As we missed yet another u-bahn train laboriously putting €2.80 in a ticket machine yesterday for the boys’ train tickets, I pondered the various approaches taken to honesty by all the public transport systems we have tried. Singapore, China, Israel, and the Netherlands share a common characteristic. It is nigh onContinue Reading
A few weeks ago, the Penguin family had a very enjoyable time at Rocket Car Day, in inner-city Sydney. Our car, the Silver Surfer, won its heat, and was a respectable third place in its repechage final (also in the SMH here). The day was very enjoyable. It was entirelyContinue Reading
My dad, who isn’t competitive at all, asked me recently how old he would have to be before he had outlived 50% of his contemporaries. He suspects he may have passed that age sometime in the past few years. So I’ve been exploring the ABS mortality statistics. If you lookContinue Reading
The insurance cycle is something that is well known to general insurers (property and casualty, if you are in the US). For many classes of business, the price of insurance fluctuates much more than the underlying cost. The general consensus is that it is about availability of capital. If theContinue Reading
It’s a truism in the life insurance industry that “life insurance is sold not bought”. Meaning that people very rarely go out and seek opportunities to buy a life insurance policy without someone actively trying to sell it to them. Life insurance agents aren’t well liked, because they are trainedContinue Reading
According to this article from the Economist, Australian house prices are 50% overvalued. I’m normally sceptical of worldwide measures like that, but in this case, the Economist looked at the long term residential rental yield in each market, and then compared it with the current rental yield. So for myContinue Reading
The SMH had a scare article in the main section of the paper today, arguing that Australian house prices were about to drop, following the US. The rise in the number of Australian households who are in so much difficulty with their mortgage repayments that they are facing selling upContinue Reading
Today’s book review is Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, by Barry Ritholtz, with Aaron Task. Barry Ritholtz is the author of The Big Picture, a blog I became addicted to when I was trying to make sense of what was going onContinue Reading
Today’s Book Review is The Pinstriped Prison: How overachievers get trapped in corporate jobs they hate, by Lisa Pryor. Lisa Pryor is a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald who got 100% in her HSC (school leaving exams). She started a law degree, but ended up a (less well paid) journalist,Continue Reading
Today’s book review is Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard H Thaler, and Prof Cass R Sunstein. I’ve missed the zeitgeist with this one – this book was apparently very popular with Barack Obama’s policy team well before he won the election. And Sunstein is nowContinue Reading