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I have a long standing interest in the Australian Agricultural Company (AACo) both as a very small investor and as someone interested in the Australian agricultural sector and its history. AACo is Australia’s second-oldest company – it was founded in 1824 – and our biggest beef producer by a ‘country kilometre’. It runs 630,000 cattle [...] One strategy for enforcing a law that many are breaking is to focus on a few offending individuals and to hit them with overwhelmingly large penalties. Then the fear factor motivated by publicity of the penalties might lead to an overall reduction in offenses. This seems to be what happened when the Recording Industry Association [...] After years of denying it Richard Pratt agrees that his firm Visy systematically cheated consumers by colluding with Amcor to restrict competition. Recall that Amcor was a co-conspirator but was exempted from legal actions because it acted as a whistleblower. For a time Visy tried the defence that they were not really colluding but just [...] When the mighty BHP-Billiton was formed several years ago I criticised the arrangement on the grounds that (i) there was an evident lack of ‘economies of scope’ – the firms had a commodity specialisation that lay in different areas and, (ii) the advantage offered to Billiton unfairly disadvantaged BHP shareholders. These criticisms might still be [...] No I am not going to post on the nonsense economics of Kevin Rudd. One of the household magazines I subscribe to is Choice. It’s a consumer magazine that gives you product information and helps you, well, choose. This month it discusses shopping for groceries and does a nationwide test by buying a fairly [...] Matthew Denholm in The Australian this morning records claims, from trapped miners and others, that the Beaconsfield mining disaster was driven by the goldminer’s rush to repay its debts to Macquarie Bank. Recall that Allstate Explorations, in administration, owned 55% of the mine but, in a 2002 deal, Macquarie Bank bought the $77 million debt [...] The Australian tobacco-growing industry has ended with an industry-government buyout of all producers. All cigarette products consumed in Australia will now be imported. The advantage for the anti-smoking lobby is that the price of illegally-grown tobacco (‘chop-chop’) will increase so taxes levied on legally-sold cigarettes will have a bigger impact in reducing smoking and its [...] David Jones Ltd is suing the The Australia Institute for saying that DJ’s advertising eroticized and sexually exploited children. DJ’s was furious with the TAI claims which it denied. It demanded the TAI remove references to DJ’s on its website. The TAI in turn describes the DJ’s response as ‘corporate bullying’ and refused DJ’s [...] I put up a rather dull post a few days ago showing how water restrictions were having some obvious market effects that would enhance water conservation. For example, households have incentives to invest using use grey water for their gardens or covers to prevent evaporation from their swimming pools. More importantly concerns over high [...] Have you been waiting to choose one of the new generation of high-definition DVDs and disc players? I have because there are two rival formats (Blu-ray and HD DVD) and because I don’t want to be left with a format that eventually is rejected by the market as was the Betamax videocassette. Consumers generally are [...] I have blogged on the case for an ‘open skies’ aviation policy for Australia. It seems that the case for one will be tesated by an inquiry launched by Tourism Minister, Fran Bailey, though details are scant. Qantas has predictably rejected the case for it and I wonder if the falling Qantas share price is [...] I was interested in the views of George Roberts (of Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts) on the rationale for the boom in private equity – equity not publicly-traded in a share market. ‘Managements want to take a long-term view, but they know they get clobbered in the short-term. A lot of companies want to start [...] Are the private equity moves so much discussed in the press of late – the proposed $11 billion takeover of Qantas is an instance – a consequence of equity premium issues?In short, if equity is relatively expensive way of financing firms – that relies on excessively risk-averse investors – does this mean there is a [...] Qantas looks likely to pass into the hands of Macquarie Bank and its backers for about $11 billion or about 25 times current earnings. On the face of it the price looks very good and I am curious about the source of value – which I am fairly sure will be there – for the [...] In the cover page of the AFR today (subscription required) there are renewed calls by foreign carriers for a liberalisation of Australia’s ‘air service agreements’ (ASAs) particularly on the lucrative trans-Pacific routes. Over the years I have followed the same issue on the Australia-Japan link. The call by Singapore Airlines (and other Qantas competitors) [...] I posted on the mining disaster faced by Allstate Explorations at Beaconsfield Tasmania earlier this year.As a sideline recall that I pointed out that the smarties at Macquarie Bank had previously acquired $77.5 million dollars worth of Allstate Explorations receivables for $300,000. The sort of deal that gives the Macquarie boys healthy Xmas bonuses (as [...] I’ve been inactive in terms of stock-market activity for months – but this story from this morning’s SMH partly humoured, partly annoyed me. It spurred me to post at my lazy stockmarket blog. I am surprised at surging acceleration of my blog’s ‘popularity’ over the past 8 days – I have advanced to a mere 87,998th on Technorati’s ranking of visitation strength among the world’s 57 million blogs. Traffic to my site has doubled over its sustained levels of the past 6 months. Where’s the Bollinger?Many of the [...] |
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