Economic Rigor

Congrats to the 37% of applicants who passed. Commiserations to those that didn't. (Don't lose too much hope, I didn't pass the first time either) Onto Level 2........

Lots of controversy in the press regarding the Mineral Resource Rent Tax and how the Tax department can't give out any information to the Treasurer as it would violate Privacy. Pleasseeeeeee. How a Government Department (even the Taxation department) that isn't indepentent by any means (unlike the Reserve Bank) can deny information from it's head is rubbish in my opinion. So why the secrecy. Here at Goat central, we like to get to the bottom of things. So I have created an extremely simplistic econometric model to see if I can separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak. The model is as follows Quarterly Resource Rent tax earnings for the present quarter = constant + A*(Quarterly Resource Rent Earnings for previous quarter) + B*(Dummy Variable of MRRT applied) + C*(CPI for the quarter)+Error As mentioned, very simplistic, but the Co-efficient of the Dummy Variable should give us a rough estimate of how much the MRRT earns in a quarter. (though as we have figures fo...

Time for the first update in the new Year. After the last two new polls from Essential and NewsPoll we have the Coalition extending their lead over Labor. And it's an election year. Doesn't look good for Gillard.

As a night time side project from my day job, I have been busy honing my Java skills, creating a program that downloads price information for the entire ASX from Yahoo Finance and then calculates the ARMS index (or TRIN). The TRIN is a useful little technical tool and can give you insight into general market sentiment. To calculate, use the following formula :-  (Number of stocks increasing/Number of stocks decreasing)/(Volume of stocks increasing/Volume of stocks decreasing) Over last two days, the TRIN has gone from 0.88 to 0.89, indicating that buyers are in the asendency at the moment (anything under 1 means people are buying, over 1, people are selling) A figure at around 0.9 is always a good sign for the bulls and a great indicator that the All Ordinaries will continue to increase at least in the short term However the fact that it is going up slightly indicates that maybe the rally is starting to stall. Once it cuts over ...

No joy on the surplus for Wayne Swan, who has finally woken from his self imposed economic data coma and discovered that you can't polish a turd. But the adage rings true. You elect the Liberals to save and Labor to spend!

Interesting stats from an environmental survey from the abs.gov.au released yesterday. Here are % concerned based on weekly income Generally you would expect that as income rises, people would care more about the environment (either through knowledge or Maslow's pyramid of needs). And generally the results of the survey reflect this. But not for climate change where the rich care the second least (only the second percentile of income has a worse result). Interesting.

Sorry, back to cricket again, but had to respond to this statement by Phil Hughes "Top-order batsmen - all batsmen - get caught behind, in the cordon or by the keeper,'' he said Yes, but not all the time Phil. Lets go to the stats shall we. Phil Hughes has had 32 innings (31 dismissals and 1 not out) and of those, 26 times he has been caught. That is a grand total of 84% of dismissals. Compare that the Adam Gilchrist (61% from a high risk player), Michael Clarke (55%) and Ricky Ponting (55%) Phil Hughes has a problem with his technique. I wouldn't bet on him scoring too many runs.