Just had to say that Brian Fallow’s column on inflation in the NZ Herald was really good – I think everyone should read it. Generally, economists seem to be running with a consensus about what inflation is and why it is bad (outisde of Berl at least – although they have toned down the anti-targeting […]
The July Barfoot and Thompson numbers are out according to Stuff. The Rates Blog discusses the numbers – something I’m not going to do here. However, I always enjoy reading what real estate owned businesses have to say about the numbers. In the Stuff article we see that house sales increased by 73, and we […]
Well to be honest, the Reserve Banks know a lot of things I don’t – but it appears that maybe they have some access to information that I am not aware of. Yesterday, the Reserve Bank of Australia turned even more dovish than it had been earlier – spelling out the fact that it was […]
There has been a lot of talk (here, here, here, here, here, and here) about the a potential National government taking on debt for infrastructural investment. Now I’ve got no problem with this, and Roger J Kerr says here we could view it as an intergenerational issue – borrowing allows us the stagger the cost […]
So the quarterly employment survey and the labour cost index came out yesterday. Now remember that the pointer for me was hours worked – I wanted to see how far they fell before making any judgments on the state of the labour market. The kicker is that they rose! According to the tables in the […]
Poverty is not an issue that we have touched on terribly much on this blog – however it is a fundamentally important issue when it comes to discussing what outcomes we want as a society. Now the general impression is that poverty is bad, at least that is how I feel when I hear the […]