Keywords: Global Financial Crisis
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 25 August 2016
War Dogs is the latest in a string of films from the past few years that are custom made for our cynical times; deeply ironic black comedies and dramas featuring antiheroes who profit to the point of excess off the misery of others. Where those films dealt with the finance industry and gained relevance from the backdrop of the Global Financial Crisis, this one shifts focus to the grimier world of arms dealing, in the context of Bush era conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 23 January 2014
5 Comments
If ultimately Belfort's comeuppance for his innumerable evils is modest, and his lessons remain unlearned, it is deeply and frighteningly ironic, in a way that has parallels in the real world. The global financial crisis resulted precisely from the kind of unbridled amorality that the characters in The Wolf of Wall Street gleefully embrace. Money is their morality. Lives are left battered and bruised, but the Wall Street party keeps raging on.
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ECONOMICS
In The Big Bang Theory Sheldon invents a game of chess which 'utilises a three-sided board with transitional quadrilateral-to-triangular tessellation to solve the balanced centre combat-area problem'. This gobbledegook sounds suspiciously similar to the application of mathematical models to financial securities in derivatives markets.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 09 January 2013
1 Comment
Money is not like water, that 'flows' around the world, reaching 'equilibrium', or experiencing 'volatility'. It is transactions between people, based on trust. It enables the cooperation that forms the basis of social life. Human beings should be at the centre. Yet that is the opposite of what is happening. Monday 27 August
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 04 October 2012
1 Comment
Robert Miller has built an empire that is about to be sucked into the mire by a bad investment. Now he wants to offload it quickly before the purchaser realises anything is amiss. His practical obligations to his family and employees usurp his human obligations to those who become pawns in his efforts to maintain order.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 27 August 2012
5 Comments
Money is not like water, that 'flows' around the world, reaching 'equilibrium', or experiencing 'volatility'. It is transactions between people, based on trust. It enables the cooperation that forms the basis of social life. Human beings should be at the centre. Yet that is the opposite of what is happening.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 22 March 2012
1 Comment
The action takes place in 2008 on the eve of the GFC, at an investment bank loosely modelled on Lehman Bros. The CEO is monstrous; a kind of sinewy bishop to capitalism, gaunt and vicious. Yet even the most principled characters are shown to compromise to varying degrees in the name of self-interest.
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AUSTRALIA
- Robert Corcoran
- 21 October 2011
16 Comments
When America sneezes the world catches cold. No wonder crowds are demonstrating against Wall Street. Successive economic crises reveal that we have forgotten the economic lessons learned after the Great Depression. I am one of the dwindling number of Australians who was alive at that time.
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AUSTRALIA
- Michael Kelly
- 11 August 2011
5 Comments
London is burning. Throughout the rest of the world, stock markets are tumbling at a rate not seen since the 2008 global financial crisis. Unemployment in the US and parts of Europe is high and refuses to come down. What we are seeing in Britain could be just the beginning.
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ECONOMICS
- Gerry O'Hanlon
- 02 December 2010
7 Comments
A hopeful sign has been the emergence of commentators, mainly secular, advocating the transformation of the economy to a model based on values like the common good, solidarity, environmental concern, equality, active and inclusive citizenship.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Ben Coleridge
- 22 April 2010
5 Comments
Winter in the Russian industrial city of Yaroslavl has been hard since
the Global Financial Crisis. The 'contract' between Russia's elite and ordinary
Russians, whereby the latter sacrifice their civil and political rights
for economic wellbeing, is not delivering.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Brian Matthews
- 27 January 2010
3 Comments
Senator Steve Fielding attempted to debunk climate change theories using graphs based on Channel 9's Snicko. The debate petered out when Tony Abbott incautiously declared it was all 'crap'. Re-thinking, he amended
crap to tax — it was just a big tax.
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