Bluff and counter-bluff

Sunday, 17 May 2009   Tactics   5 comments 

Both parties were just talking tough about going to the electorate with economic programmes that they didn’t have.

So if the downturn is unprecedented, why has then Treasury chosen this time to change its methodology to more allow for the experience of past economic recoveries than ever before?

Predictions of some officials in Washington, London and Paris that the economy would begin to recover within a year, are based on no other reason than they wouldn’t know what to do if it didn’t.

No left turn, either

Tuesday, 14 April 2009   State of the parties   6 comments 

Clearly some markets are more evil than others.

A political morality play

Friday, 10 April 2009   Key posts, Tactics   9 comments 

To make a morality play out of this economic crisis it is first necessary to make it a financial one.

Chris Uhlmann must have clearly enjoyed London because even his anti-government cynicism was swept away by what came out of the G20. It is hard to see why.

If it is clear that there has a failure to find an international solution, it is bad news for Rudd because he doesn’t really have anything on the domestic front by way of a counter-crisis strategy.

Too big to fail

Monday, 30 March 2009   International relations   2 comments 

In effect the US government is putting an economic gun to the head of the other major economic powers and doing to the rest of the world what the major US financial institutions did to it.

Dead centre

Monday, 23 March 2009   State of the parties   9 comments 

The fact is that, leaving aside metaphysical claptrap, any objective assessment would have concluded that this was an election that Labor should never have looked like losing.

The period of domestic initiatives is now over and the global dimension to this crisis is now becoming unavoidable.

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