Wry & Dry: a cynical and irreverent review of the week in politics, economics and life. For intelligent Readers who disdain the trivial.
But first, a snapshot of this week’s Investment Matters:
- The RBA offers Christmas cheer by putting rate cuts on the agenda, then unemployment went down
- Emeco (equipment and mining services provider) research update
- QBE (insurance) research update
To read Investment Matters, just click on the link at the bottom of this week’s Wry & Dry. Or here.
1. Australia’s Kristallnacht
Join the dots. A synagogue in a Melbourne suburb gets fire-bombed. And the Victoria police send out the… arson squad. Really? Yes, really.
This after the weekly blockades of Melbourne’s CBD by protesters flying Hamas’ flag and shouting death to Jews, the picketing of synagogues, the targeting of Jewish schools and businesses, the vandalism of Jewish MP’s electorate offices, the graffitiing and burning of cars in Jewish suburbs, etc.
And on Wednesday the second graffitiing and car-burning in a Jewish Sydney suburb.
A question without notice, Prime Minister: when did this ethnic hatred become not okay?
Last Friday? With the fire-bombing. No, it wasn’t then, there was tennis in Perth. Perhaps the penny dropped on Sunday, when the media reports screamed anti-Semitism.
Until then he and other leaders played politics and votes’ defending. Under either (a) the fashionable guise of not wanting to upset the sensibilities of other ethnic groups; or (b) reluctance, especially by the Premier of Victoria, to consider ‘law & order’ as a legitimate tool of government.
His insistence that he and his government have “consistently called-out anti-Semitism” is classically vapid. Upgrade Albo: having called it out, you have to do something about it. That’s what leaders do. Don’t faff around with international virtue signalling.
Upgrade Albo’s naivete of history (Germany 1933-45) is unforgivable. And his unwillingness to show leadership, until now, against the terrorising of Jewish Australians who have no say in Israel’s policies marks him as spineless.
Wednesday’s words are too late, Albo, now. It’s too late.
2. The road to Damascus
Is history repeating?
The communist regime in Moscow in the late 1980s watched helplessly as Poland, East Germany, Hungary, etc. all made their own arrangements. Events moved quickly, unpredictably and euphorically. Those in the Kremlin were not only helpless, they were powerless. Their power made all the more diminished by a floundering economy.
The Islamic regime in Tehran today is watching seemingly helplessly as its proxies collapse: Hamas, Hezbollah and now Syria are Iranian shells. Events are moving quickly but not always euphorically.
The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei still has proxies in Iraq and Yemen, but his influence is weakening as fast as Iran’s economy. Its highly educated and cultured people are weary of the jackboots of the ayatollah’s henchmen on their throats.
It will take some time for clarity to emerge in Syria; the world is watching all of the factions and alliances (Islamic State, Al-Qaeda affiliates, Kurdish affiliates, Hezbollah, HTS rebels, Syrian National Army, etc). To Wry & Dry’s mind, the bigger picture is to the east.
Iran’s reaction will unfold more slowly than events in Syria. But ultimately be much more significant.
The Trumpster’s capitalised social media rantings will be absent, as it must be clear to even his brain that this is not a binary situation. There is not one side to choose that will make America great again. Any choice might make things worse.
3. Uncle Fester’s nuclear flag
Consider that Australia’s economy is a mess, government debt is spiralling, interest rates are crippling, Australians’ living standards keep going backwards, and the prime minister is probably the worst since the hapless Billy McMahon in the 1960s.
And yet Uncle Fester Dutton’s Coalition can only manage to have a polling outcome equal to that of Upgrade Albo: 50/50, according to Monday’s Newspoll. Objectively, he should be 53/47 ahead.
At a similar time before the last election, Upgrade Albo was leading Miracle Morrison 54/46. Upgrade Albo is now as bad as Miracle Morrison was then, and Uncle Fester now is better than Upgrade Albo was then. Got that?
QED: Uncle Fester is performing poorly. Which might explain his two telling moves this week.
Firstly, deciding that there is just one flag that represents Australia, not three. That is clever politics.
Secondly, announcing the costings of the Coalition’s renewable energy policy. Well, it’s not a renewable energy policy, it’s a fossil-fuel-reduction-energy policy. And it’s all about “my energy policy is cheaper than your energy policy.” That is dumb politics.
Give Wry & Dry a simple spreadsheet and he can produce a model that proves the earth is flat. It all depends upon assumptions.
The voter fear about nuclear power is not cost. It is a fear about safety. Anyone for Chernobyl? As illogical as it is, that will be the issue. Not the dollars.
4. Best economy in 2024?
The Economist yesterday released a ranking of how the OECD countries performed this year. It uses five measures: GDP growth, share prices’ change, core CPI, unemployment and fiscal balance (excluding interest).
Cutting to the chase, Australia has had a poor year, ranked 21/37.
GDP growth is anaemic at best (#27); share-market gain is good (#13), CPI is high (#27), change in unemployment is relatively poor (#23); and fiscal balance is good (#9).
Readers shouldn’t do cartwheels about the last figure. This year will be the last year that Australia’s fiscal balance looks good. Next Wednesday, Treasurer Grim Jim will give his mid-year budget update. Expect the worst figures, excluding the pandemic since the GFC.
By the way, the top performing countries in 2024, on the Economist’s measures, were: Spain, Ireland, Denmark, Greece (!) and Italy (!). The US was 20th, Germany 23rd, France 26th and the UK 31st.
5. Defamation
It’s the end of penny section for John Pesutto, Victorian Liberal opposition leader. Yesterday, a court made a defamation finding against him, awarding a former colleague $300,000.
A few ill-considered words against the actions of a vengeful far right-wing MP got him into the legal fest. Her decision to sue Pesutto would have been encouraged by an ageing right-wing wannabe power-broker more interested in squashing centrist Liberals than defeating the Labor government.
It’s sort of sad. He is a sensible, hard-working leader, who did his best to bring the right-wing and light-weight idiots in his party into the tent of commonsense. And with a good chance of winning government.
6. Revocably Irrevocable
Sigh. The problems of being wealthy.
Rupert Murdoch, multiple marrier1, media giant and owner of News Corp and Fox Corp2, is running up legal bills again. This time he wants to revoke an irrevocable trust. Which can be a costly exercise when the beneficiaries of the trust do not consent to the change.
Y’see, Rupert, now aged 93, set up the trust, dividing the management of his post mortem assets equally between four of his children. And then changed his mind, wanting management to rest solely with his eldest son, Lachlan. Lachlan is the only child having an executive role in the company.
But the other three beneficiaries got grumpy. The battle is not about the assets themselves, it’s about who controls them. It’s not about the money, it’s about power.
So, each side lawyered up and took the matter to court. This week, a court in Nevada ruled against Rupert and Lachlan, accusing them of a “carefully crafted charade.”
In spite of media reports, time is not running out because Rupert is aged 93. The four children can litigate to their hearts’ content after he passes off this mortal coil.
There’s some US$23 billion to spend. The lawyers will have already put down the deposit on the next ski chalet.
1 Patricia, Anna, Wendi, Jerry and now Elena. When he married Jerry Hall in 2016, aged 85, a UK tabloid’s headline was “Jerry and the Pacemaker.”
2 The empire includes UK (The Sun and The Times), in Australia (The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, and The Australian), in the US (The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post), book publisher HarperCollins, and the television broadcasting channels Sky News Australia and Fox News (through the Fox Corporation). With a net worth of about US$23 billion, Murdoch is the 31st richest person in the United States and the 71st richest in the world according to Forbes magazine.
7. Competence or DEI?
Readers will know that Boeing got into very hot water after two of its 737 MAX aircraft crashed. Amongst other consequences, the US Justice Department sued Boeing. The US being the US, Boeing and the JD agreed a plea deal. Part of the deal, in addition to Boeing paying a $244m criminal fine, was that Boeing would appoint an external ‘monitor’ who would overseas Boeing’s future legal compliance.
The fine print of the deal revealed that ‘diversity considerations’ must be used in appointing the monitor.
Not so fast said the federal judge who had to approve the plea deal. “It is in the utmost interest of justice that the public is confident this monitor selection is done based solely on competency,” he wrote.
Back to the drawing board. And Boeing removed material relating to its DEI goals from its website.
But wait! There’s more. Yesterday, a US court rejected Nasdaq’s years’ long push to set racial and gender targets for the boards of its listed companies. Companies listed on Nasdaq include Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, NVIDIA, Google and Tesla.3
3 Nasdaq is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the U.S. by volume, and ranked second on the list of stock exchanges by market capitalisation of shares traded, behind the New York Stock Exchange. Although it trades stock of healthcare, financial, media, entertainment, retail, hospitality, and food businesses, it focuses more on technology stocks.
8. NBN in the sky – a public service announcement
The ACCC reported some useful data on Australian satellite internet services. Readers have two choices: NBN’s Sky Muster (which advertising guru thought up that name?) or Elon Musk’s Starlink.
There are three factors to assess.
- Download speed: Starlink averages 192 Mbps across all hours, NBN a tortoise-like 83 Mbps.
- Cost: Starlink’s base cost is $139 per month, NBN’s a bargain at $65 per month (for 25 Mbps).
- Reliability: Starlink’s 6,700 satellites have a life of about 5 years and are constantly being replaced. NBN’s two satellites are expected to be decommissioned in the early 2030s.
Of course, if Mr. Musk gets grumpy with Australia, he can switch off his satellites. Back to dial-up?
9. The Trumpster’s already in charge
The American tradition is that the nation has only one president at a time. Actually, that’s what the American constitooshun says.
Right now, that president looks like the Trumpster. Because Sleepy Joe has ceded the apparent leadership.
Consider that it was the Trumpster who was in Paris meeting with French Rooster Macron and Ukraine’s final Ukrainian leader, Zelensky. He also had a long meeting with Princess Catherine’s husband. Sleepy Joe, only the second catholic US president,4 decided not to go to the re-opening of the Notre Dame in Paris.
It was the Trumpster who spoke to reporters about the collapse of the Syrian regime twelve hours before Sleepy Joe commented.
The Trumpster is already dictating US trade and immigration policy. Last week, he dined with Woke Trudeau, Canada’s PM and conference-called Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum.
And now he has invited Emperor Eleven to his inauguration. How is that for hutzpah?
Readers may remember when the Trumpster was first elected, the then President O’Bama firmly held the reins of power, for example overruling the Trumpster’s wish on a UN Security Council resolution about Israeli settlements.
O’Bama also held media conferences after he lost the 2016 election. Sleepy Joe returned from his recent sleepwalk to Angola and failed to hold the traditional during-or-post-overseas trip presser.
Of course, if there’s a 3am call about Emperor Eleven invading Taiwan, to whom will it be directed? Sleepy Joe will be in dreams of all sorts. Kamala Kamala will still be in a period of mourning.
Actually, the matter will not arise. Emperor Eleven would have already phoned the Trumpster.
4 John Kennedy was the first. Not that he ever allowed the Seventh Commandment to stand in the way of him, err, getting his way with a cornucopia of budding, and budded, flowers.
Snippets from all over
1. Youngest world chess champion
An 18-year-old from India became the youngest-ever world chess champion. Gukesh Dommaraju defeated the defending champion, Ding Liren of China, in the final game of their 14-match series in Singapore to win the overall title. (UK Telegraph)
Wry & Dry comments: India’s pride will be complete if its cricket team defeat Australia in the current test series.
2. More mini-nuclear power stations
GE Hitachi, a frontrunner in the competition to develop the first mini-nuclear power stations in Britain, has said that it would aim to build enough plants to power about six million homes by 2050. (The Times)
Wry & Dry comments: GE Hitachi has a contract to develop mini-nuclear power station at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington site near Toronto, which is due to start construction next year and begin generating power by the end of 2029.
3. Saudia Arabia’s soccer win
On Wednesday, soccer’s governing body confirmed that Saudi Arabia has secured the biggest prize of all: the men’s World Cup in 2034. (New York Times)
Wry & Dry comments: The Saudi Pro League has an average attendance of a massive 8,000 spectators per game. But some games have crowds less than 1,000. In fact, a recent match between Al-Riyadh and Al Okhdood was reportedly played in front of just 133 fans.
4. Sleepy Joe forgives
President Joe Biden granted clemency to nearly 1,500 people on Thursday, the highest ever in a single day. (The Times)
Wry & Dry comments: Two weeks ago, he pardoned his son for various criminal convictions, after stating that he wouldn’t.
5. Investors dump France
Investors are dumping French debt in favour of Spanish and even Italian bonds as the deepening political crisis in Paris scares off money managers. (UK Telegraph)
Wry & Dry comments: A decade ago, it was Italy and Spain that needed bailouts.
It figures
- 4.35%: Australia – interest rates. The RBA left interest rates unchanged.
- 3.0%: Europe – interest rates. The ECB lowered rates by 0.25% points.
- 0.5%: Switzerland – interest rates. The SNB lowered rates by 0.50 points
- 2.7%: USA – inflation. The Fed may lower interest rates next week.
And to soothe your troubled mind…
“Legalising marijuana in America and Canada is one of the greatest mistakes of all time.”
Sir Elton John, in an interview in Time magazine.
Wry & Dry comments: It’s sort of weird that governments around the world are slowly making tobacco products illegal and at the same time are increasingly legalising cannabis (ex medicinal).
Disclaimer
The comments in Wry & Dry do not necessarily reflect those of First Samuel, its Directors or Associates.
Cheers!