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As I men­tioned briefly in my spiel on interest rates

• Monster’s Ball trailer

, the global sav­ings glut pro­duced some rather lop­sided out­comes, many of which are now com­ing home to roost. The ready avail­ab­il­ity of credit and basic greed fuelled the Amer­ican sub-prime mar­ket, and now the world’s stock mar­kets and cur­ren­cies are pay­ing for it.

Over the past fort­night, the Aus­tralian Dol­lar has ranged between 0.78 and 0.89 USD (hyooooooge!), with the big­ger num­ber occur­ring before the smal­ler one (i.e., we’ve deval­ued hugely). There’s also been a cor­res­pond­ing reduc­tion in the Trade Weighted Index (TWI), so that’s a depre­ci­ation against all major currencies.

Although there’s been tur­moil in the fin­an­cial mar­kets, I’m not con­vinced this will have any sub­stan­tial effect on Australia’s real eco­nomy. The Aus­sie dollar’s recent com­mand­ing heights were invari­ably going to be short-lived (I bought some stuff from Amazon.com just in the nick of time to take advant­age of this), and even at its cur­rent level is still slightly above its long-run aver­age. The All Ordin­ar­ies Index’s almighty slump this week just means it is back to where it was at the begin­ning of the year. If any­thing, it rep­res­ents an excel­lent buy­ing oppor­tun­ity. For­give me for feel­ing unsym­path­etic that a few investors lost a bundle.

In more money topsy-turvy, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment has intro­duced the Higher Edu­ca­tion Endow­ment Fund Bill into the par­lia­ment. Put­ting aside the sil­li­ness of under­fund­ing higher edu­ca­tion for a dec­ade, and think­ing it can all be undone with a less than adequate cap­ital injec­tion, Andrew Norton points out

• Cleaner film
  • Dark Blue film

that the Bill makes pro­vi­sion for tax-deductible con­tri­bu­tions by mem­bers of the pub­lic. That is, out of the good­ness of your heart, you can give money to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. Who would do that in pref­er­ence to a dir­ect dona­tion to a uni­ver­sity? At the time of the 2007/08 Budget, there was tussle between Peter Cos­tello and Julie Bishop, about who actu­ally came up with the idea for the HEEF. Was it the self-tooting Eco­nomic Mas­ter™, or the light­weight Min­is­ter for Edu­ca­tion? Too bad this isn’t an issue of enough import for any blame-shifting. Oth­er­wise we’d all find out that it’s the state Labor gov­ern­ments’ fault.