Hunter Valley Coal Mining

In today's SMH, a story titled Rush to introduce Hunter coal dust monitors:

HARD on the heels of its decision to block the Bickham coalmine, the state government is to suspend planning controls for a series of coal dust monitoring stations in the Hunter region, expediting their construction.

Interesting, but there still seems to be a question mark about whether they're going to be monitoring for the sufficiently small dust particles.

See my earlier post on the Four Corners documentary about Hunter Valley coal mining.

Euro bailout. Now banking risk morphs into geo-political risk

Good explanation about economic troubles in Greece and Europe and the bailout.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2010/05/euro_bailout_now_banking_risk.html

Cool zoom

This is cool - zoom from coffee bean size down to a single atom!

https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/cells/scale/

Of Bubbles

Two contrasting views from the Intelligent Investor blog (Doddsville) on whether there is a bubble in Australian real estate prices make for an interesting read:

• Gareth Brown's Jeremy Grantham calls Australian property market “a bubble”
• James Greenhalgh's follow-up The myth of the house price bubble

Shiller's Irrational Exuberance is great book on bubbles. Personally, I don't think Australia is quite in a bubble situation yet with housing. I tend to agree that as long as there is an under-supply of housing, it's quite unlikely that house prices will crash. On the other hand, the recent history of housing in the United States shows that under-supply in housing can be turned around pretty quickly so there's always reason to be cautious.

China on the other hand, strikes me as being in a real estate bubble. I'm in the Chanos camp there. I've seen the videos of  New South China Mall and Ordos and they are rather scary! Unfortunately, I suspect it will be a very rough ride out of that particular situation, once things start to collapse. I don't think anyone knows exactly when that will be, but more people seem to be of that view: Chanos, Andy Xie, Jack Rodman and others.

Update: Interesting counterpoint on China on Scott Sumner's blog:

I’d say if you are predicting a crash based on construction being 60% of GDP, and it’s actually only about 10%, that’s a big problem.

Hmmm, good point!