Utopia, you are standing in it!

Tom Cruise’s biggest opening weekend ever proves that there was pent up demand for that “Top Gun” sequel, no matter how much time has passed or how middling the first movie was.

Tuesday and Thursday previews rolled into Friday has “Maverick” at almost $52 million heading into Sat. showings.

Paramount is saying it’ll do $123 or so Fri-thru-Sunday, and Memorial Day Monday will take it over $150.

But what about “Bob’s Burgers,” you say, animation but not necessarily for kids? A $5.7 million Friday points to a $19 million holiday weekend for Twentieth Century pictures.

“Doctor Strange” had a middling $4-5 million Friday and won’t hit $20 this weekend. Finally.

“The Lost City” added another $1.9 to finally clear the $100 million mark. Maybe Sandy Bullock needs to team up with TC.

Figures from Exhibitor Relations — ercboxoffice.com.

The renewable energy cult reckons “coal is dead”, but the market says otherwise.

Thermal coal prices are off the charts, with record demand driving record prices: Australian thermal coal prices recently hit $US$400 ($548 a tonne), with prices still on the rise.

The crowd that tells us that we’re only a heartbeat away from an all wind and sun powered future have been telling all who care to listen that investing in fossil fuel producers, in particular coal-miners, borders on insanity; with lots of talk about “stranded assets”, the prices of which will plummet, to never recover.

Well, that’s the cult’s mantra, anyway.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Terence Corcoran explains that, in an energy hungry world, fossil fuel producers are a very safe bet, indeed.

Which energy assets will be stranded?
Financial Post
Terence Corcoran
4 May 2022

Oilprice.com covered the latest energy trends Monday with a report that U.S…

When finance professors publish papers claiming to find inefficiencies in asset markets, my initial reaction is skepticism. The odds are stacked against them to start since asset markets are mostly efficient. Then even if the inefficiency they found is real, shouldn’t they keep that fact to themselves and get rich trading on it?

But listening to a recent interview with Edward Thorp, I realized I shouldn’t entirely discount the possibility that someone would publish a real inefficiency, even a tradeable one. After all, Myron Scholes and Fischer Black did just that when they published the Black-Scholes model in the Journal of Political Economy. This made them famous on Wall Street and in econ/finance academia, and won Scholes the 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

Thorp explained that he had come up with a similar model years earlier, but instead of publishing it, he started a hedge fund and…

The current system of recruiting and employing MPs’ staff is not one you would design if you were starting from scratch, but before considering an overhaul, it is useful to ask how we got here. In this blogpost Rebecca McKee, who is currently running a project on MPs’ staff,examines the evolution of MPs’ staffing arrangements, providing some context to the current arrangements so we can understand how best to reform them.

Speaker Lindsay Hoyle has called for a Speaker’s Conference to consider a major overhaul of workplace practices in the House of Commons. Under our current system, it is MPs – not the Commons – who recruit and employ their staff, within a framework of regulations set out by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA).While the devolved legislatures and many other countries have similar arrangements, New Zealand stands out as an example where MPs engage staff employed…

During her record-breaking 70 years of service, Queen Elizabeth II has become no stranger to parliamentary traditions like the State Opening of Parliament, and next weekend her milestone as the first British Monarch to celebrate a Platinum Jubilee will be celebrated with four days of festivities. But Her Majesty the Queen’s predecessor as a female monarch, Queen Victoria, also witnessed many ceremonies during her own long reign.

Here Dr Kathryn Rix, Assistant Editor of our Commons 1832-1868 project and voice behind the VictCommons twitter page, explores Queen Victoria’s approach to parliamentary ceremony…

On 17 July 1837, less than a month after becoming Britain’s first reigning queen in over a century, Queen Victoria visited Westminster to prorogue Parliament. She had been persuaded by the Whig ministry to perform this duty in person, rather than delegating it to commissioners. The presence of the youthful new monarch generated widespread…

Read the first page of the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Statement yesterday (the press release) and it is hard to find anything to quibble with. It was a strong statement, backing up another large OCR increase, and referencing a further increase in inflation pressures (and thus a revision up in the forecast track). One might wish they had gotten this serious back in November/December when the issues were already becoming stark and the upside risks high, instead of doing one 25 point increase in November and then heading off for a very long summer recess. But if they have got serious, and a bit worried, now, then better late than never.

And given where we are now – which is not a good place – if they manage to deliver core inflation next year at 2.6 per cent (as in the projections) I’d probably count that as quite a reasonable…