Written By: - Date published: 11:31 am, January 15th, 2009 - 24 comments
John Key in person is extremely amiable; talking to him face to face, it’s hard not to like the bugger. I guess that he hasn’t lost any of that magic on his holiday. How else could one explain John Armstrong’s piece in the Herald today? The guy sounds like he’s in love. All it takes […]
Written By: - Date published: 1:15 pm, January 14th, 2009 - 24 comments
We all know the story of the sub-prime crisis that had developed into the credit crisis – a flood of credit saw mortgage lenders lending to anyone, including people who couldn’t really afford the repayments. To get these potentially bad loans off their books, the banks pooled them together into new, unregulated instruments and sold […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:41 am, January 13th, 2009 - 29 comments
Only four weeks into a well-deserved holiday following two frantic weeks stripping Kiwis of their work rights, the National/ACT Government has been spurred back into action by an emerging crisis. No, not the international financial meltdown. Nup, not peak oil, nor climate change, nor the recession. The crisis that has seen the Government suddenly announce […]
Written By: - Date published: 1:54 pm, January 12th, 2009 - 40 comments
We’ve seen that oil production in oil fields and countries peaks long before the oil actually runs out, and as individual countries go, so must, inevitably go the world. Once the amount of oil the world is capable of producing starts to fall, things are going to get difficult. Our economy is the use of […]
Written By: - Date published: 3:24 pm, January 9th, 2009 - 27 comments
There is only so much oil in the world. It was all formed when, over the course of a few hundred million years, creatures living in shallow seas died and their remains accumulated and were subjected to a very particular combination of heat and pressure for hundreds of millions of years. We know where all the sedimentary […]
Written By: - Date published: 2:05 pm, January 9th, 2009 - 11 comments
Yesterday, Labour leader Phil Goff challenged National to present its plan for getting the economy through the global downturn. Halfway through National/ACT’s much-hyped first 100 days and, Goff pointed out, while Obama and the UK are pushing ahead with a ‘Green New Deal’ we’ve seen nothing from National/ACT except the cancelation of the one Green […]
Written By: - Date published: 4:08 pm, January 8th, 2009 - 35 comments
The more I learn about energy, and peak oil in particular, the more concerned I get. So, in the spirit of the season, I thought I would share some of it with you. I’ll get to some concrete things we need to start doing now to mitigate as much as we can the impact of falling […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:17 pm, December 30th, 2008 - 27 comments
I’ve spent the last week touring around the provinces and catching up with old friends and family I haven’t seen for years and part of this has meant traveling to places I haven’t been in over a decade. Nearly every town big or small that I’ve past through has been bigger and seemed far more […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:19 am, December 27th, 2008 - 11 comments
A couple of good but not quite satisfying articles today. The first is Brian Gaynor’s analysis of the economy in which he lays out where we stand financially as a nation and blames the housing boom for our current account deficit: But the message from both the GDP and current account figures is that New […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:09 pm, December 26th, 2008 - 11 comments
At the end of my post a couple of days ago I touched on the notion of a new Zealand identity and a Left nationalism. Since then I’ve been thinking about the value of the last government’s moves to foster national identity and their remarkable success in doing so and concluded that this is quite […]
Written By: - Date published: 5:15 pm, December 24th, 2008 - 21 comments
One of Bruce Jesson’s constant bugbears during the New Right revolution of the 80’s and 90’s was that the Left allowed itself to be positioned as conservative. That we were simply fighting for the status quo rather than providing a proper progressive alternative to the imported market ideology that was being foist upon us. He […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:22 pm, December 23rd, 2008 - 42 comments
OK, one last graph for the year. The latest GDP data isn’t pretty, a 0.4% contraction of the economy in the September quarter. It’s the third quarter of contraction in a row driven by the drought, oil prices, and the credit crunch. The ongoing international financial turmoil means we are likely to continue in recession […]
Written By: - Date published: 3:56 pm, December 20th, 2008 - 27 comments
Economics 101: if you consume more than you produce, your standard of living is unsustainable and, unless you fix the situation, it will eventually come tumbling down. As a country we import more than we export equivalent to 8% of our annual domestic production. The current account deficit is projected to widen to 9.4% of GDP next […]
Written By: - Date published: 11:36 am, December 19th, 2008 - 29 comments
Yay, more infrastructure spending during a recession. That’s the right thing to do – stimulate the economy and spend while the price of construction is lower. But why, oh why, cancel spending on rail and housing insulation and put the money into roads, instead? The only reason I can think of is that National/ACT doesn’t […]
Written By: - Date published: 8:19 am, December 19th, 2008 - 35 comments
It’s good to see Bill English acknowledge the last government has left New Zealand in a good position to face the economic crisis. The only shame is that he’s using that position to throw money at people who are more likely to pay down debt and increase savings than engage in stimulatory spending.
Written By: - Date published: 1:27 pm, December 18th, 2008 - 48 comments
The latest Treasury economic forecasts are out and, in a continuing pattern, they not only make worse reading than the previous updates but they are already out of date. We are now looking at gross government debt rising from less to 20% to 30% or as much as 40% by 2013. Unemployment could rise above […]
Written By: - Date published: 11:47 am, December 15th, 2008 - 5 comments
As usual an insightful analysis from Rod Oram on the need for our political and business sector leaders to better come to grips with what the international economic situation means domestically. He says: Every sector of this economy has its own set of structural challenges forced on it by global conditions. Yet, we’re hearing nothing […]
Written By: - Date published: 11:32 am, December 15th, 2008 - 16 comments
I’m no lover of the car industry but it’s interesting to see why the effort to put together a bailout for US carmakers has failed. Seems the Repubicans couldn’t face the horror of a 14 billion dollar payout, which is chump change compared to the welfare Wall St has gorged itself on, with far less […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:45 am, December 10th, 2008 - 10 comments
Have you heard the sad news that the EU may be next to join the international communist nanny-state conspiracy against incandescent bulbs? It seems EU bureaucrats have published a “report” which calls for a ban on the freedom-loving inefficient bulbs which have kept our planet warm for almost 130 years. Thank goodness ordinary decent New […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:15 am, December 8th, 2008 - 89 comments
National/ACT has cancelled the Buy New Zealand Made programme. So, this is that ambitious and positive vision for New Zealand we’ve been hearing so much about?
Written By: - Date published: 2:28 pm, December 5th, 2008 - 38 comments
It’s good to see Treasury’s extreme right-wing prescription for New Zealand has not been wholly embraced by the National Party – and it’s easy to see why. While Bill English (a former Treasury wonk himself) no doubt agrees with the policy ideas and direction outlined by Treasury, he has the disadvantage of being accountable to […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:23 pm, December 5th, 2008 - 17 comments
Treasury’s briefing to Bill English as the new Minister of Finance must’ve pissed him off big time. Aside from the expected ideological burp (already covered in depth by No Right Turn) it reads like a long list of Labour achievements and calls on National is reign in its irresponsible promises. Here’s a taste of some […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:05 am, December 4th, 2008 - 14 comments
The Reserve Bank has cut 1.5% off the official cash rate, bringing it down to 5%. The rate has now been cut 2.5% in just six weeks, an unprecendented slashing. Mortgage rates will drop as well, but perhaps not by as much because the banks (excluding Kiwibank) have to borrow most of their money from […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:47 am, November 27th, 2008 - 92 comments
Don’t let Key go abroad representing us again until he has had some diplomacy training. I can’t believe, I literally can’t believe, the comments he has made in the UK. In addition to the comments yesterday, where he called the new carbon-offset airport departure tax “protectionism” and said it will lead to a “contagion effect”, […]
Written By: - Date published: 8:01 am, November 27th, 2008 - 28 comments
Yesterday it was a $7bn rescue package. Today it’s preparing a contingency plan to bail out big business. But do we get details? Of course not. I’ve got a bad feeling deep in the pit of my stomach that there’s no real plan here, or if there is it’s one that the public wouldn’t like […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:15 pm, November 26th, 2008 - 24 comments
I’ve never seen the sense in Public-Private Partnerships. How is it ever going to be cheaper to get a private profit-making company to come on-board and take the risk for developing a piece of public infrastructure? The Government has to give them a good deal so they can make a profit, and the Government has […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:52 am, November 26th, 2008 - 56 comments
The UK has announced plans to increase departure tax from its airports for flights outside Europe to pay for offsetting their carbon emissions. This is part of the worldwide response to climate change – countries are making emitters pay and even aviation, which is excluded from Kyoto, is now being targeted (quite rightly too, it […]
Written By: - Date published: 8:34 pm, November 25th, 2008 - 12 comments
I’m a bit concerned to see people welcoming APEC’s commitment to re-igniting the Doha Round of free trade talks as if they are a solution to the economic mess we are in now. I’ve already noted that more free trade, while desirable if done fairly, will not fix the problems that have lead to this […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:41 am, November 24th, 2008 - 13 comments
Free trade is basically a good idea. We live on a world of limited resources, we should use those resources as efficiently and sustainability as possible. Trade barriers that distort the costs of production in different countries undermine the efficiency of resource use. Ideally, we wouldn’t have them – but we would also need consistent […]
Written By: - Date published: 6:03 am, November 23rd, 2008 - 19 comments
The article below is well worth a read for anyone concerned about the global economic crisis. It looks at Keynes plan for managing the balance of international trade. It is imbalances in the system that we have now that leads to economic crises and fuels the speculative markets, especially the currency traders. It is the […]
Written By: - Date published: 7:34 pm, November 22nd, 2008 - 44 comments
Well, John Key took my advice and gave a speech at APEC different from the pro forma MFAT-written speech that might have been expected. Unfortunately, it’s still all style and no substance, all bark but no bite. Key is scathing of his fellow money-men for taking on more and more risk; he accuses them of […]
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