The Australian Way These stats from the UK are normally a good leading indicator. “Money numbers” from the Inland Revenue about what has been paid in payroll tax. Overall it’s a very sharp drop in employment and trending sharply down. One of the major causes has been an increase in what is known as Employers

Not friends That got ugly quickly. Elon actually believed he could cut government spending. He was given carte blanche by his former bestie to do so. He failed.  That is the thing about Elon Musk, he is actually prepared to fail. One of his rockets fell out of the sky too this week, because that

HKMA The stablecoin race gathered a little pace this week. The United States regulatory bill is making its way through the Senate but rather more interesting is the action on the other side of the world. Hong Kong actually passed stablecoin legislation, establishing a licensing regime for fiat-backed stablecoins. It wouldn’t matter so much but

KYC Before we throw eggs at Coinbase for their KYC debacle, let’s take a look closer to home. Right across the board then, public to private, data is stolen all the time. Indeed, there are identity factories in Asia that will sell you any and all the KYC you could wish to buy on pretty

A slow climb The slow price climb continues. I’ve written about the scale of the psychological barrier that is $100k before. Back in February “it will take time” Then we had this in December. It’s now May. We are still where we were. We can make all sorts of excuses about global trade wars and

Aye You Free stuff! I was particularly drawn to Labor’s contribution to men’s health, $32million or $2.30 each. In fairness to Albanese he actually had some policies while it was not absolutely clear that his principal opponent had any at all. What is most striking across all the parties was the complete lack of any

Unrealised CGT It’s only on superannuation, it’s only on balances over $3m, it only affects about 80,000 tax payers. Less than half a per cent of the population. It’s a nothingburger. The general reaction suggests to me that this argument is winning. Most people are not concerning themselves because they are not really in any

We don’t need money What do you do if your last CEO got thrown in jail by the Americans and you need a bit of top cover? What you do is, you take money you don’t really need from people that have influence. Not surprising then that one of the most cash generative businesses in

Are Tariffs bad? At university, tariffs were “bad”. It was pretty simple stuff and simple to calculate. Comparative Advantage, everyone richer for it. Free trade, hooray. Indeed, it is mathematically “proven” they are bad. It plays out here. Australia is comparatively good at mining, agriculture and that’s it. China is comparatively good at manufacturing almost

Free Stuff For those following along closely; this Balaji riff will resonate. A lot of people are asking why the DeepSeek model was just given away and open sourced and Balaji goes to the heart of the answer. It went much further than just the model. Earlier this month they had what they called ‘open