A review of things you need to know before you sign off on Thursday; both mortgage & TD rate changes, Crown accounts reveal slowdown, household savings up, swaps firm, NZD firm, & more

Other than new houses/duplexes, I think It is mainly "B" grade houses for sale in the northern North Shore.

 Us conspiracy theorists are having trouble keeping up with all the obvious evidence being continually put in front of us.

'Conspiracy realist' in my opinion

8)   more sellers then buyers.......

HUDSON:Well, the key to understanding the West’s neoliberalism is privatization of basic needs and basic utilities. The most important public utility throughout history has always been the ability to create money and credit. 

And what China has that no other country had was its central bank created the own money. 

And when the government creates money through the treasury, spending money into the economy, it spends money in order to actually build things, mainly to build real estate, to house the Chinese, but also to build the high speed railroads, to provide an educational system, universities all over China, to build communications. 

Other countries, such as the United States, don’t have this. Money is created, especially in the United States, by commercial banks, and they create money not to finance new construction of factories or new investment of any sorts. Banks lend money in the West against collateral that is already in place. You can go to a bank to get money to buy a building that exists, an office building, although the office building’s prices are all collapsing now. You can go and borrow money to buy a whole company. That’s what private capital does. It buys money to buy Sears. It drives it bankrupt, collapses it, and fires the [workers]. 

It can buy Toys R Us, drives it bankrupt, collapses it, and it’s gone. You can buy companies and loot them and essentially close them down and turn factories into gentrified buildings for the 1% of financial operatives who are doing the looting. 

But banks in the West do not fund public utilities, and once you cut the taxes and force a government into deficit, you then finance the deficit by privatizing your roads, turning them into toll roads. You privatize your postal system. You privatize your health care system so that there’s not much health care anymore, as you have in England, for instance, the crisis that you’re having in English medicine and hospitals and privatization. You make the whole economy in the West look like England after Margaret Thatcher, where people who are actually wage earners can’t afford to live in London anymore. That’s for the foreign investors or the people who work in the financial sector. The wage earners have to live in suburbs to take privatized rail transportation. 

In the United States, for instance, Greyhound, the bus system, was just bought out by private equity. They did exactly what Stagecoach, England’s largest bus company, did in England. They sold off the bus terminal that was in the center of the city that people would go to to catch the buses, and they sold it for gentrified real estate and told people, there’s now a parking lot we have on the outside of the city. You go and wait in the parking lot. 

We hope it’s not raining or too cold or snowing, but we don’t have a terminal anymore. Well, you can just imagine this way of doing things. It turns into a race to the bottom. 

Well, China, by [keeping control of] finance, really controls who is going to get the credit, and credit is really the economic planner. Neoliberalism in the West says the government shouldn’t do the planning. Wall Street should do the planning because Wall Street is what provides the credit that determines who is going to get the resources and what they’re going to do with it. 

Well, Wall Street gives the credit to financial engineers that are trying to make money by increasing stock prices, increasing capital gains, and making money financially. 

It’s true that China has made many billionaires. That was part of the Let 100 Flowers Grow, but now that it’s had that spontaneous growth, now it’s seen what forms work and what forms don’t work. Now it’s consolidating the economy to essentially create credit to finance tangible industrial growth, tangible infrastructure growth, tangible agricultural modernization, and general improvement of living standards. 

The whole aim of the Chinese economy is growth, not looting and downsizing and a smash-up of corporate raiding. There’s no corporate raiding going on in China. There’s not going to be any financial interest that’s going to buy Huawei or the other Chinese developers. You don’t have the parasitical financial class that have become the central economic planners of the United States. 

Because that’s what libertarianism is. Libertarians want a centralized economy, not run by government but run by Wall Street and the financial sector. The libertarians are essentially the advocates of what normally used to be called fascism, central planning by the wealthy financial and monopoly sector against the population at large. 

You have the Republican and the Democratic Party both supporting a dismantling of government just with a different kind of rhetoric, but the same policies, the same military policies and the same anti-industrial policies. China, Russia and their now more and more BRICS countries are rejecting that whole self-defeating neo-feudal path of growth. 

Does wealth per capita take into account quality of publicly funded services and personal freedom in each country? 

Define poorly distributed! If it were equally distributed I may as well sit on my ass all day. 

To be fair they also go up when you are locked in your house and can’t spend anything.