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Tuesday's Top 10 with NZ Mint: 'HSBC is a Too Big To Jail bank'; Why America's new oil boom is a sham; Paul Krugman wants a higher minimum wage; Wars cause hyperinflation, not money printing; Dilbert

Tuesday's Top 10 with NZ Mint: 'HSBC is a Too Big To Jail bank'; Why America's new oil boom is a sham; Paul Krugman wants a higher minimum wage; Wars cause hyperinflation, not money printing; Dilbert

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 11 am in association with NZ Mint.

As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.

See all previous Top 10s here.

My must read today is #1 from Matt Taibbi on HSBC's failures. It is a head-slappingly good read. Numbers 5,8 and 9 are also crackers. 

1.'How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists - And got away with it'. That's how Matt Taibbi headlines his latest thunderbolt in Rolling Stone.

Read it and weep.

Again.

Taibbi has a foam-flecked style which can be disconcerting.

But he always goes fairly deep in his reportage.

Worth reading before you say our global 'too big to fail' banks are now completely beyond reproach and are reformed beasts. If you are an HSBC customer, in particular, you need to read it. 

They just got away with it. And now they're 'too big to jail'.

Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit – but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses.

People may have outrage fatigue about Wall Street, and more stories about billionaire greedheads getting away with more stealing often cease to amaze. But the HSBC case went miles beyond the usual paper-pushing, keypad-punching­ sort-of crime, committed by geeks in ties, normally associated­ with Wall Street. In this case, the bank literally got away with murder – well, aiding and abetting it, anyway.

That nobody from the bank went to jail or paid a dollar in individual fines is nothing new in this era of financial crisis. What is different about this settlement is that the Justice Department, for the first time, admitted why it decided to go soft on this particular kind of criminal. It was worried that anything more than a wrist slap for HSBC might undermine the world economy. "Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, "HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.

2. The myth of Saudi America - Slate's Raymond T. Pierrehumbert reports on some very detailed rebuttals of the idea (cited in yesterday's Top 10) that America doesn't have an energy shortage anymore because of the discovery of apparently monstrous oil and gas reserves in shale.

The popularity of the abundance narrative waxes and wanes, and its current ascendance comes primarily on the heels of a report by Leonardo Maugeri, a former oil-industry chief and currently a fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center. When his cornucopian fantasy came out, I smelled a rat (or at least a not-too-deeply buried fish). But the International Energy Agency jumped on the bandwagon with breathless, and equally fishy, forecasts of the coming “Saudi America.” Most of the media swallowed the story hook, line, and sinker, with even the usually sober Economist rising to the bait. So what's wrong with this story? Maugeri's problems begin but don't end with an arithmetic blunder so dumb (he compounded a percentage decline incorrectly) it would make even Steve Levitt blush. The geeky geological stuff discussed at the AGU session is more interesting and ultimately more damning.

The geological considerations expose a number of common threads of faulty reasoning that pervade the current crop of starry-eyed projections of endless oil abundance. There are certainly huge amounts of oil locked up in shale formations worldwide. In the United States alone, the Bakken and Eagle Ford shales contain up to 700 billion barrels, and the Green River shale under Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah has a whopping 2 trillion barrels. However, only a tiny fraction of this total is recoverable. For Bakken (in Montana and North Dakota) and Eagle Ford (in Texas), which account for most of the current surge in U.S. oil production, the estimated recoverable fraction ranges from 1 to 2 percent. Though all of these deposits are loosely referred to as “shale oil,” Bakken and Eagle Ford oil is more precisely called “tight oil,” because it is actual, fluid oil that is trapped in the pores of shale, and it can be liberated by fracturing the rock to allow the oil to flow. In contrast, the hydrocarbon in the Green River shale is not really oil at all but a waxy substance that must be cooked at around 500 degrees Celsius to turn it into flowing oil.

The technology for extracting oil from deposits like the Green River shale is far more challenging than what is required to tap into tight oil, and it has never been profitably implemented at any significant scale. There is thus no credible estimate of how much oil can be recovered from the Green River formation. At the high end of the estimates, predicted production from Bakken and Eagle Ford together amounts to perhaps a two-year oil supply for the United States at 2011 consumption rates. That's significant but not a game-changer. Even if it were to prove possible to achieve production rates comparable to those of Saudi Arabia, that would only mean that we would deplete the resource faster and bring on an oil crash sooner.

3. 'Raise that Wage' - Paul Krugman argues for a higher minimum wage here at his NYTimes blog.

Economics 101 tells us to be very cautious about attempts to legislate market outcomes. Every textbook — mine included — lays out the unintended consequences that flow from policies like rent controls or agricultural price supports. And even most liberal economists would, I suspect, agree that setting a minimum wage of, say, $20 an hour would create a lot of problems. But that’s not what’s on the table. And there are strong reasons to believe that the kind of minimum wage increase the president is proposing would have overwhelmingly positive effects.

First of all, the current level of the minimum wage is very low by any reasonable standard. For about four decades, increases in the minimum wage have consistently fallen behind inflation, so that in real terms the minimum wage is substantially lower than it was in the 1960s. Meanwhile, worker productivity has doubled. Isn’t it time for a raise?

4. Where the foreign buyers come from - Tony Alexander has an excellent monthly survey of real estate agents and he has just started asking them where the foreign buyers they are seeing come from. Next month's survey will show what percentage of buyers are from overseas. I can't wait.

In Auckland Chinese dominate, but British buyers have a strong presence everywhere except Manawatu/Wanganui.

5. China, technology and the middle class - Chrystia Freeland at Reuters has done a nice job of talking about the elephant in the room of the current thinking on trade liberalisation and use of technology: both cost high paid jobs in the developed world. If it wasn't for Taibbi's epic this would have been today's must-read.

The big surprise, at least for believers (like me) in the classic liberal economic view that trade benefits both parties, is the strong and negative impact of globalization on U.S. workers — Autor estimates it accounts for 15 to 20 percent of jobs lost. “The rise of China was such a huge change. It really did matter,” Autor said. “First, China is such a huge country. Two, China was 40 or 50 years behind in technology, so it had a lot of catching up to do. Third, it happened so fast.” What is striking, and frightening, is the extent to which, at least in the U.S.-China trade relationship, the knee-jerk, populist fears intellectuals tend to deride actually turned out to be true.

“U.S.-China trade is almost a one-way street. This trade relationship doesn’t clearly give you the benefit that you can sell a lot of stuff to your trade partner,” Dorn said. “If you talk to someone who is somehow involved in the promotion of free trade, they may say that maybe the headquarters of Apple (AAPL.O) benefits. That may be true. But the first-order effect is of job loss.” The impact of technology is more familiar. Autor, Dorn and Hanson found that it did not create fewer jobs overall, but it did hollow out the jobs in the middle. “Technology has really changed the distribution of occupation. That doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with reduced unemployment, but it creates a more bimodal set of opportunities,” Autor said. “There is an abundance of work to do in food service and there is an abundance of work in finance, but there are fewer middle-wage, middle-income jobs.”

6. Here's an idea - Stop allow tax avoiders to bid for government business. BBC reports that's what Britain is planning. 

I wonder how much money the New Zealand government spends with Facebook, Google and Apple.

Companies involved in failed tax avoidance schemes will be banned from bidding for government contracts, under new rules published on Thursday. Firms bidding for contracts of £2m or more will have to declare whether they have fallen foul of wide-ranging tax avoidance rules in the past 10 years. The move is designed to deter tax avoidance and evasion by companies bidding for public contracts.

7. China's economic growth rate - What if it was really only 5.5% last year and not the 8% plus in the official figures? Here's FTAlphaville with the theory from two sources who cross checked the GDP figures with lending growth figures and other more...er...concrete measures of output, including concrete and steel and KFC.

8. 'Why the currency war deniers are wrong' - Here's former ECB executive board Lorenzo Bini Smaghi with this argument in a blog at the FT.

This is the best description I've seen in response to say there is no problem to solve.

The traditional view is that monetary policy should be aimed at stimulating growth and employment as long as price stability is ensured. On the proviso that inflation expectations are well anchored and the central bank’s inflation projections are within target, interest rates can be kept as low as possible to foster consumption and investment. The exchange rate is determined by financial markets as a result of the different monetary policy stances across countries, which are in turn determined by different cyclical positions. In such an environment, currency wars do not exist because the weakness of some countries’ exchange rates reflects the weakness of their fundamentals. There would be no point in complaining about the low level of the exchange rates of countries with a relatively depressed economy.

It is the task of monetary policy to try redress the situation; the exchange depreciation is only the consequence. The real world has become a bit more complicated.

First, exchange rates do overshoot compared with the levels that are consistent with underlying fundamentals. This is not only because financial markets adjust faster than goods markets, as the German-born economist Rüdiger Dornbusch explained more than 35 years ago, but also because of the self-fulfilling nature of investors’ expectations, and the herd behaviour that influences aggregate market developments. Overshooting is the rule rather than the exception, and is very difficult to mitigate. Indeed, exchange rate interventions are ineffective unless they are co-ordinated between the monetary authorities of both the appreciating and depreciating countries. Such a co-ordination is very hard to achieve, however, because of the asymmetric benefits that exchange rate movements produce.

Bini Smaghi then points out that central banks take on the role of quietly redistributing wealth from savers to borrowers to reduce unpayable debt. It does this by repressing interest rates lower than inflation.

The reaction of investors is to try to escape from being financially repressed, including by purchasing foreign assets, especially of countries where such repression is opposed by the political system or prohibited by the central bank statutes. The outflow of capital leads to an excessive depreciation of the currency in the former countries and an appreciation in the latter, compared with underlying fundamentals. At that point, a currency war can be avoided only if the latter start acting like the former, and also repress holders of financial assets.

The most likely outcome of the currency peace which would result from a global attempt by central banks to repress holders of financial assets would be a new bout of risk taking all over the world. And, sooner or later, a new financial crisis.

9. A study of hyper inflations - James Montier at GMO has done a studie of hyperinflationsHe rejects the idea that government money printing automatically leads to money printing. He says wars and the supply shocks that follow them are often the trigger.

There is an alternative view of hyperinflations, one that I find much more credible than the quantity-theorybased argument outlined above. This alternative viewpoint recognizes that money supply is endogenous (and hence that interest rates are exogenous), and that budget deficits are often caused by hyperinflations rather than being the source of hyperinflations.

If simply “printing money” really did lead to hyperinflations, then we should expect to see hyperinflations all of the time. Any government that issues its own currency under a floating exchange rate effectively spends by printing money 7 (as a matter of logic, if the government is the sole issuer of currency, it has to spend before it can collect any taxes at all, otherwise there is nothing to pay the taxes with). Yet, rather than two-a-penny, hyperinflations are thankfully rare events, representing occasions when populations lose complete faith in their currencies.

10. Totally Jon Stewart on Barack Obama and the Giant Speech. There are 70,000 structurally deficient bridges in America.

(Updated with cartoons)

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29 Comments

#4

Nice confirmation of where the foreign buyers are coming from and showing teh Auckland distortion.

Next question.

How many of each group are buying for their own use/occupation and how many are absentee owners with no real interest in NZ?

Also it would be good to know how many prospective Kiwis are being pushed aside into that bucket called  ' lifelong renter'

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Whoops double entry.....

...eevn if it deserves the emphasis

;o)

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..... no , this is the better of your two comments .... although saying " double entry " could get you banned from here .... they're kinda sensitive on the lewd stuff , fella .....

 

Isn't it curious that Aussies make up only 9.8 % of the foreign investment in Auckland , whereas the Chinese own 44.8 % of the total ....... but in Otago , Aussies are 47.6 % of the foreign owners of property , versus just 4.8 % for the Chinese .....

 

Conclusion : Aussies don't like Chinese ..... or is it the udder way around ?

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#1 Matt Taibbi on HSBC ..
yeah right .. and maybe if the Justice Department had gone for the jugular, they risked HSBC rolling over and spilling the beans on what every one knows the US merchant banks have been up to, they all know, they're all in it. The cone of silence.

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Elizabeth Warren said "Too big to fail " is now also "too big to trial".....

 

Reminds me of a terrorist when cornered says " Arrest me and I will set off this bomb and Everybody dies when the building collapse ".....So we have no choice but to let him go....until he does it again sometime later....

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That of course is not the real reason. If anything went to trial then the investigation would spread out through the highest and lowest levels of US society. Corruption is a many headed beast.

Anyway, who else are the americans going to get their cocaine from and sell their guns too?

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#1

There's a phrase that's been a commonplace in the VRWC for a few years now, as a challenge to the way things are being run.  usually, it's hurled at a Senator with hand in till or other dangerous place.  But any ZH reader will know their view of the universe is sorta the same - as Tom Waits sings (Sins of the father):

 

"smack dab in the middle of a dirty lie

the star spangled glitter of his one good eye

everybody knows that the game was rigged

justice wears suspenders and a powdered wig"

 

Oh, the phrase:

 

'Laws are for the little people'

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#3. I notice there's been no discussion here on the "living wage" campaign.  While I understand both sides of the debate re minimum wages maybe it's time to think outside the box and have a cap on maximum wages and profits.  My theory is that costs and prices of practically everything would then decrease.

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"Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges," said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, "HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.

............................

“At the risk of repeating myself from last year, we looked at a land tax, and land taxes, one, reduce the value of land in New Zealand, by definition, and it has an impact on every single homeowner in New Zealand."
http://www.interest.co.nz/news/52737/imf-recommends-govt-broaden-capita…

looks like similar reasoning?

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Bernard's top 10's are always a bit more gloom-laden than David's.

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... " a bit " ..... that's like saying the Pope is a bit Catholic !

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Gummy

and a 'bit' resigned....

cheers

Bernard

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The word you seem to have trouble looking for is 'realistic'.

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Chuckle. That's what you do when it doesn't sell....     :)

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#9    Any government that issues its own currency under a floating exchange rate effectively spends by printing money 7 (as a matter of logic, if the government is the sole issuer of currency, it has to spend before it can collect any taxes at all, otherwise there is nothing to pay the taxes with).

Clearly a differnt ball game in the USA - where its not the government that prints money

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Tony Alexander

Why the high rating for New Zealand? In the words of Finance Minister Bill English’s quite good introduction in this year’s Demographia survey...
“supply side factors explain the deterioration in New Zealand’s housing affordability...

Land has been made artificially scarce by regulation that locks up land for development...
 

earlier response the the Government appointed Savings Working Group

/*-->*/

"One of the claims made in the Savings [Working Group]report is that migrants push up house prices and
therefore maybe if some controls were placed on immigration prices would not be so high
and we Kiwis would save through bank accounts and such like rather than buying each
other’s houses. They report cites a particular study showing that about a 1% of
population boost in immigration lifts house prices about 10%.

However there is another study of migration and housing which finds that looked at from
a local as opposed to national level one cannot find evidence of more than about a 0.2%
- 0.5% lift in house prices. This study also suggests that maybe it is not the migrants
(foreigners) affecting house prices if such an effect exists, but returning Kiwis – which is
what we will examine here.

/*-->*/

............

So who would you believe the independant Savings Working Group or a government committed to population growth and driven by powerful interests who provide infrastructure, property developers, banks etc? Presumably the Savings Working Group were familiar with all the research?

Micael Reddell pointed out that

/*-->*/ /*-->*/

  "80% of our population growth in the last couple of decades has been the net inflow of non NZ citizens" .

 

 

/*-->*/

From The Landlord Says:

Meanwhile the National Party released its immigration policy. You may wonder what this means for the property market. It is clear from research that immigration is one of the key drivers of house price growth.

The logic is simple. If you import more people into the country, then you need more houses. Supply and demand means that prices are then pushed up, this is particularly so in Auckland.

While the latest immigration numbers show the number of people coming into New Zealand is starting to rise, the Nat’s policy looks like it wants to increase immigration levels even further. (Although it is unclear what sort of number they are targeting.)

This policy is, arguably, a plus for people who want house prices to rise. (But may be not so good for first home owners wanting to buy.)

My guess has always been that property investors lean heavily towards the right rather than the left. (This was made clear in an email newsletter I saw from one developer this week.)

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Nice to finally see you report a more informed view of the forecast tight/shale oil production. The 'Saudi America' meme reminds me of the 'rosey' EIA forecasts throughout the 2000's which touted we'd be producing more 100 million barrels/day by 2012 at a price of $20/barrel with a 'worst case high projection' of $30.

 

Well, turns out last year we produced 75 million barrels/day (but what's 25 million barrels/day between friends eh!) at an average price of $112. Who could have known!!?!?

 

Anyway, where's Gummy?! Dow to 30,000!!! GDP growth of 8% this year!!!! ;-)

 

 

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Good commment.

 

I started to rebut the comment DC put up, then went and did something useful. The figures were so obviously bollocks that I found it hard to understand why a financial site - presumably with at least average numerical capablity - would have put it up. Not surprised to see the Otago Daily Times run it though - off-blamed on the AFP. They  (the ODT)  have an inbuilt bias and a refusal (inability?) to investivate that seems endemic.

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"who could have known?" Oh lets see ASPO, just about any real oil geologist, quite a few ppl like Matt Simmons etc.....

The craziest thing Ive seen is that recent PwC "analysis" what a dogs breakfast that is. They based in on the EIA's data that already contains a huge % of as yet unknowns (actually never wills) and then threw shale on top!!  Incredibly bad.

Me thinks there is some money changing hands somehow,, probably in the form of fat fees for some "consulting" on shale play sell offs or something. I cant believe a professional would do such a bad job unless bribed.

regards

 

 

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What is most irritating is the inability of journalists (and I will include the apparent cornucopian DC in this) to do even a modicum of their own research on any story involving global oil production. Two examples of cornucopian oil production fantasies should suffice. Five years ago the press were full of stories of:

a) The huge discoveries that the Brazilians had made off-shore in their pre-salt fields, and how this was going to bring huge amounts of oil to the market. The media totally avoided talking about the nightmare involved in getting this oil out.

Back in 2009 Petrbrobras said they would be producing 3.6mbpd by this year:

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Resources/2009/09/10/Brazil-rep…

Now see what has really happened - the pre-salt fields have been a nightmare to produce and Brazilan production has actually FALLEN for the last 3 years to 2.35mbd last year:

http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=br&v=88

 

b) how Iraq was going to be a VAST oil producer, challenging Saudi - well yes production has gone up (its now up above 3 million bpd) but given that it was just below 2.5mbd 10 years ago where has all this vast new supply of oil gone?

http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=88&c=iz&l=en

Back in 2009 they were going to be producing 6mbpd by 2015:

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/news/international/countriesandterrito…

They better hurry up as they added less than 0.8 mbpd in 5 years.

And so it goes - endless cornucopian claims by the oil patch.

 

It took me about 20 minutes to dig up this sort of data. Are journalists these days incapable of doing this?

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David C says he read Lomborg, then changed his mind.

 

It takes about 5 minutes to discredit the Skeptical Environmentalist'. As with Allenby's 'Ecolgy Facts', the BRT'S 'Conservation Strategies in NZ', and the Claus/Bolander 'Ecological Sanity', there are always folk prepared to deliver the disingenuous, in muddying manner.

 

A good journo should be skeptical first, believing second. On that basis, I can think of 2.5 journaists in NZ who make the grade. I rate Hill, Crump and half-Laidlaw. I give Armatrong a fail, and recently I'd be inclined to put Colin James in that category too. There are a lot who aren't stupid - Fallow, Trevett, Cunliffe if he;'s still in action - but they don't make the connection. Black - who now spins for English - once opined on the Panel that '" I think the trouble is that there are too many people on the planet" - then went on about her house do-up. What part of 'too many people' is not 'too few resources per head? Go figure.

 

 

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It took me about 20 minutes to dig up this sort of data. Are journalists these days incapable of doing this?

 

Apparently not. Face it, critical thinking has left the building! I'm waiting with baited breath for Bernard and others to realize that energy (or lack of cheap energy) underlies most, if not all of our current 'economic' ills. Why are economies not recovering like 'usual'? Why is oil $116 as world economies are in the toilet and we sit on the cusp of depression? What does declining energy mean for production of goods, food and transport? How will our economies keep growing forever!?
 

I do wonder when the revelation that economic growth is over will sink in. Forget all the paper nonsense. Energy is the master resource - period. Life is one big energy balance and so are economies. Reality bites.

 

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This one has to bring a smile to your face
It will happen - it's a matter of time
Picture Dairy Milk Powder Producers in China shipping Bulk Milk Powder to NZ, decanting it, repackaging into Infant Formula Cans "made in new zealand" labelled "made in New Zealand", shipped off to Australia, distributed around australian supermarkets, snapped up by chinese visitors and shipped or air-freighted back to china, all on the shirt-tails of "green clean product of the 100% pure green image"
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/world/8323843/Chinese-vegetables-Made-in-NZ

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So we have an image to project and no produce for sale policy - since when did NZ allow such a state of affairs to arise?

 

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#2

An American Oil Find That Holds More Than All of OPEC

 

Last Paragraph:

"The technology for assessing oil reserves is pretty good," Rusco said. "I don't say there isn't a wide margin of error, but you can have great confidence that there is a very, very large amount of oil trapped down there that could be recovered. It's just that, so far, it can't be recovered at a profit."

 

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some straight talking on the Alpine Fault from Otago Regional Council

What will happen to the rivers and lakes?

Landslide dams with breakout flash flooding are very likely. Aggradation will deposit high sediment volumes in riverbeds lasting for many months.  Huge sediment and gravel deposits will have downstream effects for years.  Areas such as the Shotover River may be radically transformed.

Rock avalanches falling into the water bodies may cause tsunami in lakes, rivers, and fiords. Areas such as Lakes Wakatipu, Wanaka, Hawea, Te Anau, Manapouri, Tekapo, Milford Sound Doubtful Sound are at risk from tsunami induced by massive landslips into the water.

Electricity supply

Damage to hydro electrical generation plants and transmission lines will result in an immediate shutdown of South Island power generation and widespread disruption of reticulation. Electricity supply is likely to be unavailable for many weeks or even months in some remote areas.

The Clyde Dam has been built to very high specifications and it is unlikely it would suffer catastrophic damage.

Damage to buildings and infrastructure will cause uncontrollable fires.

The nature and location of the earthquake indicate that a relatively small number of people will be killed. However, a large number of people will suffer disabling injuries.

Communications and public services

All communication systems including land and cell-phones may be down in many parts of West Otago. Satellite based telephone systems will initially be the main means of communication. Queenstown could become completely isolated if the airport is damaged.

Water, sewerage, energy, transport, health, and social services may be disrupted for weeks.

Cessation of most commercial activity may occur in many parts of the South Island, however, many local economies will be maintained solely by recovery activities. As in any disaster some people may suffer terribly, and others will profit.

People trapped on roads and tracks, or in accommodation will need to be looked after where they are for days due to road blockages, airport damage, and limited means of transportation.

Agricultural production will  be disrupted, and dairy herds may be unable to be milked in some areas due to electricity outage.

A major problem constraining repair and rebuilding will be the shortage of trades people and materials.

Provision of emergency medical facilities for many major trauma victims and the rescue of trapped people on roads will be severely disrupted for 3-4 weeks.

 

http://www.orc.govt.nz/Information-and-Services/Natural-Hazards/Great-A…

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Good one from George Monbiot

Note the Koch brothers (Wendell Cox, Demographia .... land supply... )

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Yep, if its a charity getting tax free status I think its funding should be transparent....

regards

 

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Brad Delong on the US housing boom and collpase the likes of Hugh P want here. The Q is during the boom where was the affordable housing, and what there was, whats happemed to it? foreclosed, never completed or never occupied for a lot of it.

"In short, the story of the downturn remains depressingly simple. We have nothing to replace the huge amount of construction and consumption demand created by the $8 trillion housing bubble. Perhaps if the problem were more complicated policy types would have an easier time seeing it."

I think Brad is wrong, the policy types didnt want to see it.

To answer my own Qs, there wasnt really any cheap housing, what there was was so far out it broke the bank getting to work and has been abandoned.

Meanwhile the likes of Hugh want to let the sharks pray on the NZ poor for their/his own political ends.

regards

 

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