I have two garbage truck video enthusiasts at home who will be sad to learn of this. Presumably parents will continue to login via their own accounts for children to watch YouTube videos in a supervised manner.

Not great news for Australia’s future productivity performance.

Bullock singled out durable goods and construction costs as two items in the monthly CPI series that concerned RBA enough to delay a cut. Both look pretty benign in the Q2 CPI report. Trimmed-mean CPI declined from 2.9% YoY to 2.7% and services from 3.7% to 3.3%. Time to cut.

NZ tariff rate rises to 15%

Headlines like this are the reason why economic efficiency arguments of comparative advantage and least cost production origin need to be tempered by realist assessments of power politics. Adam Smith understood this.

A big part of this (at least recently) is seasonal conditions, but ag is powering Australia 👇

Our system is tightly regulated planning with liberalised credit. You can have tightly regulated planning, but only if you also have tightly regulated credit. Australia chose the present situation in the 1980s and hasn’t seen fit to un-choose it since.

👇

Albo said recently that he opposes raising the GST because it is regressive. This 👇 and 20% debt haircuts for future high income earners is also regressive 🤷🏻‍♂️

Capital controls? Fixed exchange rate regime? State intervention to smooth out volatility in commodity markets? Don’t be surprised if some of these ideas come under active consideration within the next 10 years. The rubric now is Curtin/Chifley/Menzies, not Hawke/Keating/Howard.

Norman Angell wrote a book making this same argument that free trade and globalisation made war impossible because economic interdependency made the costs too high. Five years after it was published, WWI started.