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Saturday, November 24, 2007

The numbers

The NZH has more analysis of the USD collapse:
The Fed's trade-weighted major currency index bottomed at 71.11 on November 7, the lowest since the era of free-floating currencies started in 1971. Against the yen and European currencies, the US dollar is now worth about a third of what it was in the days of fixed rates.
In 1971 Nixon had to take the US off the gold standard because of the expense of the Vietnam War (and as I recall France kept demanding payment in gold rather than dollars). Hmmm, Iraq? Even their central bank wants to revalue.

And speaking of money, Fletcher's wins the Eden Park upgrade - by default it seems. If the project is as badly handled as most of them are in Auckland it will be a licence to print money for them. The share price was down however on Friday but maybe that was before the announcement.

And the Aussie election. Because of the more complicated preferential voting system the electoral commission is urging competence with spoiled ballots normally running at about 5%:
Across Australia there were 639,000 informal votes and Sydney was over represented [...] In completing the green House of Representatives ballot, voters must number every box for the vote to be counted. On the white Senate paper electors have a choice of marking 1 above the line or numbering every box below.
Yes, all the boxes must be filled in for the House seats; and in the Senate if you don't want to give all your votes to the one party:
At the last election 10,183 (or 11.8 per cent) of the votes were informal in the western Sydney seat of Greenway - considerably more than the 883-vote winning margin.

Voting closes 8pm NZDT in Eastern Australia.

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