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Despite a post-pandemic bull-run, both the national and international economy are now stalling. Interest rates are going up. Markets are going down. Inflation seems unstoppable. While many factors are to blame for the rising cost of living, a catalysing force continues to be our response to the war in Ukraine.
Last month I travelled to Ethiopia, visiting an IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camp filled with thousands of people facing a hunger crisis. The triple threats of conflict, COVID and climate have created the perfect storm, with serious impacts on countries that depend heavily on grain, fuel and fertiliser imports from Russia or Ukraine, including Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan.
With $1 trillion of debt accumulating over the last seven years in attempts to establish a National Radioactive Waste Management Facility, the new Labor Government is facing mounting pressure to rethink the nuclear waste storage plan for Kimba.
It is easy to view homelessness from a distance as only a failure of economic policy and of the political responsibility to deliver material goods. A home, however, is more than a house. It connotes connections that are central to humanity. Left without a home people are deprived of more than bricks and mortar; they are diminished in their humanity.
We all know the Internet can be a seething cesspool of vitriol, so the presence of heart-warming videos of people slipping $20 into someone’s coat pocket or randomly complimenting a stranger, even the ubiquitous handing out of flowers, is largely welcome. But is this actually kindness? If an act of kindness happens and no one is there to film it, did it really happen?
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.
Ozark is, at heart, an unflinching look at evil. I’ve always known I’d come back to each new release of episodes in part because the darkness is made watchable by the likeable faces of Jason Bateman and Laura Linney. They play the couple at the centre of a family amidst sinister violence and corruption. Indeed, the juxtaposition between the content and those faces is a key part of what makes the show so intriguing.
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.
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?
I have always considered myself pro-life. It’s not something I’ve felt a need to wear as a badge of honour, rather it has always been a default position. But terminology matters. Indeed, frequently, calling myself pro-life has drawn the derision or raised eyebrows of people around me, nuns and priests and radical ratbags alike, it has connotations.
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.
I was invited to a party the night of the 2019 election. The night’s entertainment was invite-only, with long tables of bread and wine, and I stepped back from the sounds of celebration to hear the political coverage on my phone. Standing at the far window, I looked up to see people in the night below, out in the dark, silent. Behind me a party guest shouted over the noise ‘what happened?’ I looked away from those outside and answered: a loss.
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