Big companies are pulling the rip-off of the century. Coles and Woollies, Qantas and Virgin, AGL and Origin Energy, and the Big Four banks are passing on inflated prices and interest rates to consumers, cutting workers’ real purchasing power and boosting company profits to record highs.
What would you do with $1.5 million? You could put down deposits on ten median-priced Sydney houses, or you could buy one outright and spare yourself the crushing mortgage repayments.
Davos, a small skiing town in Switzerland, once a year becomes the world’s most consequential insane asylum. On Europe’s highest populated mountaintop, 3,000 of the global elite meet to ponder why the climate they pollute is so polluted, why the people they impoverish are so poor and why the world they fight over is at war.
Taiwan’s 13 January presidential and legislative elections were a three-way fight between the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the conservative Nationalist Party and the new “third way” Taiwan People’s Party. The DPP held onto the presidency for a third term while the People’s Party soaked up significant pools of disaffection from both major parties.
“There will probably never be anything I can do to make my lifetime impact net positive”, Sam Bankman-Fried wrote in his diary after the collapse of his cryptocurrency company FTX. His high-profile criminal trial for corporate fraud is giving us another glimpse into capitalism’s moral abyss.
Why do we compete so much? Every year, tens of thousands of year 12 students have their academic merit precisely graded from top to bottom with an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank. We compete for our livelihoods—for jobs, housing and promotions. Companies compete in the economy for market share. Countries compete for global influence. The outcome of these competitions determines the fate of everyone in the world. Frequently, competition leads to war.