Past Programs
Business, Economics and Finance - 2008
2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004
2008 Boyer Lectures - A Golden Age of Freedom, Lecture 4: Fortune favours the smart
23/11/2008
An important theme of Rupert Murdoch's 2008 Boyer Lectures is the pressing need for Australia to develop human capital. But to do this successfully our schools need serious reform, otherwise the global bar will seem set far beyond our reach.
Ross Garnaut: Measuring the Immeasurable
29/06/2008
Climate change is a battleground of risk. It appears we need to make fateful decisions in a context of exceptional uncertainly. Enter Ross Garnaut. He has been commissioned by Australia's Commonwealth, state and territory governments to make sense of the risks, costs and benefits of tackling runaway carbon emissions. His interim report is due this week. Today we hear from the man himself, delivering the sixth HW Arndt Memorial Lecture at the Australian National University. Can the immeasurable be measured?
You can find a transcript of the lecture at The HW Arndt Memorial Lecture see below:
Muhammad Yunus
18/05/2008
Australia is witnessing yet another round of bank mergers. The big grow bigger on the pretext that size maters in a global economy. But small also matters. The Grameen Bank is heralded internationally as a lifesaver for tens of thousands of people. Based on the unworldly principle of micro credit the bank lends over half-a-billion each year. It invokes inverse rules of banking: if you have nothing they want to know you. Business Week named its founder Muhammed Yunus as one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time. His portrait hangs next to Henry Ford and John D Rockefeller. Muhammed Yunus recounts the remarkable work of Grameen, over three decades. with the poor and neglected.
Lessons from financial history - Professor Niall Ferguson
11/05/2008
Join us for a fresh look at the way finance works. Professor Niall Ferguson's analysis draws on the work of the French Naturalist Jean Bapiste de Lamarck - the idea that organisms alter and adapt in response to a changing environment. He applies this framework to our current, uneasy financial climate and asks: are we on the brink of a great dying?
The Logic of Life
02/03/2008
The age of the pop economist has dawned. Since Freakonomics was published in 2005 a new breed of media savvy expert has come forth. It turns out that life can be understood through a prism of daily cost-benefit analyses. In the age of homo economus this makes perfect sense. Today we meet one of the leading practitioners of low brow economics. Tim Harford works for the Financial times (UK) where he runs a blog called The Undercover Economist. His raw material comprises the everyday - from relationships and marriage to crime and overpaid bosses. In his reckoning it all makes sense in an economic sort of way. Join Tim Harford for an entertaining look at the logic of life.
Global finance: big, bloated and dangerous? Read Transcript
03/02/2008
Is it possible that global finance rivals climate change as the biggest challenge facing humanity? So goes the thinking of Dr Paul Woolley. He's no stranger to the industry, a veteran of merchant banking and global finance with over three decades experience. And yet not even he can fathom its spectacular growth. After all, as he says, it's supposed to be just a go-between, servicing the productive parts of the economy.
Yet the figures bear out an amazing leap in prominence in a relatively short time. Forty years ago the industry accounted for 10% of corporate profits. It's now close to 40% and growing. It is easily the largest single corporate sector. Received wisdom holds that capital markets are supposed to be lean and efficient. How then can bloated profits, price bubbles, and periodic blow-ups be properly explained?
Dr Paul Woolley is very worried; so much so he has set up three global centres studying capital market dysfunction, including one here in Australia. Today on Big Ideas we hear his powerful speech, putting the dangers before us, recorded at the launch of his centre in Sydney.
