This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Vital Signs: the housing market might deflate, but it might pop. Here’s how — Richard Holden in the Conversation: As I have said here before, one of the worries is interest-only loans. Around A$360 billion of these loans are due to be rolled over over the next three years. If they are not, they will convert to principal-and-interest loans, which are much more expensive to maintain. Given that only about 15% of loans currently issued are interest-only, down from 40% in recent times, that means a lot of people are starting to pay the more expensive principal and interest. For some, the jump in repayments will be as high as 40%. That’s scary enough. But this week’s minutes of the October Reserve Bank board meeting point to another concerning possibility – an old-fashioned credit crunch.
• Middle East dictators always end up bringing their western allies down – and now they've got their coils in the White House — Robert Fisk in the Independent: If the Trump regime collapses – for regime it is – I suspect it will not be his frolics with the Russians which destroy it. Nor his corruption, nor his domestic lies. Nor his misogyny. Nor his anti-immigrant racism. Nor his obvious mental instability, though this clearly connects him to his friends in the Arab world. The Middle East has already got its coils into the White House. Trump is a friend of a highly dangerous state called Saudi Arabia. He has adopted Israeli foreign policy as his own, including the ownership of Jerusalem and wholehearted support for Israel’s illegal colonisation of Palestinian Arab land. He has torn up a solemn treaty with Iran. He has joined the Sunni side in its sectarian war with the Shias of the Middle East, in Iran, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Bahrain and, of course, in Saudi Arabia itself. Many countries have gone to war on behalf of other nations. Britain drew the sword for Poland in 1939, albeit a little late in the day. But to actively seek participation in someone else’s sectarian war for no other reason than to continue to sell weapons to a wealthy and unstable autocracy, to amalgamate your own country’s foreign policy with that of the most militarily powerful state in the Middle East -- to the point of depriving an entire people of a share in its capital city – and to wilfully ignore the long and lucrative support that our Gulf “allies” have given to the most frightful of our cult enemies – those who have indeed struck in the streets of London and New York – is beyond the usual lexicon. It is beyond shameful. Beyond wicked. Were it not for the insanity of the man responsible, the word “depravity” comes to mind.
• Matt Wuerker:
  
• In the New Fight for Online Privacy and Security, Australia Falls: What Happens Next? — Danny O'Brien at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: With indecent speed, and after the barest nod to debate, the Australian Parliament has now passed the Assistance and Access Act, unopposed and unamended. The bill is a cousin to the United Kingdom’s Investigatory Powers Act, passed in 2016. The two laws vary in their details, but both now deliver a panoptic new power to their nation’s governments. Both countries now claim the right to secretly compel tech companies and individual technologists, including network administrators, sysadmins, and open source developers – to re-engineer software and hardware under their control, so that it can be used to spy on their users. Engineers can be penalized for refusing to comply with fines and prison; in Australia, even counseling a technologist to oppose these orders is a crime.
• The "Yellow Jackets" Riots In France Are What Happens When Facebook Gets Involved With Local News — Ryan Broderick in BuzzFeed News: Due to the way algorithm changes made earlier this year interacted with the fierce devotion in France to local and regional identity, the country is now facing some of the worst riots in many years — and in Paris, the worst in half a century. This isn’t the first time real-life violence has followed a viral Facebook storm and it certainly won’t be the last. Much has already been written about the anti-Muslim Facebook riots in Myanmar and Sri Lanka and the WhatsApp lynchings in Brazil and India. Well, the same process is happening in Europe now, on a massive scale.