Via James I saw this excellent post by Lars Christensen on why data revisions don’t matter for NGDP targeting. I think it shows how much traction that the NGDP people are getting, when critiques like this start to appear – and it is good they are making a concerted effort to answer them. Now I’m […]
Good article in the Sunday Star Times on the middle class in NZ – the author seemed to share some of the sentiments I’ve had in the past (*, *, *, *,*), where he feels that concerns should be for the worst off in NZ not the “doing alright”. I love this quote: Of course, […]
I was recently out having dinner with my family and it reached the part of the night where we needed to order desserts while some are playing games such as 벳엔드. I did my usual thing of ordering a beer for dessert, which is all well and good, and it gave me an opportunity to […]
Via Rates blog I see that, at the conference on government finances over the past couple of days Michael Cullen suggested making compulsory Kiwisaver contributions pro-cyclical (combined with the scheme becoming universal) as a monetary policy tool. I appreciate he wanted the auidence of academics there to think outside the box, but this is actually a […]
Here I go, banging on about how the issue of “middle class squeeze” isn’t the same in NZ as it may well be in the US. I’ve talked on this before of course, what can I say I’m a man of limited imagination 😉
I was sitting around working the other day, and at that point in time it involved downloading and playing with PPP (purchasing power parity) data in order to compare a bunch of GDP and consumption figures for work. All very exciting. At that moment I looked around the internet a bit, and noticed people complaining […]