November 1, 2009 – 5:50 am
I have just listened to the last Soros lecture and he makes many good points http://www.ft.com/indepth/soros-lectures .
Soros has long argued that stable equilibrium as a model does not reflect reality and he continues to make a lot of money because policy makers act as though it does.I have also listened to a talk by Tim [...]
October 26, 2009 – 12:07 pm
A slidecast of this presentation is available at http://www.slideshare.net/cscoxk/zero-interest-loans-for-energy-sustainability
Approximate text
This talk was first presented at the green new deal event put on by the green institute http://greeninstitute.org.au/gnd
It came after an talk by Tim Jackson who presented his book Prosperity without growth.
In the talk I discuss one mechanism to implement Prosperity Without Growth.
The key to sustainability [...]
October 3, 2009 – 5:28 am
In a recent LateLine discussion Jim Greenwood, president and CEO of the Biotechnology Industry Organisation put out a challenge to Australians to come up with a better way of financing research and development in gene research than the approach using patents. The following is a better way.
Patents are used to increase the cost of the [...]
September 10, 2009 – 7:02 am
ACT Residents are being asked to pay extra money for water to pay to build the Cotter Dam. The following is a financing arrangement that will build the dam, cost the government and Actew nothing, cost the Federal government nothing, give the residents of Canberra ownership and ongoing income from the dam and be very [...]
August 27, 2009 – 5:21 pm
The following appeared as a letter to the editor of the CT on August 27th.
Bede Harris in his article “Our democratic system fails us” CT August 26th makes two good suggestions on how to reform the system. Another reform can be made in the allocations of public funds and political donations to candidates. Currently we [...]
August 23, 2009 – 8:47 am
Another approach to funding health is to realise that most medical costs do NOT require insurance. That is, we can predict pretty well how much we need on average for the “regular” items. These are things like dental work, regular “check ups”, pre-natal, birth and post natal, injections, minor accidents, treatment for diseases such as [...]
August 22, 2009 – 3:17 am
One of the major issues facing governments, for which they get a great deal of criticism, is the spending of government funds on community infrastructure. The free marketers say that leave money with people instead of taxing and let the market decide the provision of goods and services. Socialists tend to agree with this provided [...]
August 21, 2009 – 5:43 am
Money for innovation is very expensive as you have to pay for it with equity. In my experience it is a minimum of 10 times as expensive as a loan to purchase an existing asset. This, of course, is the opposite to what we want if we want to foster innovation. The reason that money [...]
August 21, 2009 – 5:36 am
The world is experiencing a Global Financial Crisis. It is called a Financial Crisis because it started as a problem with the financial system and has spread to the “real” economy. We can see the symptoms and effect of the crisis but there is little confidence that after we come through the problem it will [...]
August 13, 2009 – 9:46 am
The banks are not the cause of the Global Financial Crisis but are the solution. They can now, if they choose, solve the problem as they have been given the tool to do so with the government guarantee of deposits. In fact banks have, through their diligence, prevented the crisis from being much worse than [...]
