Monday, May 30, 2011

Accountants going backwards

It’s always good fun when financial services people attempt to use “inspirational” climbing-themed photography to promote their wares.  This one from the Chartered Accountants in today’s AFR caught my eye:

Accountants

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In view of the fact that this bloke is clearly abseiling, wouldn’t this be more appropriate?

Accountants2

As for the last line of their text, “If you want to rise to the highest heights, choose Chartered”, you might want to consider choosing someone that can tell up from down.

Mind you, as good as this one is, it still doesn’t get close to the head-scratching wierdness of the Macquarie Graduate School of Management previous attempt at a similar theme:

Climbing Macquarie

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Gotti’s Irony

GottiInteresting piece in today’s Business Spectator (aka BS), which sees Gotti foaming at the mouth about “Dutch Disease” and the demise of the manufacturing sector, the banks, tourism, education and pretty much anyone with a job, as the rocketing $A and a contraction in business lending puts the skids under the non-resource sectors.  All of which begs the question as to whether we as a nation are extracting sufficient value from our once in forever boom in the demand for and price of our resources, given the collateral damage that it’s obviously causing.

However, it seems like only yesterday that Gotti was leading the charge of the anti-RSPT cadre, bellowing to all and sundry about the evils of the government’s attempts to claw back more of the minerals wealth:

“When new Prime Minster Julia Gillard announces a completely revamped mining tax it will be an enormous victory for the nation”, he wrote back in July 2010 (see “An RSPT Victory”), and went on to boast that

Here at Business Spectator, Alan Kohler, Stephen Bartholomeusz and myself realised that Rudd and Swan had made a diabolical mistake soon after it was announced. We decided to highlight every aspect of this terrible measure until it was changed. In all the KGB wrote some 80 commentaries on the tax and I think that, with a few print journalists, including Matthew Stevens on The Australian and Terry McCann on the Herald Sun, we led the push for the government to act in the national interest. Our readership soared to 400,000 as the business community turned to Business Spectator to understand what was happening. This is the first time I have been involved in an exercise like this and I have found that electronic communication is more powerful than print.

Perhaps Gotti would now be kind enough to define “national interest”.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

ROI on Housing…..Zilch?

Someone’s just pointed me at an article in the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Business Review of Q3 2010 which essentially put the ROI of home ownership in the States over a 35 year period at slightly less than zero. I realise “we’re different” but thought it might be worth pointing out.

http://www.philadelphiafed.org/research-and-data/publications/business-review/2010/q3/brq310_benefits-and-costs-of-homeownership.pdf

Friday, May 6, 2011

Bank ROE History Lesson

I found this graph in PwC’s latest Major Bank Analysis, which provides an analysis of – oddly enough – major banks.  What is odd is that the PwC paper deals with the 4 big Australian banks, but the graph covers UK banks – a shame someone couldn’t do the same analysis for our lot, but presumably it would look similar, shifted a few years to reflect the later introduction of financial deregulation, and also missing the catastrophic GFC related plunge at the end.

 

image

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