World factory activity expanding; Evergrande in new trading halt; RCEP underway; Turkish inflation leaps; Aussie house price growth stalls; Apple worth US$3 tln; UST 10yr 1.63%; oil and gold soft; NZ$1 = 67.9 USc; TWI-5 = 72.6

Possibly because the President is merely a figurehead and not representative of the economy as a whole?

Banks have migrated away from lending to productive business enterprises because the risk weights can be as high as 150%. Thus around 60% of NZ bank lending is dedicated to residential property mortgages owed by one third of already wealthy households.

Being the US, more likely the corporate prison system would contract the prisoners back to the government for a handsome fee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8

It's fair to say Tesla delivers a mixed bag. They produced a viable mass market electric vehicle nearly a decade before the traditional players, and have a fairly extensive supercharger network. 

Their stock value is well out of line from reality though, they're priced higher than Toyota. 

So you did'nt buy the shares Sam? On holiday here in Coromandel and they are everywhere...nearly as common as shiny Auckland Utes off-roading (parked on pavements).

 Lockdowns work? There is library of papers out showing they are a waste of resources, money and lives.

If lockdowns worked Sweden would have the highest death rate in the world and Indiana wouldn't be seeing this - “Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”

The lockdowns are taking out the young and fit while covid took out the old and frail - with a so so IFR of 0.15%.

As for contagious - measles is more contagious!

*lockdowns not to be conflated with border closure on remote islands.

There will never be a figure of individuals who's death was purely down to covid that will make you satisfied, because that's not practically possible.

Nobody is asking for perfection, just consistency. The way COVID-19 deaths are counted (and, for that matter, hospitalisations) is quite different to the way in which deaths from other causes are counted.

This is why the United States cannot industrialize as long as the house prices absorb this high a rate of income, and as long as the banking sector is supporting this, and as long as the political parties say we will not tax real estate so that all of the rising land value will be able to be pledged to banks to pay interest instead of to pay taxes. Essentially, it’s the (lack of) taxing of real estate in the United States that has subsidized the increase in housing prices, because housing prices are worth whatever a bank will lend to buy a house. If you have to go to a bank, and if they lend more and more and this money isn’t taxed away, the price is going to go up. So you have the government policy, the bank policy, all trying to promote this high diversion of income into paying land rent. Again, this is the exact opposite of what Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and classical economics and the whole 19th century had advocated. This has priced American labor and industry out of world markets.

If you have to pay 43 percent of your income for rent, then even if the government were to give you all of your goods and services for nothing, all of your food, all of your clothing, all of your transportation for nothing, you’d still have to pay so much money for rent and for health care that you couldn’t compete with labor in Asia or the Third World or even Europe. And so this is what has essentially excluded the United States from having a successful empire. It’s the greed of the financial sector, basically, and the takeover of the government by the financial sector here as happened under Margaret Thatcher in England and then Tony Blair. You’ve had both countries essentially enter permanent austerity programs, and the only way to cure this is for housing prices to go down. But if the housing prices go down, then the banks will go broke. That’s why Obama said he had to support the banks: because if he’d actually lowered the housing prices to realistic levels, that would enable America to survive, but the banks would go under. Until you’re willing to restructure the banking system, you’re not going to be able to industrialise the American economy.  - Link

So did Afghanistan.

Actually Europe has got far better in terms of pollution and industry.

However it's been eye opening how many empty houses there are in Spain and Portugal, particularly in smaller towns and cities. A consequence of declining population and urbanisation I suppose. Seems you can get a perfectly good 1 or 2 bedroom apartment for under €100k in a smaller seaside city, a doer-upper for a fraction of that. My wife noted it was probably cheaper to holiday in Spain than live in New Zealand.

Nothing like internet reckons from the granny herald school of electronic music knowledge.

When demand is flat to negative and spare land abundant things are quite different.

On the flipside, houses in Hawaii look to be about the same quality as NZ houses from the 70s/80s, many blocks from the beach for double Auckland prices. 

Or you can look up the stats on the Police website:

https://www.police.govt.nz/crime-snapshot