Land Inspection Now – Exhibition

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ring4sale

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 and tonight is your chance to buy a slice of the Great Australian Dream. For many young people that might be as close as they ever get to ownership under present economic policy.

Questioning the values we pay for land, David has an interesting story on the motivations of land price versus land value, one of our favourite topics. With land ‘another commodity’, the connection to the history of location and community has diminished.

The exhibition only has 2 days left. Be sure to visit and support this concept at Seventh Gallery, 155 Gertrude St, Fitzroy.

How to Fight Climate Change Economically

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bookshop for just $27 hardback.

Empty Homes for All to See

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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.
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Renegade Economists now Podcasting

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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:

Open up Itunes, go to the Itunes Store and search ‘Renegade Economists’ then subscribe

OR

follow these 3 easy steps –

  • copy this link:
    http://podcast.3cr.org.au/podcast.php?cat=RenegadeEconomists

  • go to your ITunes, Click on Advanced then ‘Subscribe to this Podcast’, which will give you a place to paste in the hyperlink you have just copied
  • press ok and your ITunes will automatically download the week’s edition.

OR

To stream an episode (rather than download), scroll down the official 3CR podcasters page to find the Renegade Economists.

Please join our podcast e-list so we can contact you – our dedicated podcasters – in case of any future changes to the podcast feed URL. This e-list will be sparingly used.

To check the details on the latest show notes, with links to the articles we discuss, click on the giant Renegade Economists ‘tag’ you will find on the home page.

Technical details can also be found at the top of this helpful 3CR page on what podcasts are and how podcasts operate.

Oil Speculators Greasing their Wheel

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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.
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