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Offshoring Consumption

Cheap labour may no longer come to you.  Rich western nations may be souring on immigration . Longer term, the global supply of working-age people will shrink . Services inflation outstrips goods inflation , particularly in areas which are hard to automate.
Recent posts

Multiculturalism: Always Was, Always Will Be

Arnhem Land, Australia, 1650: expat Makassans run trepang processing plants with their local joint venture partners. Even after white settlement, during Australia's supposedly 'pure' settler period, you had Chinese on the gold fields and in veggie gardens, and blackbirded Islanders on sugar plantations. Even the most remote societies have always been multicultural, to varying degrees. Tribes since the dawn of humanity have bumped and mingled. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Steppe people, no! The notion that multiculturalism erodes social cohesion is therefore false. So what actually does?

Price, Earnings, Property, Housing

As if you needed another measure to tell you Australian house prices are out of whack. The Price-to-Earnings (P/E) ratio tells you how much people are willing to pay for an asset compared to how much it earns. Currently, the P/E for the world's 100 largest companies is 26.68 . A suburban Adelaide home worth $1.2M bringing in $750 a week rent and costing $12,000 per year (council rates, insurance, maintenance) has a P/E of 44 . [1.2M / ((750*52)-12,000)] via GIPHY