I’m a MAC

• Command + Shift + 3 = entire desktop
• Command + Shift + 4 = select part desktop
• Command + Shift + 4 then Spacebar = active window

I’m a PC

• Print Screen > Paste into graphics program = desktop
• Alt + Print Screen > Paste into graphics program = active window

I’m a Vista PC

• Accessories > Snipping Tool > pick method from ‘New’ drop-down

BarCamps are always good, always free and always inspiring. You find out stuff you had know idea about and debate with people on stuff you know a lot about. It’s a primordial soup of tech ideas and views without an internet filter applied.

Top 5 tips for BarCamp

5. Have something to say, if not your own quick speech, be prepared to comment on the days speakers to create the conversation.

4. Make sure you know your key tech terms. Make sure you have a firm grip on Memes, Tribes, Semantic Web, SaaS, Cloud Computing and a view on No Filters!

3. Keep you eye on the schedule, it moves like Obama boxing Republicans and if you miss something that everyone says was “really cool”, then it will sting like a bee.

2. Don’t go on a no drink, no pizza, no caffeine detox between now and 15 Nov. Bring all those healthy addictions plus one tech addiction for a tool called Twitter

1. Continuously thanks the sponsors. Microsoft AU, Atlassian, Pollenizer and Google AU are giving everyone an awesome day for free.

Grant Young and I made Smart Companies list today of Australia’s top web 2.0 entrepreneurs. I’m chuffed to be there and Grant who started Saasu with me would probably agree that we look up to our peers mentioned in the article so it feels a bit weird being there.

Top Web 2.0 Teams would be the article I’d love to see. I wish they had mentioned Jusa who was instrumental in the last 5 years to get us to where we are today. He’s the young brains behind our now quite old company. He’s created the engineered application that Saasu has become. There is always more behind the success than the cliché entrepreneur. Our team who built Saasu which also included Kas, Pete, Emma, Dympna, Nik, John and Will all caused the success.

Targeted search - For knowledge and information I tend to hit Wikipedia, Google Blogsearch and Delicious

Consumer choice - I tend to go straight to go straight to Twitter for word of web backup and if it’s not something techy and thus not as talked about on Twitter I tend to go back to Google hoping to hit some forum comments on the product or service.

For finding services I’d go to aggregated services websites like ServiceSeeking

For benchmark prices I would always go to Ebay, Google Products, Amazon and others. These quite often lead me to specific e-commerce sites. i.e. it’s helping me do brand and price exploration and only sometimes the actual buy transaction. So search engines aren’t catching me at all when it comes to spending dollars. So if you sell stuff you need web stores!

It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that banks should borrow money at the same rate the government does if it’s now the same risk. It’s not that simple. Fussy money (money sensitive enough to deposit rates that it gets moved) is leaving the banks who are reducing their deposit rates to find a new home paying a higher rate of return. That money sometimes just changes bank or asset class within a country but it can also change countries which opens up a whole bunch of foreign exchange activity. So banks need to pay a higher deposit rate than the Government does to attract investment, despite having a Government Guarantee.

If banks lower their deposit rates because they have a government guarantee they risk losing funding. At the same time the margin they make between lending and borrowing increases. This quandary of protecting liquidity versus improved margins is a whole new ‘how low can you go’ game in the banking sector for deposit rates.

We know in business that small increases in prices cause much larger increases in profit. The impact on your P&L is magnified due to the change in your margins (the difference between where you buy and sell your goods). The same magnifier applies to bank margins but also in a far more leveraged way because they usually have around $10 of assets for every $100 of loans and deposits. Even a small 0.10% change in deposit rates (cost of funds) has large implications for profit or lower mortgage rates (in lieu of profit).

Thus an ethical dilemma exists for banks to keep the margin or pass it on. Should banks be forced to pass on any gain from the government guarantee to their borrowers or are market forces best placed to do this?

Many uncertainty that surrounds how long with the guarantee will exist and how many deposits it covers manifests itself in higher deposit rates despite the guarantee.

Personally I’m against the government guarantee, why give banks more help than they need. Why risk seeing capital shift offshore looking for higher rates of return. Why not step in at the ninth hour and save the odd bank that looks like collapsing but only if all other avenues have been explored. This would be better than handing out free money to a sector who have made more than enough over the last 10 years to muscle them through a recession.

Money will always flow toward the best rate for a common risk and liquidity profile in markets. So a government guarantee does not imply you should only earn the same rate from a bank that the government would pay to borrow money. If anyone from a bank tells you otherwise then it’s misleading.

Photo by conorwithonen

Screenshot from Google Mobile

One party who needs to be held more accountable are the Federal Reserves. For at least a decade Federal Reserves have been finessing a stable inflation rate while allowing asset prices (many are not captured in inflation numbers) to dramatically outstrip wages. This makes the average person poorer in an affordability sense and sends them of to the predatory lenders to get some money to buy what they want - stuff to make them happy.

They have also allowed cheap money to build up in the economy by keeping unrealistically low interest rates for very long periods of time. When what they should have been doing is managing interest rates on a more realistic inflation measure that included assets prices.

The result of consumer-itis (the disease of getting lots of stuff in the hope of getting happiness) coupled with the capacity to buy it (lots of cheap money) has resulted in heavily indebted families with crappy home ownership affordability.

Here’s the rough maths.

When you earn 50k. All your money will go on rent, food and service. Probably 100%. You will probably fund excess using debt.

When you earn 500k. You will struggle to spend what you earn and it will in all likelihood end up in assets. Those assets generally get geared because you are told that is tax effective and gears up those returns. Rising prices (higher percentage of equity you own in the assets) lets you go and get more debt to buy more assets. The whole thing just fuels itself and creates a liquidity bubble. In the end you make stacks of money and end up with a huge gap between the low and high socioeconomic classes.

This crisis unwinds this. The reverse happens, asset prices plummet as assets need to be sold to pay of debt. Unfortunately everyone is rushing for the door at once because someone shouted fire. Those same people arrived at the party gradually. This is why prices go crazy when you see many people unwinding their geared assets all at once.

Some of you are thinking this is about risky investments. Well yes you’re right except that they don’t get created without a market and there has been a strong market of wealthy buyers for many years. The people whinging about those risky investments are the same ones slapping high fives at dinner parties when their geared risky investments paid them nice 25% p.a. returns.

As I saw in a Ted talk recently. It’s a little like blaming America for the war in Iraq. I might think it’s a mistake them being there but common sense tells us that had there been no 9/11 there would have been no war. “No 9/11, No War”. So the witch hunt should turn on itself if it is to be fair. The government is just as much to blame as the bankers who are just as much to blame as the debt binging consumers and return hungry superannuation investors.

Everyone has a choice to put their dollars in nearly risk free government bonds or low risk bank deposits. I think if you were that risk adverse and you lost your money you are quite justified in complaining. Everyone else needs to take it on the chin.

The witch hunt never seems to get it right because there isn’t such a thing as a right choice in the blame game.

I haven’t done much research on Safari plugins, I’m sure there are some good ones out there and I found a few here at Pimp My Safari. Chrome is fast and if it had the plugins Firefox had I might be tempted to set it to my default browser. My top 3 plugins are Firebug by Parakey Inc, MeasureIt by Kevin Freitas and SeoQuake by Aramis, Pelmen and Lelik.

Stop feeding the bears cry the Zookeepers!!!

When regulators ban short selling do they have a legal liability to the mum’s and dad’s, fund managers and traders who lose money from this almost instant change in regulated markets? I’d love to see what some of the big legal firms think on this.

(Update: Just read Sean’s Stubborn Mule blog which has has a good post on short selling.)

It is in effect the banning of an instrument used to hedge, used to remove risk. A reasonable person could argue they wouldn’t expect a regulator to do this surely?

I’m not saying this out of anger as I haven’t had shorts in the market for a long time. We closed all our trading book positions back in April. However I am angry that free trade and capitalism is at risk here of being hurt by short-term decision making by people in a panic to cover themselves in their regulatory roles. The same people who actively encourage openness in markets, hedging to create stability and improved liquidity.

In addition you could argue that a reasonable person expects regulators to announce major reforms well ahead of time so that organisations can adjust their business models and risks. Imagine if a government made sweeping company tax changes today and implemented them tomorrow. Why are rules around the trading of equity via stock and futures markets any different?

Mum’s, dad’s, traders, and fund managers all engage in short selling. Many trade CFD’s to achieve the shorting effect. The larger players borrow the stocks they are going to sell short.

These market participants were busily operating in the market on the premise that short selling is a part of market operations and provides liquidity to markets. In many cases shorting is a hedge against illiquid assets they own and can’t sell because liquidity has dried up.

Below is my Macquarie Bank Prime Trading Platform account rules received as a result of the change. It highlights how little I can now do when I do go back into the market. I can only buy companies. That doesn’t feel liquid to me and it feels very inflationary. Neither is good for markets.

Share Positions
Opening New Positions
- Short Prohibited
- Long As Usual
Closing Existing Positions
- Short As Usual
- Long As Usual

CFD Positions
Opening New Positions
- Short Prohibited
- Long Prohibited
Closing Existing Positions
- Short As Usual
- Long Phone Trades Only

Photo: Wili Hybrid