Actions and words
We know that actions and words should be consistent – and when thery aren’t, actions speak louder than words. The gulf between the actions and words of New Zealand politicians over the last 20 years…
We know that actions and words should be consistent – and when thery aren’t, actions speak louder than words. The gulf between the actions and words of New Zealand politicians over the last 20 years…
Trump’s latest round of tariffs took effect on August 7. They are not just the most widespread tariffs of his second administration, they take the average US tariff to the highest level since the 1930s….
I worked for 10 years in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in their immediate post-war reconstruction phase. There were highly-paid international consultants by the hundreds, possibly thousands, there. Some readers may be asking if I was…
The US dollar has been the world’s reserve currency since the end of World War II – a period of 80 years. That means it is the only type of international financial system politicians and…
When I was deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Reserve Bank’s investment committee proposed an arbitrage deal. I decided to discuss it with the governor, Don Brash, who had a merchant…
The centre-piece of this year’s Budget was the implementation of the tax cuts that National had ‘promised’ during last year’s election campaign. They did this by raising the three lowest tax brackets by about 11.5…
Waipa District Council’s debt level on June 30, 2022, was $149.5 million. A year later it was $226 million, a rise of 51 per cent. By June it is projected to be $296.8 million, a…
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand speech on January 30 didn’t shine much light on what the bank might do with the Official Cash Rate on February 28. So economists and bankers are still speculating….
Many people here and overseas are scrutinising inflation data closely trying to predict when central banks will start lowering their official interest rates. Late last year, most of the inflation news was positive. Though inflation…
I decided to write my first column for 2024 about the big economic problems New Zealand faces. There are many, and some go beyond big – they are enormous. None have arisen suddenly – they…
