“New Zealanders have been showing early signs of moderating their borrowing.” Does anyone know what these early signs are. From what I can tell, the growth in household borrowing is at record highs, in fact todays M3 data confirms that. If anything, household borrowing seems to be accelerating, I’m sure it will slow eventually, but […]
So, our dollar has fallen 5% against the US, and 8% against the yen in the last few days. While some people may think that the prospect of no more interest-rate hikes is the driver, the truth is that market participants have become a bit more risk-averse. A little bit of wobblying in the US […]
I was reading a quick little post on Econlog. In it they say that you should not tax income, you should tax consumption. Ergo we should remove income taxes and replace them with a higher rate of GST. The main criticism I often hear about this is that GST is regressive. Now I used to […]
An increase in the OCR to 8.25%, on the back of increases in food and oil prices The year end merchandise trade balance worsened to -$6,230m The exchange rate broke through $0.81US this week, just to fall back to $0.78US now. As most analysts expected, the RBNZ lifted interest rates. They also said they were […]
An interesting new blog on stuff tells us why interest rates had to rise. Now I agree that people in the public service are being paid too much (as I don’t work there 😉 ). However, I’m not sure that public sector core wages are the main reason for inflationary pressure (although they do play […]
As I was waiting in line to grab some McDonalds before going to see the latest Harry Potter movie I got to thinking about why the line was so long. In fact, I got to thinking about why, when there are other perfectly good foods around the food court, was half the place lining up […]