Australia's war on red tape
Joe Hockey went out for a bite of pizza and ended up choking on red tape. The Australian Treasurer – that's finance minister to you and me – related the tale to business owners in a speech on Wednesday about the government's efforts to slash overregulation it believes is holding back the economy.
Apparently Mr. Hockey stopped by his local pizzeria with another family to enjoy a slice on the patio, when the owner told him he wasn't allowed to push two tables together because of local council rules, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Then, after going inside to fetch an extra chair for the group, he was told regulations allowed for only seven chairs on the patio. That's when Mr. Hockey, in his own words, "exploded."
"I actually tracked down the mayor. It was six o'clock on a Friday night, and I think the whole suburb heard the conversation," he said.
The government boasted last week that Wednesday's launch of its Spring Repeal Day (it's spring down there, remember) has moved "to repeal nearly 1,000 pieces and more than 7,200 pages of legislation and regulation," after its 2014 Autumn Repeal Day earlier this year "repealed over 10,000 pieces and 50,000 pages of legislation and regulation. This brings the total net deregulatory savings to date to over $2.1-billion."
Joe Sixpack would be proud.
The numbers don't lie, do they?
Amid the white noise of business commentary, it can be hard to get a bead on what's actually going on – that's why it's wise to rely on hard data.
But as Greenlight Capital president David Einhorn warns in Business Insider, even that can be tricky ground to navigate, illustrating his point with a chart examining U.S. spending on live entertainment. That spending happens to shows a pretty tight correlation with the number of people who die falling out of their wheelchairs.
The upshot? Don't spend on live entertainment if you're in a wheelchair, wear a seat belt in your wheelchair if you do, or just take a lot of correlations with a pinch of salt. Just to be on the safe side, Disclosures is doing all three.
Detroit really is this guy's hometown
In Detroit, pretty much anywhere Herb Strather lays his hat is his home. On Tuesday, the city completed its auction of more than 6,000 parcels of "blighted" properties, with the whole lot going to a single unidentified buyer.
Well, unidentified for a day, at least. The winning bidder was Mr. Strather, a local casino and real estate developer, The Detroit News reported, who scooped up a total of 6,350 properties for $3,183,500 (U.S.). That works out to $501.39 apiece.
About a thousand of them are in good shape, 3,000 require demolishing, and about 2,000 are vacant lots. Under the terms of the auction, Mr. Strather will have to put the wrecking ball to the worst of them in six months, work expected to cost more than $24-million, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.
Conditions attached to the sale require Mr. Strather to come up with a redevelopment plan the city can live with, or the properties revert to the city.
But the developer seems unfazed by that, and has nothing but enthusiasm for the deal. "Right now," he says, "I am so excited my toes are wiggling."
Next up is the city's auction of unneeded municipal vehicles to be held Nov. 5 and Nov. 13. Mark the dates in your calendar for a chance to pick up "garbage trucks, aerial bucket lift trucks, lift trucks, digger trucks, grapple trucks, backhoes and much more" at prices that can't be beat. (All sales final.)
At least he got him a card
What do you get the man who really does have everything? A nice card would probably do. That's what fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg sent Bill Gates, who turned 59 on Tuesday, in a colourful homemade effort with Microsoft Paint. Maybe next time he should just buy a card.
Cliffs CEO snubs analyst
Are CEOs getting a bit tetchy lately, or is it just me? Last week a few analyst eyebrows were raised when it appeared Rogers CEO Guy Laurence was taking a shot at Canaccord Genuity analyst Dvai Ghose in a conference call over comments he had made about the company's results. Turns out it was all in jest, as Streetwise's Niall McGee explained, and Mr. Ghose laughed off the reaction.
But a Tuesday morning exchange between Cliffs Natural Resources Inc. CEO Lourenco Goncalves and Wells Fargo analyst Sam Dubinsky was bit more prickly, as Business Insider reported. Mr. Dubinsky has an "underperform" rating on the stock and a target range of $4 (U.S.) to $7 (it was trading around $11 on Thursday afternoon), based in part on the company signalling it wants out of its investments in Ontario's Ring of Fire region.
It all started out so politely, with Mr. Dubinsky thanking Mr. Goncalves for taking his question, and then Mr. Goncalves responding by thanking Mr. Dubinsky for saying thank you. The CEO then added he wouldn't answer his questions because you "already know everything about my company. You have a $4 price target, and we think we can sell assets. So I'm going to take the next question, I'm not going to answer you. Next question, operator, please."
They used to QE, but it's all over now
The end of QE is surely cause for celebration, so we need a playlist for the big party. Fortunately, Marketwatch has done some of the work for us, offering up eight tunes to get things started, and Tweeters have jumped in with their own suggestions. Among Disclosures' favourites: Livin' on a Prayer and When Doves Cry. Here's the rest of the list.
You want it to look like a what?
China may be undergoing an economic slowdown, but its propensity for offbeat architecture appears unabated. So much so, in fact, that President Xi Jinping has made it clear he's not a fan of the current spate of one-upmanship in the weirdness stakes that has gripped the country's developers.
During an unusual appearance at a literary symposium in Beijing this week, the President gave a two-hour address that talked about how art should serve the people.
He called for morally inspiring art that should "be like sunshine from the blue sky and the breeze in spring that will inspire minds, warm hearts, cultivate taste, and clean up undesirable work styles," according to a translation by the WSJ. And he doesn't appear to feel buildings that look like a teapot, a piano/violin, a coin, a Slinky or a pair of pants fit the bill.
The worst offender may well be the headquarters of the People's Daily newspaper, the state's official organ, that looks like, er, a giant organ. Perhaps it's a comment on the journalists working inside.