A review of things you need to know before you sign off on Monday; Kiwibank ups TD rates, service sector roars back, tractor sales fully recovered, swaps take a breather, NZD stays low, & more

Consensus among my chartist mentors is for next level at USD17k, then  wide open until 12k. 

Fat thumbed an ETH purchase this morning, just before the fall. 

Yea, I suspect much more weakness and BTC to go back to $12k-$15k shortly with Eth hovering around $1,000 should trade in that range for a number of months. Can't see anything taking off anything time soon

The whales are having a grand old time..sharks cruising and dolphins not jumping

Early previews of FOMC jitters I suppose.  Perhaps we will follow the pre-FOMC call pattern of everything down until the day, and then green for a while.  Although a 1% rise could cause a bit of a shockwave.

My cash reserves are ready if we get another nuke.  So far the cheapest I have bought is $18.1k

If people are struggling to buy food and power and somewhere to live Bitcoin and crypto becomes useless. If you are hungry what would you choose a chicken or a Bitcoin. Crypto currency’s are going to hit the wall over next few years as it really has no value unless someone wants to buy it.

Not sure I buy into the idea that people will flock to NZ because of exchange rates. BTW, Air NZ promotional stunt in NYC with the dreadful band Six60 seemed to be a waste of money. 

"Superabundant Chicken Bucket".  Whoever runs the marketing department of Beijing KFC must be one smart fortune cookie.

Surprise! Chinese Junk Bonds Yield Less Than US Treasuries

Neoliberalism impoverishes. Neoliberalism is a class war against labour by finance, primarily, and a class war against industry. A class war against governments. It’s the financial class really against the whole rest of society seeking to use debt leverage to control companies, countries, families and individuals by debt. And the question is, are they really going to be able to convince people that the way to get rich is to go into debt? Or are other countries going to say, this is a blind alley. And it’s been a blind alley really since Rome that bequeathed all the pro creditor debt laws to western civilization that were utterly different from those of the near east, where civilization took off. Link

Rents are continuing to rise in the US. According to realtor.com, February 2022 was the seventh month in a row with a double digit increase in rent prices from the year prior. Rents in February were 17.1% higher than in February 2021. The median rent in the 50 largest metro areas has risen to $1792 a month.

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

You lost me at NZ Herald

The article is fine. Headline not so much. That outfit is bang on. Tasteful with a nod to NZ.