From 99 suburbs across Melbourne, 99 samples of land extracted, valued, individually packaged, sold!

Tonight is auction night for inspirational artist David Short’s exhibition of 10 x 10cm blocks of land. He has valued each piece of land from every suburb according to local council valuations …

Hear Peter Barnes deliver the details on his Cap and Dividend policy alternative to Cap and Trade. Peter was recently written up as the go-to man in a Time Magazine article entitled How to Win the War on Global Warming. We have his must read book ‘Capitalism 3.0′ in …

The Sydney Morning Herald is on our side. Today’s headline news includes an article featuring Bubblepedia.net, a wiki set up by Dr Daniel Cox for photos of vacant homes to be uploaded onto the web. What a great idea! We have a Panoramia page with some of our vacant photos uploaded.

The article, entitled Empty Homes for All to See, is an indictment on the inaccuracy of vacancy figures collected by a group with a vested interest in skewing the results their way.

We pointed out in the I Want to Live Here report that the published vacancy figures of the Real Estate Industry of Victoria are inaccurate. They only list those properties on the market at present, those advertised through Real Estate Agents. This excludes:

those that are being held off the market because the capital gains of 15% per annum are at least double the annual rental income - why bother renting them out?
all those properties that are being privately advertised
those that are used only once per year (ie owners fly in when Melbourne Racing Carnival is on or Sydney Fireworks)

The overstated scarcity of land and property encourages an atmosphere of desperation in the buying market. A genuine vacancy rate would include all vacant property, especially vacant land, which constituted 93% of the vacancies in the I Want to Live Here report.

Now you can listen to the world’s only geonomics radio show by subscribing to our podcast. To have your computer automatically download each week’s show, follow these 3 easy steps -

copy this link:
http://3cr.org.au/podcast/podcast.php?cat=RenegadeEconomists
go to your ITunes, Click on Advanced then …

Crude oil is the world’s most actively traded commodity. Margin requirements see that speculators have to lodge only 5 - 7% of the total investment in an oil futures contract to gain ownership. This is compared to stocks, where 50% must be deposited upfront. The low margin required and the risk of investment in the land and sharemarkets has seen oil as the go-to investment vehicle for the immense wealth circulating the global financial markets.

This has seen commodity indexes rise $40 billion in the first three months of this year, a larger gain than the whole of 2007.