Grim Jim’s incoming tide. For whom the polls toll. 40-hour week?
Wry & Dry: a cynical and irreverent review of the week in politics, economics and life. For intelligent Readers who disdain the trivial.
Investment Matters
The National Accounts (i.e. GDP data and its constituents) were released. The news behind the headlines wasn’t good. Craig Shepherd does a deep dive. Also, research reports on:
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1. Wry & Dry’s ponderings…
Grim Jim denies the incoming tide. Farmer Angus Taylor is even less popular than Pauline Hanson. Germany wakes up to problems of shorter hours. US navy docks in Thailand – local economic boom. Venezuela was made an offer it couldn’t refuse. Europe’s Gen Z crown princesses.
2. Grim Jim denies the incoming tide
The toothsome Treasurer, Grim Jim, has finally admitted his tax reforms crashed the housing market. A sort of, kind of, “a factor but not the only factor, factor,” which is his version of “it’s not you, but it’s partly you. But it’s definitely not me.”
Federal Treasury forecasted a modest 2% house-price dip. Instead, capital city values fell 3.7% in a single quarter, with Sydney down 4.7%. Grim Jim’s response was to accuse everyone of comparing apples to a two-year forecasting window nobody asked about.
Rather than revisit the negative gearing (and CGT) policies, or take a leaf from his self-professed hero Keating, who reversed course in 1987 when negative gearing changes backfired, Grim Jim pivoted to deflection. And blamed “algorithms and social media” for society’s ills.
Bold strategy: can’t fix the economy, so critique the clickbait covering it. Meanwhile HSBC now forecasts a 13% peak-to-trough housing correction.
Meanwhile, Australia’s productivity is going backwards, GDP per capita is stuck below where it was when Labor won office, and Grim Jim is celebrating growth “on par with the US”.
This is technically true, but technically meaningless when your own citizens are getting relatively poorer per head.1
1 Australia’s GDP growth per capita was zero in 12 months to June. The US’ was 3.5%.
3. For whom the polls toll
Liberal leader and wannabe PM Farmer Taylor’s net approval sits at -17%, trailing even Mono Nation’s Pauline Hanson’s -1%.2 This is a genuinely remarkable achievement, given Hanson can’t name the leaders of Indonesia or Japan.
In a head-to-head, Uncle Albo comfortably beats Taylor 44%-35%, and when Hanson’s added to the mix, Farmer Taylor drops to a distant third on 23%, comfortably beaten by a woman whose foreign policy platform amounts to just Emperor Eleven and ad hominem vibes.
This is Farmer Taylor’s core problem: he’s positioned as the sensible alternative to both Uncle Albo and Hanson, yet voters can’t quite picture him as Prime Minister either. He simply generates less enthusiasm doing it.
Meanwhile Mono Nation, riding a populist wave nobody in Canberra fully understands, has reclaimed top-party status. The truly bizarre outworking is that nobody can seriously imagine Hanson sitting across from Trumpster, Emperor Eleven or Tsar Vlad representing Australian interests. Yet she’s polling better than the actual Opposition Leader.
Farmer Taylor doesn’t have a Hanson problem. He has a nobody-can-picture-him-as-PM problem; which, for an aspiring PM, tends to be, well, disqualifying.
2 Source: Newspoll published in The Australian, 31 August 2026.
4. Back to a 40-hour week?
Students of economic history will know that four decades ago, German metalworkers fought a seven-week strike for the 35-hour week. This is a victory now quietly being unpicked by the executives who spent the intervening years discovering that €49.50 an hour is, in fact, a real number with real consequences.
German industrial production has fallen 15% since 2017, manufacturing jobs are vanishing at 12,000 a month, and Mercedes’ Chairman wants everyone back to 40 hours a week on the tools. With the extra five hours unpaid, because nothing revives competitiveness quite like reminding workers their leisure time was always negotiable.
Meanwhile Hungary undercuts German labour costs by a factor of three, China undercuts everyone, and Germany’s answer, four decades late, is to rediscover arithmetic: fewer hours + more pay = fewer employees.
5. One ship economic boom
After 286 days blockading Iran without a single port stop, 5,000 sailors and other service people from the USS Abraham Lincoln3 have descended on Pattaya, Thailand’s capital of sunburn and questionable decision-making. And the local economy could not be happier.
Bar staff, starved of custom by the very Iran war their guests just came from, are practically doing the maths in real time: $100-150 a day per sailor, five days, roughly $3 million total. Somewhere, a Thai economist is calling this fiscal stimulus.
The sailors themselves sound less triumphant than depleted — “mouldy showers,” numbness, and a collective desire to “just sleep” after nine months of naval blockade duty. Pattaya, meanwhile, has helpfully banned them from Soi 6 (a street of, err, ill-repute), cannabis, and jet skis, on orders from ship command. Proof that even the world’s most permissive party town has limits, mostly involving liability.
It’s the oldest military tradition there is: fight a war, then spend the accumulated salary trying very hard to forget it happened.
3 A nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, of some 100,000 tonnes and over 330m in length, carrying 90 fixed wing aircraft and helicopters. The Persian Gulf is now home to 20 US warships, including two remaining aircraft carriers: USS George HW Bush and USS George Washington.
6. Venezuela was made an offer it couldn’t refuse
Trumpster has “taken the oil,” as promised, in a deal so audaciously mob-adjacent it needs its own Godfather sequel. Having kidnapped Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in January like a geopolitical bounty hunter, he’s now secured majority US control of 65 billion barrels of the country’s oil. And, he insists, “at no cost to the American Taxpayer,” a phrase doing more heavy lifting than the Pentagon’s entire procurement office.
Which is doing the actual investing, incidentally. And so doing via penny warrants,4 because nothing screams “national security” like the Defense Department dabbling in Caracas crude futures.
Trumpster calls it “the biggest oil deal in world history.” A more honest headline: Don Corleone finally got his geography degree, and Venezuelans get to watch the spoils go everywhere. Except to them.
4 The transaction is fiendishly complicated. But it essentially gives the Pentagon control of 65 billion barrels of heavy crude for virtually zero cost. The only actual cost will be that of getting the oil out of 17 Venezuelan oil fields. Interested Readers should visit: The Pentagon’s Penny Warrants: Inside the 65-Billion-Barrel Venezuelan Oil Deal
7. No-one left to lead America’s military
Pete Hegseth, US Defense Secretary, who once explained defence policy from behind a Fox News desk, has now given the DCM to so many generals that the Pentagon’s org chart is starting to resemble a cable news ratings graveyard.
US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is merely the latest to exit stage left, having committed the unforgivable sin of criticising Hegseth’s giving the DCM to General Randy George as Army Chief of Staff, the top uniformed position in the service and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
This chaos is the natural consequence of Trumpster appointing someone whose primary qualification was reading autocue confidently: personnel decisions in the US military now run more like a television producer axing guests who don’t test well and less like military strategy.
Two dozen generals purged, dozens of promotions blocked, and now both the Army’s top civilian and uniformed leadership vacant mid-war.
Trumpster, ever generous, called Driscoll “actually a killer” with “a beautiful smile”. Presumably this was the same casting criteria Hegseth once used booking panellists, now repurposed for running the world’s largest military.
8. Gen Z Queens
Wry & Dry is getting tired of what Princess Harry and Princess Princess next did. Or will next do. And so turns to Europe for royal solace.
Readers will know that Europe has 10 constitutional monarchies: Belgium, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Of these, five now have women as heirs; a genuinely novel development for institutions built almost entirely on the principle of first-born sons.
Sweden’s Crown Princess Victoria is a generation ahead of the Gen Z quartet of Norway’s Ingrid Alexandra, Spain’s Leonor, the Netherlands’ Catharina-Amalia and Belgium’s Elisabeth. Interestingly, both Victoria and Leonor are blood descendants of Queen Victoria.
They’re also, notably, unbothered by their families’ embarrassments, unlike their UK counterparts. What each has isn’t privilege alone, but preparation: officer training, master’s degrees, fluent English, and an evident awareness that the monarchy’s survival now depends less on bloodline than on competence.
9. “I am the greatest!”
In an article on his social media apparatus, Trumpster has crowned himself the greatest US president in history (see the published chart, below).
He joins a distinguished lineage of self-anointed legends including Napoleon (who literally crowned himself, saving the church the trouble), Muhammad Ali (“I am the greatest,” a claim at least backed by actual boxing), and Julius Caesar, who similarly didn’t wait for the Roman Senate’s opinion before declaring victory. Trump’s method is subtler than most: quietly editing a 1948 historians’ poll, inserting himself at the top, and including Obama, Biden and Carter as “failures”. Undoubtedly a ranking system with the academic rigour of a ransom note.
Actual historians rank Trumpster between 41st and 43rd out of 44 presidents, roughly tied with a man who defended slavery into the Civil War.5 Trumpster’s response to seven decades of scholarly consensus was, characteristically, to overrule it unilaterally and publish the results on social media.
It’s a peculiarly modern form of self-coronation: no armies, no legions, just a Truth Social post and an assistant nicknamed the Human Printer. Caesar needed the Rubicon. Trump just needed Wi-Fi.
5 James Buchanan, who served from 1857 to 1861. He sought to manage the emerging sectional crisis by a pro-slavery interpretation of the US Constitution. He was succeeded by Abraham Lincoln.
Snippets from all over
Dutch move gold from New York
The Dutch central bank has shifted more than 78 tonnes of gold from New York to London in a politically sensitive move, citing “increasing geopolitical unrest”. (Financial Times 4 September)
Wry & Dry comments: France which removed all of its gold from the New York Federal Reserve between July 2025 and January 2026.
LIV may soon meet XI
LIV Golf may file for bankruptcy protection (so-called Chapter 11) as soon as next week, as the challenger golf league races to find funding for a slimmed-down version slated for 2027, according to people briefed on the negotiations. (Financial Times 1 September)
Wry & Dry comments: LIV (Roman numerals for 54, being three rounds of golf that is played in its tournaments) was launched as a challenger to the US PGA Tour. It is funded by the Saudi Public Investment Fund.
Aston Martin’s fate
Oh no, Mr Bond, Aston Martin is set to be ejected from the FTSE. (Headline in The Times, 31 August)
Wry & Dry comments: Aston Martin Lagonda, the lossmaking carmaker, is set to leave the FTSE 250 and enter the FTSE SmallCap index. A company’s market capitalisation, generally, is the prime determinant of its inclusion in a stock market index.
Cost of UK debt increases
The cost of paying for newly sold UK government debt has risen to its highest level in nearly three decades, underscoring the tough fiscal backdrop as prime minister Andy Burnham and chancellor John Healey draw up their tax and spending plans for their first budget in under two months. (Financial Times 31 August)
Wry & Dry comments: The current yield is 3.8%, the highest since 1998, when the rate was 4%.
Icelanders say “no”
Icelanders have rejected reopening negotiations on joining the EU despite Donald Trump’s threats against neighbouring Greenland, dealing a blow to Brussels’ efforts to draw the strategically important Arctic state closer. (The Times 31 August)
Wry & Dry comments: “No” received 52.8% of the vote.
It figures
- 2.1%: Australia. GDP growth in year to end June. Above expectations.
- -0.2%: Australia. Labour productivity.
- 0.0%: Australia. GDP growth per capita.
- 7.8%: India. GDP growth in year to end June. Above expectations.
And to soothe your troubled mind…
“We will send Iran deep into the stone age and darkness if it attacks Israel.”
Israel Katz, in a social media post.
Wry & Dry comments: Unlike Trumpster’s threats against Iran (which Iran derisorily ignored), this has a sense of reality (which Iran will heed).
Disclaimer
The comments in Wry & Dry do not necessarily reflect those of First Samuel, its Directors or Associates.
Cheers!