Here's our summary of key economic events over the weekend that affect New Zealand with news changes are coming as a result of both action and inaction at the COP26. They will all be inflationary, especially for food. Only the well-off will be able to tolerate these changes.
But first in China, this year’s “Double 11” online shopping event saw sales grow at a slower pace amid regulatory tightening, and as China’s overall consumption slows down. But it still hit a new record high of NZ$70 bln on the day (11/11/21), up +8.5% from last year. Almost 1.2 bln packages were sold at an average price of NZ$60. (However most platforms had much larger sales than this because they ran this promotion starting on November 1 through November 11. Over this longer period the two largest platforms sold NZ$200 bln of product. Apple alone sold about $2.5 bln in this 11/11 promotion. Fresh food including dairy products were reported as selling well too.)
However, excavator sales in China plunged -30% in October from the same period last year, their biggest monthly drop this year, as real estate curbs, tighter liquidity, less infrastructure projects and the hike in raw material costs hampered demand. But exports were on the rise as overseas economies make a comeback.
Indian consumer inflation rose to 4.5% in October (+5.0% in cities), a small rise from the prior month. This was higher than anticipated.
Indian industrial production data disappointed however, rising at only a +3.2% annual rate in September when it rose +12% in August. That is a fast and worrying slowdown for the world's sixth largest economy.
In the US, the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment for the US fell to an index of 66.8 in November of 2021 from 71.7 in October and well below market expectations of 72.4. It was the lowest reading since November 2011 due to an escalating inflation rate and the growing belief among consumers that no effective policies have yet been developed to reduce the damage from surging inflation. In this survey, inflation expectations for the year-ahead edged up to 4.9% from 4.8% - higher, but actually lower than the actual inflation currently hitting the US at 6.2%.
We should also note that the American IRS has applied automatic income tax rate updates that reflect higher inflation.
US job openings slipped to 10.4 mln in September but well ahead of what was expected. And August's data was revised up. The 'quit' rate rose and more people (4.4 mln) resigned their positions voluntarily to move to another role, than at any other time since this series started 20 years ago.
The number of ships waiting at US West Coast ports for unloading has grown to 111, 78 of them in Los Angeles. In pre-Covid times, the number waiting was zero. But there are signs the situation may ease as new fines for waiting for more than 5 days by importers to pick up their goods is motivating them to clear incoming cargoes which is now holding up ship unloading.
In Canada, the central bank's senior bank officer loan survey reports the easiest conditions for credit approvals in the series history for non-mortgage lending to households, and series equal-easiest condition for mortgage lending.
Like India, EU industrial production in September also disappointed, slipping slightly, although less than was forecast.
The COP26 talk-fest is over now with 'agreements' claimed to be better than expected but less than hoped. Almost immediately, both India and China reneged on the phase out of using coal, rather agreeing to "phase down" its use. They were aided and abetted by Australia. Other parts of the deal will now start to bite and the inflationary aspects could be kind of serious, especially food inflation. This is a deal that only the well-off can afford. The agreement set the rules for trading emissions in bilateral deals and in a global United Nations-supervised marketplace. By some estimates it could be worth/cost US$100 bln.
Australia signed the international request for countries to strengthen 2030 emissions reduction goals by next year. But within hours of agreeing, the Morrison government, facing a 2022 election, told Australians it had no intention of changing its current policies. This is despite global-scale issues at Australia's coal mines.
In Australia, inflation expectations rose to 4.6% in November from 3.6% in October. That is a sharper jump than the actual inflation in September of 3.0%.
And staying in Australia, Delta cases in Victoria have 1221 cases reported there yesterday. There are now 16,671 active cases in the state and there were another 4 deaths yesterday. In NSW there were another 196 new community cases reported yesterday with 2,901 active locally acquired cases, and they had another death yesterday. Queensland is reporting no new cases. The ACT has 15 new cases. Overall in Australia, just over 81% of eligible 12+ Aussies are fully vaccinated, plus under 8% have now had only one shot so far.
In Austria, overnight they instituted a nationwide lockdown for unvaccinated people. The Dutch has also reinstituted lockdown conditions.
The UST 10yr yield opens today at 1.57% and little-changed since this time Saturday but it is +12 bps higher than a week ago. The US 2-10 rate curve starts today unchanged at +105 bps. And their 1-5 curve is marginally flatter at +106 bps, while their 3m-10 year curve is also a little flatter at +151 bps. The Australian Govt ten year benchmark rate is slightly firmer at 1.80%. The China Govt ten year bond is unchanged at 2.95%. The New Zealand Govt ten year is also unchanged at 2.63%.
The price of gold will start today up +US$1 to US$1865/oz and to a new 5 month high. For the week it has risen +2.8%.
And oil prices are little-changed at just over US$79.50/bbl in the US, while the international Brent price is now just under US$81.50/bbl and little-changed over the weekend.
The Kiwi dollar opens today little-changed at 70.4 USc but that is a -1% depreciation for the week. Against the Australian dollar we are soft at 96.1 AUc. Against the euro we are firmish at 61.6 euro cents. That means our TWI-5 starts today at just on 74.6.
The bitcoin price has firmed slightly since where we left it on Saturday, up +0.6% to US$63,684. Volatility over the past 24 hours has been modest at just over +/-1.2%.
The easiest place to stay up with event risk today is by following our Economic Calendar here ».
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105 Comments
Cabinet will make a border decision today, but according to the Herald, the actual announcement isn't going to be until later this week.
I find it really hard to understand how the government can justify any additional delay on letting Aucklanders know when they'll be able to resume moving around the country. Just tell us today ffs.
It's beyond ridiculous, after 13 weeks of lockdown, the queen will let us wait a bit more... is this some kind of mind game she plays with us.. Labor still got so much support.. it must be kiwi masochist like this kind of treatment. Will be great to watch the announcement about later announcement at 4pm, can't wait
As we await another announcement from the Ministry of "Truth"
Everyone who showed a basic initiative in getting the vaccine has had it. The country should now be opened up both locally and internationally. The fact that it hasn't is an absolute disgrace to all those who have done the right thing in getting vaccinated. We have surge capacity of 500 ICU beds for the unvaccinated, use them.
Nice misinformation
It's a pandemic of the frail, aged and of those with commorbities... yip, turns out old people die...
And yes we had the ABSOLUTELY TRAGIC opening news segment about nz losing another 90+ year old with underlying health conditions.. it's just so unfair...
But hey, you've "done the right thing SO FAR... soon be time to booster up ....
"It's a pandemic of the frail, aged and of those with commorbities." No that's wrong. It's a pandemic for every one. True those groups are the most vulnerable, but it is having a significant impact on anyone who catches it. And while you are in denial and espousing your views, who will you blame when you catch it, likely not die, but spend the rest of your life suffering from the effects of having caught it?
https://www.gov.sg/COVID-19
That bottom chart def shows its the over 60s, and unvaccinated (for a 2% chance) that really have anything to worry about.
Murray Murray Murray ... yes I'm in denial... the 99.99% survival rate is concerning ... which must be why we have locked down our ENERGY usage and raked up another squillion billion in govt debt...
Makes perfect sense
Ah, remember the good old days of herd immunity and elimination... quaint wsnt it.. course we are about to have a flu epidemic now...
Those clever epidemiologists just didn't see that coming.... well how could they???
The key thing is to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated.... because they are the vulnerable now that they are vaccinated...
Thanks for your words... I'm having an epiphany
So any life is better than none? I just don't want to catch it at all, so I don't want you or any of your mates to bring it to where i live, like they did to Stratford or Tararua district. If people had followed the rules this would have been over two or so months ago, but they didn't and you and the rest of us suffer because of it. Stupid is as stupid does!
But yes I do agree the Government has largely screwed this too. Bringing a lot of extra money, they have largely squandered the opportunity, so where it shouldn't have incurred a cost, I think it will significantly.
Yes the flu will return, it's here now, but like COVID it needs infected people to mutate and most mutations that have the worst impact happen overseas, so until the borders open fully, I doubt that epidemic will be significant, even though the "experts" are preparing us for it now.
murray86 -The Covid thing has TOTALLY been over cooked and fear installed in the nation.
Aucklanders are going to break out if required by force, we are over this BULLSHIT.
And yes Covid is coming to a town near you but if your vaxxed then you have nothing to be overly concerned about.
Everyone will be exposed to Covid over the next year just like in every other country, it's life, get use to it !
The unvaccinated don't warrant an ICU bed. The govt has quietly and deliberately left the triage to the coal face. Dr., in ED up in Northland already basically said "no room in this inn" for the unvaccinated. This is abrogation of responsibility by the govt. in not spelling out who will get priority in public hospitals should there be vaccinated vs unvaccinated based on age, co-morbidities and other factors.
I think we could ditch all smokers, alcoholics, drunk drivers, prisoners or a number of other people from the health system before your everyday tax paying citizen.
I mean, how about we only use hospitals for the woman and children, doesn't history tell us they are about the only ones worthy of being saved?
Here's the thing though - that kind of happens. We excise the hell out of smokers to the point they cover their costs. Being a drunk tends to work against you if you need a transplant. We also compromise on what medications we buy through Pharmac because we have limited funds and more people needing medicine than we can afford.
Healthcare is already rationed and was long before Covid came along.
I was speaking to someone yesterday who is intimately involved with the Covid response in our DHB area. I only touched on it lightly but the very mention of it made him look broken. He said they are doing what the can to prepare for it, but there are a limited number of ICU beds available in the DHB, and a shockingly (shockingly) small number of ventilator units.
The big issue is, every single ventilator is already in use, and there are no (known) Covid cases in the area.
It's not the vaccinated I fear for, it's those who will need vital medical equipment that will be taken up by needless Covid cases. The government wasted precious time treading water on preparing for the inevitable wave that will sweep the country. We bought 18 months by going hard and early, then squandered it on...what?
Still squandering time in fact. One vital tool saliva testing, self testing, would provide early diagnosis and intervention that would undoubtedly assist keeping hospitalisations down. Has been absolutely critical in the UK for example. Recommended for urgency early on by our governments own advisors, Roche, Simpson. Where is NZ on this. Still nowhere. Same applies to boosters. This would offer extra protection to those with underlying conditions etc, keep them out of hospital. MoH still taking advice. The speed of reaction would make a sloth look like The Flash.
Where is saliva testing, you ask? Why, it's right here...
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/opinion/300454107/new-covid19…
Watching cricket today in Dubai and was wondering, how can they be normal as still have more cases than NZ
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/united-arab-emirates/
According to government data, the population of Dubai is estimated at around 2,921,376 as of 2021.
Should we be shutting ourselves from the rest of the world and become an island while rest of the world start living normal life accepting that covid19 is a part of life and one has to learn to live with it - vaccination is the way to go forward.
Even after 90% does she intents to shut the international border wheras rest of the world be it Australia, USA, UK, Europe.....where number of cases are much higher, have accepted and moving on.....may be Jacinda Arden is trying to protect our weak health system being exposed to the world as many think that we are a developed country with good system in place.
This would be a good point, except it has been made clear to no one what the ongoing reward is for a more vaccinated population be locked up when the rest of the country lags behind. Can't weight short vs. long term if you don't know what any of the options are.
I'd suggest after a while, the Stanford Prisoner Experiment becomes a more useful tool for our current situation.
The COP26 push for more ambitious targets next year (including methane), and the two (and counting) legal challenges to the Government's obviously illegal carbon targets, are going to make for an interesting run in to the 2023 election. Will the winner be the planet or Fonterra? Will the international carbon market be open quickly enough (and at the right price) to stop our investor-rorted Emissions Trading Scheme driving the price of petrol up to election-losing levels? Will our famously incremental Government actually set out some kind of vision for the future or will they continue to pretend that huge changes to poverty levels, housing, energy use, agriculture, transport, and the economy, will just happen if we keep publishing strategies?
COP26 was a total waste of time, now they are going to have this circus every year so they can all get together for one giant piss up after jumping on planes that are part of the problem. Australia pulled the plug on everything. They are continuing to be the worlds 2nd largest exporter of coal and they said stick the 30% methane reduction up our cows arse. They are even arguing about the "Wording" on the reduction of coal.
Yep - 80% of the old Kyoto agreement trades were a joke. The agreement in Glasgow last week will tighten things up considerably, but it will be still be a major con. NZ pushed hard at the negotiations against putting limits on how much countries could use emissions trading to hit their targets - mainly because our emissions reduction plan involves carpeting NZ in pine trees and paying other countries $10 - $15 billion over the next 8 years to do the same. It's a joke.
Like I keep repeating, the only thing that will work, is a global carbon tax, applied to everything. Sure administer at a country level, where the money is ring fenced onto the other side as well (green projects). But all this bulls%#t about a "carbon market" is the biggest crock you will ever hear. The idiots in power have been conned by capitalists into thinking a market can fix it. Has no hope of ever working as it just provides a whole stack of ways to make even more money from doing nothing.
If only the idiots in charge could wake up to the fact they are being conned.
Illogical. A carbon tax still allows activity - it just cost more. But if the payment is with keystroked-issued debt, so what? Society would jssue issue more debt.
The only way is rationing, curtailment up front. Carbon is a useful way to virtue-signal while carrying on.
And renewables - while we will end up on them - do not support current levels of extraction/consumption/excretion. Nowhere near.
It does still allow activity, much like carbon markets. However the beauty of a carbon tax is that you ramp it up over time, start low and push it up higher and higher. And printing money won't help - because quite quickly you will find that businesses etc will suddenly find ways to not use carbon, their prices will be significantly lower than others that are not avoiding carbon. New businesses will pop up that replace the old, that are less carbon intensive. Exactly this can be seen happening when we apply taxes to any number of things, businesses innovate in ways to reduce their taxation.
Certainly I also believe that front end is a real issue too, but a carbon tax will go a long way in solving this as well, because people will be demanding less due to the in-built carbon taxation at the consumer end. A carbon tax will force businesses to produce lower quantities of high carbon intensive products, meaning they will have to make stuff that will last longer as consumers will have to pay more for goods, so reducing demand on the supply end.
Anything that uses sun only as energy (most of our food, if you minus the fertilizer inputs) will become cheaper by comparison, as will less carbon intensive packaging etc.
New business will not 'pop up to replace the old'.
That's GND greenwash.
The whole problem with less energy going into the system - which will happen by depletion, if not abstinence - is that there will be less done. So less businesses. In fact, probably no economy - not as we temporarily knew it, anyway.
Then these new electric car companies (whose products entire lifecycle use much less carbon) must not exist? The rise of fake meat products must be in my imagination too? And these two examples are those that are delivered simply via public awareness of the issues. Imagine if there was a mandated incentive for real change (like many countries are doing regarding cars - saying no new IC engines from a particular date). A carbon tax would deliver such a mandate.
We have to work in the actual bounds of what is possible PDK, while we are most certainly going to have some devastating effects on our current trajectory, we can't just say "stop all economies" as it would be equivalent to mass murder. Sure we are in overshoot, but we may find ways out of it if we put decent policies in place. Else we all simply throw up our hands and go find a cave to live in. Even your solar panels are unlikely to be replaced/repaired if we get to the point of throwing all economies under the bus because of overshoot.
You have to think harder than that.
Those cars are not just carbon - such one-aspect studies are myopic. They are resource-requiring, which currently (and probably always) is dependent on fossil energy. Nobody is going to bother making e cars using solar energy.
The best way is no cars. Of any type. Not until we get down to 2 billion or less, at least.
You artificial meats have a feedstock and scaling problem; they're only lab-scale. What is the source of the atoms you'll be putting in your mouth? By replacement-nutrient volume?
And no, you don't throw up a straw-man denial argument (which is what you just did). You work out how to live withing sustainable parameters, and reduce population be fore it reduces us.
And you have to throw growth under the bus (bad metaphor).
The problem WWH is that polite words have allowed the world to deny, ignore and put off any necessary action to address the ever accelerating, on-coming calamity. Yes one interpretation is the need for eugenics, but there are other options. The problem is every one of them, if a controlled approached is to be taken, is ugly. An alternative, which the human world seem hell bent on, is keep on going and let nature and god sort it out, which will be far uglier. But many of the rich and powerful seem to think their wealth and influence will allow them to hunker down and weather the storm. They may or may not be correct, but for ordinary people without the resources or boltholes to hide in, this is going to get very, very bad.
If you look at the biblical prophecy about the horsemen of the apocalypse, it seems they are close......
Sure it's going to get bad. For humans to wilfully promote 'controlled approaches' that have any whiff of coercion, which is the tone PDK takes so often, is another thing entirely. It's barbaric.
The thing is, incentives can and do make a difference. Australia was recently (possibly still is) paying people to have children. What if the opposite was true? As many economists would tell the story, people make economic choices that promote their welfare. When education levels have risen, birth rates have dropped. As house prices go higher, people delay having children, or don't have them. If people believe having fewer children is a net benefit, they'll do it. That's the story we need to tell, if that's the solution.
Imagine if PDK was an elected representative? C.S. Lewis rings in my ears:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
I have thought harder, don't worry. Fake meats, for instance use dramatically less inputs for the same amount of protein output. The reason is because they are more efficient, something you never seem to want to acknowledge is possible. Farming animals for meat and milk is an incredibly inefficient means of producing protein, so changing it so you can use the same inputs to get dramatically more outputs is what many of the companies are doing. Scaling up production isn't impossible either, many are doing pilot scale now producing hundreds of thousands of tonnes, but there are few barriers to them going larger scale, just more clever engineering required.
Lithium (one of the most common metals in our crust) in batteries is another area we are just beginning to exploit. The efficiency of electric engines again changes the game (20% in IC engines vs ~90% in electrics). Essentially you use less energy input for the same output. And people said that you would never be able to build electric cars at scale, but here we are today doing it, again with some clever engineering. Yes, to get that energy into the vehicles is still mostly carbon fuel based, but that fuel is being used significantly more efficiently. And with solar panel prices dropping, much of the areas that still need vehicles (spread out towns/countries, like NZ) have enough roof top solar capacity for day to day driving. Those that are in dense cities, don't usually need cars, or have shared car arrangements, which again would be significantly more efficient. Add in a scaling up of other renewables and nuclear and we can make a huge difference.
But all of this requires the right price signals - which aren't coming. If we taxed carbon emissions across the board, suddenly alternative meats would be on a different playing field, able to offer steep discounts to animal meats, particularly if taxes are used on animal meats to subsidise the scaling up of alternative meats. More people would switch to the alternatives, given the price and we would be on track to solving farmed animal emissions.
Meat can be produced on hill country (or on my backyard). Input stocks for fake meat come from high quality, flat, arable land which is in short supply. There's a place for both. No-one I'm aware of has done the research, but I'd hazard that if all land farmed for meat was no longer farmed for meat, we'd have a substantial protein deficit.
Actually it's quite the opposite and there is plenty of research to back it up. The area we need to grow protein (from peas/soy) is an order of magnitude less than producing the same amount of protein from animals. In fact it's worse than that - a lot of these crops are already grown to feed cows, to get meat. See the mass destruction of the Amazon and the replacement soy feed stock that is used to feed cows and make beef.
Yes, we would need to use lowland farms, which would displace current meat farming in these areas. Not a big ask really, swapping an inefficient protein production model for a more efficient one, albeit the efficient process goes through some big factories. The left over from harvests can also be used as feedstock or biofuels as well, making the process even more efficient.
You seem to have a townie view of what cattle eat.
"However, livestock also graze on grasslands and convert large amounts of residues from processing crops that are not edible by humans (e.g. straws, stovers, oilseed cakes, brewers’ grains) into valuable food for
human populations (FAO, 2012a). For example, in India, dairy cattle and buffalo, which are almost exclusively fed on crop residues and byproducts, produce enough milk to cover the caloric needs of some 115 million people and the protein requirements of about 230 million people. (Herrero et al., 2010)."
I think carbon taxation or carbon trading might have worked if we had started in 1990. The challenge now is that the world has 400 gigatonnes of carbon emissions before we kiss goodbye to staying below 1.5 degrees of warming. We will burn through that budget before 2030 at current rates.
Given that we are have a limited budget of carbon left - we need to think about how we use it, not how we incentivise how it is used. A carbon tax or trading scheme might help a bit, but if a billionaire wants to go into space, will they care whether the 400 tonnes of CO2 they dump into the atmosphere costs them $26,000 in penalties (current NZ ETS price) or $72,000 (at EU carbon prices), or even a million dollars? The point here is that if billionaires, SUV drivers, private jet owners etc are insensitive to price and carry on using whatever they like (and they will), then carbon prices will rocket as the remaining carbon stock diminishes. The impact of this being market-led (i.e. chaotic) are obvious - and Governments will quickly lose elections as petrol hits $5 per litre, energy costs skyrocket, and there are no alternatives because public transport is crap and there is a 2 year wait for a new heatpump.
If we are serious about climate change, then it will be hard regulations and bans, coupled with a transition plan that will be needed. To be fair this has been the case for just about every environmental breakthrough of the last 200 years - sanitation, asbestos, indoor smoking, plastic bags, ozone layer damage, hazardous waste disposal ertc.
pdk,
I have been trying to think things through. It is surely self-evident that the 1.50% target is dead in the water and any pretence that it's not has become counter-productive. As evidence, we need only look at the 2021 Production Gap Report or the Climate Action Tracker assessment.
We are not about to stop using fossil fuels and indeed, we absolutely need them to transition to a lower/zero carbon economy. Would it not be better to stop pretending and try to set a realistic(?) goal of say 2% and plan accordingly? Reluctantly, I am coming to believe that mitigation now offers the least bad way forward and that includes CCS if it can be scaled up. The fact that it doesn't 'solve' the problem because it allows fossil fuel use to continue is no longer the point. We are simply past that point.
Of course there will be climate consequences, but they're coming anyway.
Feedback loops.
It's probably too late even now, 1.5 was always dicey, 2 is out the window. Tundra, ice-melt, fires taking carbon-sink forests out......
We have to cease carbon-emission (meaning ff-use) by 2030. E/R say 2025, and they are probably more on the money.
We won't. The GND hopium set will kick the can, even if the rest were going to change, or the 3rd world could change (too many needing firewood).
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/property-traders-flipping-auckland-homes-…
This is nothing new and has been happening since long but both Robertson and Orr are turning blind eye, hoping that God will save them and they be spared from taking action to control the ponzi.
Definitely this gentlemen will pay BLT but where else can you make such easy and fast money - Message that has been sent by Jacinda Arden the Great is that why work or do business.......slowly and steadily have turned and is turning everyone into flippers as in any pyramid ponzi need another to enter, for the ponzi to continue.
Cannot blame flippers or speculators as they are doing what is best for them and is supported and promoted by Uncle Orr and Aunty Jacinda. Also both have assured by words and by their action - personal guarantee that come what may will not allow the ponzi to fall.
FHB or anyone should not be blaming Speculators / flippers as they are doing what is good for them...some may argue is unethical than the Question is to be asked as to what Jacinda Arden and Orr are doing ...is it ethical ?
Investing in business - cost of all regulation and compliance along with wages and rent besides putting long hour, why not flip as in Business, you may or not make money that too will know after slogging a year but by flipping can make money overnight and that too hassle free and risk free knowing that Orr and Jacinda will cover you as they have more to lose than flipper, if housing growth stops. Taxes have to be paid in both but is flipping not a better option !
NZ has been obsessed by housing but never at this level, where most mum and dad are turning flippers along with businesses as more risk to reward.
Massive CG on the Block NZ auction as never seen before is all pointing towards ponzi but people in power have shut themselves in ivory tower and using and taking cover the biggest crisis - covid19
Stuff.co.nz: Massive win on The Block NZ auction sees Tim and Arty pocket $760000.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/the-block-nz/126981656/massive…
Paying income tax? With what?
Keystroke-issued debt, fuelling a numbers ponzi using aging boxes made of ticky-tacky?
The question is whether there's an underwrite for the magic, keystroke-issued debt? Doesn't matter who holds it.
And 'sitting on land' is about the best thing one can do for the planet. Covering it with tar and cement, one of the worst.
If you buy a property for 1,000,000 then sell it for 1,100,000 you will pay 28% in profits so $28,000. I guess my point is at least they are being treated as speculators and paying tax on there speculations. Unlike the "long term investors" who are basically speculators disguised as investors who pay zero percent on there profits when they sell. As our system treats long term speculators different from short term speculators.
The problem Nigel, is that Governments want people to spend their money, not invest it. Look at their rhetoric around taxation. People who invest in business's get taxed a lot too. It's just that they were slow to realise that easy gains from property were not taxed at the same level.
If you were a cynical type, then you might wonder if Governments want people to be independent at all?
Climate deal starts to unravel moments after signing
Hm, how come that Old Ice cap grew in its area over 2013 while the young ice (magenta color) is forming everywhere thus creating an emergency? It wasn't supposed to be so, but here we are. Originally we were supposed to have the Arctic ice cap gone by now. Remember 2009 and Nobel Prize fraudster Al Gore?
What kind of "Data" Al Gore was talking about? I can tell you what kind of data--a doctored BS obtained from some shitty math models created by paid shills on service of the globalist mafia. - Link
It's been unraveled for a while but that fear porn sells a lot of clicks - "The Antarctic continent has not warmed in the last seven decades, despite a monotonic increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases."
profile,
nature.com/nclimate/
You may be unaware that the Antarctic continent is not a monolithic body, but is split between East and West Antarctica. The West, where almost all the work has been done, is warming and more rapidly that much of the world. I sincerely hope that East Antarctica remains stable.
You might wish to come up with an explanation for the well observed melting of glaciers globally. have you been to our own Tasman glacier recently? Do you reject the evidence of increasing CO2 as shown in the Keeling Curve and corroborated at Baring Head( that's near Wellington)? Do you wish to deny the long-established relationship between the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and temperature?
Gore wasn't a climate scientist, some of his statements about the ice cap weren't even backed by anyone, he was basically making stuff up, taking worst cases from models and making them worse. Half of the stuff he said wasn't even in the models that he was looking at, which by and large are quite accurate, because they run multiple scenarios and have a "most likely" modelling in the middle. Gore never seemed to take the most likely model runs though, he would often take the extremes. Even Manns original models from the 1980's are still quite accurate to this day.
However, if you look at the artic ice sheet, it is definitely in decline. By cherry picking the year 2013, you are going from the worst recorded year (2012) as the base, which of course is stupid. Scan this over time and you will notice a serious decline in sea ice cover. And it WILL NOT BE UNIFORM, because climate is a complex system. The general trend is quite a precipitous decline however.
And yet his crap was put in to schools to scare the children.
Precipitous decline? - I guess typical inter glacial warming out of the Little Ice Age doesn't sound so scary - nor get you many clicks.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/images/FullSize_CICE_combine_th…
The climate is changing because of what humans are doing. We have just had thousands of years of relative stability, but now temperatures are increasing, and weather patterns are changing, bringing more severe weather events and unpredictable changes. We now risk triggering tipping points that could have a huge impact on how we live. The change to our climate is happening broadly in proportion to the concentration of greenhouse gases that we have dumped into the atmosphere - gases that will often stick around for thousands of years. These changes have been predicted with reasonable accuracy by dozens of scientific models that have existed for decades.
The above is not conjecture - it is established scientific fact. Climate change denial is now broadly equivalent to 'flat earth' level delusion.
Temps have been increasing since the little ice age - funny that. You are deluding yourself if you think abrupt climate change hasn't happened in the past - long before SUV's, virtue signalling and governing by fear were invented.
"Data availability and temporal resolution make it challenging to unravel the anatomy (duration and temporal phasing) of the Last Glacial abrupt climate changes. Here, we address these limitations by investigating the anatomy of abrupt changes using sub-decadal-scale records from Greenland ice cores ...However, no consensus exists yet to explain what triggers the abrupt warmings, characterized by Greenland surface temperature increases of 5–16 °C within a few decades to centuries"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22241-w#Sec3
Well a large percentage of what he showed was correct, he just exaggerated quite a lot on particular points (which AGW deniers love to focus on, of course). So it's probably about as accurate as most classes in school. Don't forget that when you get to university, they often have to unteach you the stuff you learnt prior to that.
Warming is happening far faster than we have seen in the past, without a significant driver. And you can't argue with the simple stuff, we are clearly seeing increased CO2 in the atmosphere, whose isotopic analysis shows it's coming from fossil fuel burning. We know from simple science, earths historical record and other planets that higher CO2 means more heat trapped. And we are seeing increased heat as CO2 goes up, just like simple science says we should. And we know higher CO2 can both be a driver and a result of other events as seen in the past, as we expect in complex systems. All of this is verifiable from multiple sources, so mostly passes the objective truth tests in science, to the point now where denialism is just stupid, like trying to deny evolution occurs.
Not so pertinent comments out of Aussie:
Australia Says It's "Inconceivable" Not To Join US In Defending Taiwan
as new fines for waiting for more than 5 days by importers to pick up their goods is motivating them to clear incoming cargoes which is now holding up ship unloading.
The floggings will cease when morale improves.
Ask why they're not picking up at the rate they were, perchance?
The hiring rate, or Hires (HI), remains something higher, but not so high you’d think the economy was on fire. On the contrary, boosted by further reopening (from the last of delta corona) the number of HI for September was only 6.46mm, down for the third straight month from 6.83mm in June (keep this downward trend in mind).
On a more appropriate population-adjusted basis (above), the rate of hiring in September was no better than the middle 2000’s; hardly the kind of labor market anyone might associate with inflation (if anyone would so rely on the Phillips Curve for that kind of thing).
This is where the “lazy” American narrative falls in – and then flat on its face. JO presumes epic levels of demand for labor, therefore the relatively low rate of HI must be because of all those taxpayer-funded vacations made possible by the overly generous Uncle of each of these millions supposedly ill-minded toward working.
Or maybe they aren’t slothful, just having been “stuck” with children to babysit.
But we know in September (and October) that the anticipated rush of workers back to work didn’t happen regardless of excuses. The labor force itself declined by a few hundred thousand in that first month and only brought back half the following. These two months the same as when their Uncle’s generosity disappeared in huge chunks as well as almost complete and total reopening of schools. - Link
Same excuse as used in Britain. What happened to the free market? You know, the idea that demand (for drivers, presumably) drives up price until the job is attractive enough.......
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/11/10/our-fossil-fuel-energy-predicamen…
What an earth does that link have to do with a shortage of truck drivers in Britain?
It takes time for wages to increase, and for people to get trained as a truck driver.
There's a lockdown induced 30,000 backlog of people waiting to sit their license for starters.
This is a Complex System - grown incrementally. It grew until it started to hit Limits, which it reacted to by removing capacitance (shock-absorbing capability). Everything from ICU beds to spare shipping to stare berthage to infrastructure maintenance.
Now, it is suffering some hits, the hits have feed-back loops, and the supply is having 'net' problems anyway.
But no, it's just a lack of drivers. No, we need to lock down just because of Covid. No, we aren't on the backside of the Hubbert Curve; we need to address Climate. All those things may be prima facie true, but they're not the bigger truth.
How is no one worried about these draconian and discriminatory lockdown lawns in Austria?
Have you guys seen any media coverage of the massive protests in Spain, Italy, Netherlands, France or Australia?
Have you also looked at the Singaporean government stats:
The bottom chart I find the most interesting, it really is just a pandemic of the old people over 60: https://www.gov.sg/COVID-19
Over the last 28 days, of the infected individuals, 98.7% had mild or no symptoms, 0.8% required oxygen supplementation in the general ward, 0.3% are in ICU, and 0.2% has died.
Do you also jump at shadows? Both are global scale problems, which require global scale collaboration. In order to get that collaboration however, it requires governments to introduce regulations for their citizens. Essentially if you want to be part of functioning, rules based order, you need to accept some more rules (be it from public health emergencies for taxation or whatever). You can choose to not be part of it, but I would encourage you to do so if you want to be a good global citizen. If you don't tow the line, you might be treated badly, but that has been the same with any change throughout history, be it cultural, religious, government etc. Sure keep an eye on freedoms and government over-reach and react against it when necessary, but unfortunately a lot of people tend to think everything is a slippery slope fallacy or grand deception (Agenda 21/illuminati etc), which these days the internet and social media give a loudspeaker to.
Of course I don't jump at shadows and very supportive of the Covid response, up until recently where all sense of perspective seems to have been lost. However, many sensible, high-achieving citizens are skeptical of the Climate Change agenda. A good education teaches you to be socratic, it has served me well.
Oh man. "Papers please." The covid card becomes de facto identity papers which the police do spot check on. Thank goodness nothing, absolutely nothing could go wrong with that scenario.
Meanwhile Singapore says the unvaccinated have to pay their own medical bills. Pacemaker? $90k. Diabetes? $4500 p.a. Doctor's visit? $100
More "papers please" from the birthplace of the person who brought us "papers please" in the first place ... once again I am increasingly convinced we are living in a simulation, and those running it are just having a laugh at our expense (ok, I joke about the simulation bit).
What did Split Enz say about history repeating itself?
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