Sick and slowing. When you look at the retail sales figures out from the Australian Bureau of Statistics this morning, you wonder how any serious economist would be arguing for further punishment being inflicted by way of higher interest rates. These are certainly not boom times, with the ABS showing that Australian retail turnover fell 0.1% in June 2011, seasonally adjusted, following a fall of 0.6% the previous month.
Turnover fell in department stores (-3.2%), household goods retailing (-0.7%) and cafes, restaurants and takeaway food services (-0.7%). Turnover rose in other retailing (1.2%), food retailing (0.4%) and clothing, footwear and personal accessory retailing (0.2%).

One up for Westpac. The interest rate vigilantes of the ANZ Bank were doing their best yesterday to pretend that they were not really wrong in their assessment that the economy needed the Reserve Bank to increase interest rates. It was just those international financial problems that got in the way and persuaded the bank’s board to keep things unchanged. But never fear, their spokespeople seemed to be saying, inflation will cause our day to come soon enough. At Westpac they were too polite to gloat but their economics team will have seen nothing in this morning’s retail sales figures to make them change their view that this is  stalled economy where the next interest rate move should be down rather than up.

Not a pretty sight. There was something quite unseemly about the sight of our nation’s Prime Minister alighting outside the Holt Street headquarters of News Limited last night. The television pictures made it look like the real powers that be had summonsed and the nominal leader had come.

Don’t mention the coup. South Australian Premier Mike Rann continues with his talking tour of India and not a mention of events back home as he keeps twittering the news.

No hint in that lot that Mike is a man who thinks he only has a few days left as Premier.

If only it were true. Here’s an idea for Sydney’s bike-loving lord mayor Clover Moore: take seriously the recent stunt by Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius in Lithuania.

Opera lovers an intelligent lot. I hope I have a lot of opera-using readers. A Canadian study comparing browser use with intelligence has them definitely smarter than anyone still struggling along with Internet Explorer 6.

AptiQuant Psychometric Consulting Co. says its study showed a substantial relationship between an individual’s cognitive ability and their choice of web browser. From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers.

Opinion polling a risky business. The BBC reports that police in Mexico are searching for nine employees of polling firms who have gone missing in the west-coast state of Michoacan. They have disappeared in recent days near the city of Apatzingan, a stronghold of a drugs cartel calling itself the Knights Templar, where they have been conducting surveys ahead of state elections in November.