combination of government compulsion and tax concessions. The foundations of this empire are criticised for how the tax concessions create an expensive form of upper class welfare, and for the harmful effect of compulsory super's artificial expansion of the finance sector. The Abbott Government shows scant concern about either aspect.

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  • RELIGION

    Negotiating Catholic healthcare moral dilemmas

    • Frank Brennan
    • 05 October 2012
    15 Comments

    The nation is the better for policies and funding arrangements that encourage public and private providers of healthcare, including the Churches. The public may need to be patient with Church authorities as they discern appropriate moral responses to new technologies. This is a small price to pay.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Australia's pension fund perversion

    • David James
    • 03 October 2012
    7 Comments

    The demise of Gunns, Tasmania's biggest paper and pulp mill, has been greeted as a triumph of environmentalists over business. The saga encompasses much more than that. It poses some deep questions about ownership and accountability in Australia's financial system which are yet to be answered persuasively.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The age pension was fairer than super

    • Brian Toohey
    • 02 April 2012
    8 Comments

    Paul Keating says he changed superannuation from an elite system to one which would include 'the bloke running behind the garbage truck'. But a new elite has left the garbo in the dust. Labor's core constituency and the economy would be much better off with the age pension rather than super. 

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Garnaut shows climate change bigger than politics

    • Charles Rue
    • 26 February 2008
    10 Comments

    The Garnaut Report underplays Australia's position as a wealthy country that can act now to safeguard its future. This month's bipartisan apology to the Stolen Generations has laid the ground for a multi-party agreement on the climate crisis.

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  • ECONOMICS

    How to measure governments' economic performance

    • Les Coleman
    • 22 August 2007
    1 Comment

    Both Government and Opposition seem committed to economic reform. But the fact that the Howard Government's fiscal policy is currently being steered by a drunken sailor is cause for alarm, as is Kevin Rudd's lack of experience and seeming inability to come up with his own economic policies.

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