The price of such things as Third Party insurance are screaming through the roof. There can be no justification when such items jump by something like 100% in the case of green slip insurance.

The same can be said for the electricity prices with companies 'price gouging' and making record profits as disclosed yesterday with some companies lifting profits by up to 125%

This is the case for keeping public utilities in public hands.

Warnings are out about large gas prices increases and now water.

Eventually a large section of the public will implode  because of the lack of capacity to keep up with these  unjustified price hikes.

Something HAS to be done to stop this unprecedented grab for money.

If it doesn't our society will disintegrate and the feeling for Up the Revolution will surely surface.

bogarde73 wrote on May 10^th, 2013 at 10:47am:



Yes, but then you only get to choose between one robber and another.

They're ALL ripping us off, and the whole system needs to be investigated.

Public utilities and essential services should NEVER be placed into private hands.

Bogarde73 Prices have risen across the board, it is a matter of choosing which Robber Baron to go with.

You're all very cynical it seems to me. Don't forget these robbers as you put it are all employing people who need their jobs, maybe members of your family?
They are, most of them, paying dividends to your super funds and to mum & dad investors . . .and I'm a mum & dad investor (not that I'm a cross dresser or anything . . .not that there's anything wrong with that).
Sure, things are tough at the moment. But blame the people responsible - the international bankers & hedge funds and this b awful govt.
Things will get better.
In the meantime pursue every avenue to be thrifty.
Stop smoking if you do. It can be done, I've done it.
Shop at Aldi. Look for cheaper prices.

1. So you think that competition is not at work in the pricing mechanism of most things . . .I exclude Woolworths & Coles from that. For example, there seems to be a plethora of new entrants in the insurance market. You don't think they would all be trying to keep their prices down, consistent with costs and sufficient profit margins? If they don't compete, nobody buys, they go out of business.

2. As for the screwing, your language indicates a leftist attitude so refer to 1. above. As for the "pittances", dividend yields on the whole beat interest yields.

3. You've got a whole Politics Sucks board to explore for views on this govt's part in our economic circumstances. Enjoy.

bogarde73 wrote on May 10^th, 2013 at 2:02pm:


Australians pay more for their good and services than most other developed countries.. .. I can buy some food exported from Australia to Italy in Italy for less than what I can buy it for in Australia ... why? because they can get away with it here.

bogarde73, would it interest you to know there are only 2 insurance companies in the World and that every one you deal with is in some way an offshoot of those 2 companies.

I was told this by a very astute businessman recently.

Please don't go asking for links blah, blah, blah, just passing on what I was told.

My New Scientist


PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.