BHP Billiton is a great company, and yes, I am consulting to one of their plants at the moment. Despite their size, they are able to run over 100 businesses in 25 countries (be they mines, smelters, refineries or new projects). And they run them well. Check out their latest production report, and note how …
Category Archives: Global Macro Trends
It’s the Goats’ fault
From an interesting Mother Jones article by a reporter driven around parts of China looking for pollution and environmental disasters. They were not hard to find. <update – as Dan in the comments points out, I neglected to include a link, which is to the article at Mother Jones>
Solving the NZ and Australia housing crisis
It takes 18.6 years for the median household to buy the median house in NZ, and that’s excluding rates, taxes and maintenance. That’s via NBR, wo curiously neglect to mention that there is a giant photo of Don Brash on page 2 of the original Household Affordability report, as he is the Chairman of something …
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As the housing bubble bursts in Florida
NYTimes has some food for thought from the post bubble impact in Florida. ‘They’ said it wouldn’t hapen there, or in DC, Sydney, or Auckland. ‘They’ say now it won’t happen in Wellington, in Perth or in Nelson. It well – economics always wins in the long run. If you have any, please do consider …
Deficit and housing
via calculated risk this chart – showing the huge size of the US Trade Deficit. Sure Petroleum is bad, but that red line is hovering around the the thirty billion a year mark. Meanwhile on the same blog we see that a major US apartment owner is in big trouble, risking default on $900m in …
The vote is in: Housing prices are overvalued
I know internet polls are unscientific, but it seems that Stuff poll voters are pretty clear on housing prices these days: I agree. Just check your rent versus buy numbers. Over here in Perth I’m paying rent of a third of the mortgage payments required to buy this place. I should know – it is …
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Online ads over $60bn by 2010
ZenithOptimedia has just made the prediction that global online ad spend will be 11.5% of all media spend in 2010. That’s the average – they reckon online will acccount for over 20% of media spend for Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the UK, which is already at 15%. However they also predict that most of the …
Goodbye payphones…
At least in chunks of the USA. AT&T is getting rid of them by the end of next year. The USA had 2.6m payphones in 1998 and about 1m now. Apparently, the story goes, AT&T (or someone else) commissioned McKinsey years ago to determine the demand for mobile phones. The answer that came back was …
Why Slashdot still rocks – Earth as a billard ball
Digg, Reddit, kiwi wannabe Scoop and other news-commentary sites may come and go, but the forefather of them all is Slashdot. Here’s a post that may go somewhere to explaining why Slashdot appeals so much to the nerd community. Bear in mind these are small differences: if you could make a perfect scale model of …
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US housing crisis – more evidence
The October US new house sales statistics were revised after official release from 735k to 727k, and the September ones from 770k to 716k. Those are big differences, and signs that all is not well in housing land. So via the WSJ blog, a few tasty tidbits about the stats: It isn’t just the bottom …
Making money from the housing crisis
Call it Sub Prime Crisis, but when mortgage financiers Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae show signs of distress, the entire US housing market is in trouble. Freddie dropped $2 billion in losses in the last quarter, which is scary – as they hold over $700 billion in mortgage assets, at last some of which are …
Free Rice: Addictive, but is it a scam?
Addictive. Very addictive – I’ve managed to donate 1830 ‘grains of rice through the UN to help end world hunger’. However I’ve only managed to get to level 44 – and then only once. There are 50 levels. Here’s the deal. Each time you get an answer right, 10 grains of rice are donated through …
Tokelau connects everybody
Tokelau’s three atolls have no airport nor harbour and are two days sailing away from Samoa and just two years ago its 1100 Polynesians looked and sounded like they were in another time and space in the past. Now they have free broadband Tokelau is, of course, still part of NZ. It’s a great story. …
We’ve never had it so good
Things are booming in New Zealand – and we have 3.4% unemployment forecast for the September quarter by Westpac, a strong Kiwi dollar and low inflation. I have not seen signs this good in my lifetime. I do worry about US housing and sub prime happenings, froth in the US equity markets and froth in …
US Housing crisis
A great post by Krugman, on his blog. This picture from Schiller tells pretty much everything you need to know to decide whether or not there is a US housing bubble. There is a bunch more on his blog – and if you get it then you’ll know why I am short EQR (Equity Residential) …
Lance Wiggs 