US retail and mortgage rates rise; Canada CPI at 30 year high; China's wheat imports surge; Germany and UK report high CPI; UST 10yr 1.84%; oil and gold jump; NZ$1 = 67.9 USc; TWI-5 = 72.3

What am I missing? PFE was $50.42 on 17/08/2021, dropped to $41.32 on 18/10/2021, and now sit at $53.54. 

Edit: I do, however, see Moderna has copped a flogging.

It relates in that all of the 'price' increase in housing that is not the result of labour (relatively easlly measured) is profit.

Did the labour cost of constructing a house increase by 200-300K last year?....Id suggest not.

The difference is profit....the questions then become where did those profits go and what is the impact of them not going there?

But the Government is not counterfeiting money, otherwise your point is well made. If they are careless with where they spend their money, created or taxed, then it can undermine the economy and cause many problems. There are many examples of that around the world, and I'd have to say our Government has been careless to a degree so far. But Frank's point is still valid, if there has not been an increase in the cost of providing a resource, the the extra cost is profit.

Yes you can debase the currency but the equation still holds...price remains p+l.

There are a number of implications, especially in a world of relative currencies, one being at what point is it more 'cost effective' to use your labour to seize desired resources rather than trade for them?...and how much labour can you commit to defending rather than converting resources?

Raw "goods" have no intrinsic value until they are held, accessed or worked, aka labour, or as PDK would say, Energy. It's all about the cost of energy. Gold is just an inert mineral lying around until it is held. Ditto soil, oil, forests, animals, fish, birds.

"Raw" goods have no cost...they exist. 

The costs are in the labour to secure, protect and exploit them.

Yeah. Good thing you didn't drive into a tree.

There's a big difference in price between an Airbag and a Face Mask, and easy to talk in hindsight.  

Embarrassing to who Brock..you?

And then when when they got here, didn't supply them a nice place in Westmere for cheap?

Must suck to be so continually bitter.

Brock Landers

When NZders travel overseas they should be aware that they are automatically putting themselves at more risk than usual for any number of reasons including the unforeseen advent of a pandemic.

During my OE in UK in 1974 a mate and myself were not as aware of the Irish Terrorist bombings as we should have been.  We were heading thru Birmingham on the way to Chester to watch a nearby motor race in Oulton Park.  We stayed overnight in Birmingham and did a bit of a pub crawl. That night there was a pub bombing near where we were staying in which many young people were killed.  We could have easily visited that pub...it was only pure chance that we didn't.  When we reached Chester we had trouble finding a cheap hotel we had seen advertised in an Auto Assoc guide. We decided to park on a yellow line (illegal) for a short time hoping to find the hotel on foot. On our return to the car about half a dozen plain clothed men emerged from the shadows and made us drive with them to police head-quarters...we had been arrested (on suspicion of being Irish terrorists planting a car bomb) and spent the night in prison while they checked out our passport details (no computers those days) and had the car minutely inspected.  And we had no idea of what we had been arrested for until the next day...all in all a very frightening experience.

And all those Australians killed in the Bali bombing.

I mean it's not as though we're condemning those NZders overseas to the front lines of a war like the many NZders killed or severely wounded in WW1 and WW2.  And those guys couldn't just up sticks and return to NZ despite the frightful mortal dangers they faced.

The overseas NZders that you're referring to are merely inconvenienced, not mortally threatened.  Like yourself they are being somewhat precious and selfish.

I personally think we should be even more stringent at the borders because that is how Omicron will surely enter.

We moved relatively early and we took community outbreaks very seriously. We have high degrees of community compliance relative to most of those countries. The combination of those has been key to our success.

Our position is lucky but plenty of other islands have faired a lot worse.

The 20th century and 1st decade of  the 21st had higher age adjusted death rates.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarr…

It is interesting we measure and promote how we get to zero survival rate.

For instance, since Covid measures also stopped influenza we are saving approx 600 deaths per year which we accepted as an acceptable risk, so after two years we have about 1200 deaths saved up we can use somewhere else to keep the of deaths at the historical average. And haven't heard boo from the MSM about suicides so Covid measures must have stopped them as well, or is it just Covid is more newsworthy than suicide.

But given that we are now approx. 50,000 screening tests behind in picking up other illnesses like cancers, we might be a few death savings short over the long term.

Same with our record drownings this year. It was easily forecasted a decade or so ago that when the Govt. stopped supporting school pools and swimming lessons, that, in the future ie now, we would see an increase in drownings. Would be interesting to pull out a few Minister of Education names from then and to the present to ask them why they thought this was OK and is still OK. 

Get some fresh air Pluto -  "The results highlight that (i) considerable relative aerosol concentration levels can be reached at a 2 m distance from the subject in an unventilated space, and even when the subject is equipped with a mask, the relative concentrations are notably higher than those expected based on the ideal/rated efficiency of the masks; (ii) fit of the mask to the face, in terms of limiting leakage around the mask perimeter, is critical for limiting aerosol dispersion in an unventilated space, especially for high efficiency masks (e.g., N95/KN95); and (iii) increased ventilation/air-cleaning capacity significantly reduces the transmission risk in an indoor environment, surpassing the apparent mask filtration efficacy even at relatively low air-change rates ( ∼2 room volumes per hour)."

That was the narrative but there is limited evidence that masks and the mandating of mask ever worked. They made some sense when public health was telling us it was droplet spread but it was known from day 1 that it would do very little for aerosol spread.

When we see articles telling us we need N95 masks for omicron that's an admission that masks never worked. The virus has not changed in size and there is no known reason to believe it's external survivability has increased.

It’s worse than that. Mummy decides what to do (eg lower Waikato alert level or open to Australia) and then asks what the health advice would be in the context of doing it. Thus…’we took the health advice’. Health advice is not the primary decision point. Yet more govt spin for the masses swallowed whole. 

It seem as if ‘self home isolation’ will be the future of international travel but the issue is for the jetsetters is that they want to fly home from holidays and get back to the office the next day not faff around at home while triple vaccinated. 

I recommend optional self shielding during the 2022 surge for the unvaccinated or those at higher risk of a bad outcome rather than year of Nanny Omicron State before next summer holidays. 

AKA "we trust the science ... but not that science"

I think Omicron will spread like wildfire even in red light. The R value is too high. Unvaccinated people just have fake vaccine passports anyway so the system is stupid. I think a level 3 lock down with testing all workers once a week will be what is required to slow Omicron's spread

Cabinet is also considering tweaks to "Omicronise" the traffic light settings. The measures recommended by director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield include more mask use at all levels, and smaller gathering limits, especially at the red setting. The whole country is likely to be put into the red setting once Omicron spreads in the community, and stay there until case numbers peak and start to drop again. The Government considers regional borders, such as that deployed around Auckland for Delta, will have little effect due to the variant's transmissibility.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-omicron-two-more-cases-confirmed…

All very sensible as usual IMO. The international borders are a bit of an unknown, I think they will scrap MIQ once Omicron takes off as what is the point in stopping a few hundred cases a day when you already have tens of thousands. 

Nope with this government things will never get back to normal until after the next election.

Hopefully not, they are building a lot of houses as we speak. Maybe it would be useful for a year or two, but surely the long term solution is proper housing not 1000 boxes in a paddock (with 5 police stations and 50 alcohol stores).