Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone & No One Can Pay
By John Lanchester
224 pages
Penguin, Allen Lane
Review by Mat Ward
If you don't know the difference between a credit default swap (CDS), a collateralised debt obligation (CDO) and a cheese sandwich, this highly readable book could help you in a painless, entertaining way.
Its author, John Lanchester, grew up in 1960s Hong Kong. He says the contrasts of obscene wealth and crushing poverty were “like a lab test in free-market capitalism”.
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About 500 South-East Queensland health workers walked off the job and rallied in front of State Parliament on October 7, protesting against the Bligh government's offer of annual pay increases of only 2.5% a year for three years.
The unions are demanding increases totalling 12.5% over the three-year period. Queensland Public Sector Union general secretary Alex Scott said Queensland Health could return to "the bad old days" if workers were forced to leave the system over pay.
In a tragedy that occurs far too often, Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old gay university student, committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in New Jersey on September 22.
After a month of thundering that a rise in the official interest rate was close, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has kept interest rates on hold at its monthly board meeting on October 5.
Most financial commentators were betting on a rate rise of 0.25%, with banks expected to increase their mortgage rates by an even larger margin, despite their record profits, to account for higher costs of borrowing overseas. However, the dark financial clouds over Europe and the US appear to have put the kibosh on the financiers’ party.
Richard Stallman is something of a legend in the global software community. In 1983, he created the free software movement, through which highly trained and often highly paid professionals give their time to producing software for the public good.
The movement produced the GNU operating system, a free alternative to proprietary software such as the Microsoft or Apple operating systems. GNU is a both a humorous “recursive acronym” standing for “GNU is Not Unix”, and a gnu (or wildebeest) is the mascot of the GNU system and GNU Project.
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