Latest Posts
Is honesty the best policy?
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
Government and disaster
Ross Gittins, in his column this week talked about how much we seem to distrust the government because we don’t want to pay extra taxes to help flood victims, even though we are very willing to give money voluntarily. And yet Julie Bishop this week complained that the government isn’t doingContinue Reading
Who should bear the risk?
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
Women in charge in Australia
Watching Julia Gillard being sworn in as Australia’s first female prime minister by Quentin Bryce, Australia’s first female Governor-General, I realised there were more. I live in NSW, which has a female Premier, and female Governor, and I work in the financial services industry where Australia’s biggest bank is runContinue Reading
Have you outlived your contemporaries yet?
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 and the efficient market hypothesis – which one wins?
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
Why don’t people buy life insurance?
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
Does Australia have a house price bubble?
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
Will people walk away from their mortgages? Not in Australia
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
Book Review: The End of the Line, by Charles Clover
Today’s book review is The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat, by Charles Clover. I’ve known, fairly well, for years, that we are overfishing the seas. Reading Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky, was the first bookContinue Reading