Sadly, this week the papers have been dominated by the Lara Bingle and Michael Clark fiasco. However, other things have been happening.

After much digging around, and getting past pictures and celebrity hanger’s on quotes, I’ve dug up some much needed to know financial information for you this week.

Centrebet, an online gambling service in Australia, will now be offering the chance to ‘bet’ on where the ASX 200 ends the month. So just in case you can’t get enough of betting on boxing, the dogs, the horses, elections or even interest rate decisions, you can now take a punt on the stock market.

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This week we’ve made a conscious decision not to write about p——y or h—–g. Even though we’ve come across a few gems worth commenting on. And even though several readers have sent us a couple of choice morsels too.

But, we’ll stick to our guns and leave any p——y or h—–g comments until next week.

Anyway, our comments on pay equalisation seem to have set off something of a discussion both on the Money Morning website and in emails we’ve received to the Money Morning mailbag.

It’s an interesting topic so I thought it worth our while having another look at it based on some of the comments we’ve received.

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Yesterday the S&P/ASX200 had a very ordinary trading session. The index finished up 0.1 point to close at 4,820.00. The trading day started with the index higher, however when the home lending data was released for the month of February, the market saw a sell-off.

Economists were predicting an increase of 2%. Already, market ‘experts’ are suggesting that the 7.9% drop in housing finance will prevent the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) increasing interest rates in April.

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A quick follow on from yesterday’s Money Morning. We like this quote we’ve found from Professor Walter Block:

“Consider a man and a woman each with a productivity of $10 per hour, and suppose, because of discrimination or whatever, that the man is paid $10 per hour and the woman is paid $8 per hour. It is as if the woman had a little sign on her forehead saying, ‘Hire me and earn an extra $2 an hour.’ This makes her a desirable employee even for a sexist boss. But when an equal-pay law stipulates that she must be paid the same as the man, the employer can indulge his discriminatory tendencies and not hire her at all, at no cost to himself.”

This example is applied to a comparison of male labour versus female labour. As was our article yesterday.

But in reality, it’s not even a Male v Female thing.

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