US posts impressive growth but less than expected; ECB cuts again with EU stalled; freight rates fall; air travel hits all-time high; UST 10yr at 4.53%; gold up near ATH and oil down; NZ$1 = 56.5 USc; TWI = 67

Weird never to talk about the reason for growth...debt to infinity like everything is rosy?

Illegal immigration, woke ideology and the Dems putting forward a really weak candidate played a massive part in why Trump was elected. 

There is a lot of deep seated stuff going on in the US that goes beyond economic performance. In other words, US political status is "it's complicated".

Country said yes to putting a complete corporate clown in charge with a circus to boot.

Damn right it's no. No to totally unsustainable resource extracting "growth".

It's a bit rich of Luxon given his party just restored all the tax advantages of residential property investment.

He is right though.

Thank you for sharing! I agree with almost all commentator's comments about effective innovation which is completely absent in New Zealand. I have been asked to write an article about it but focussed on forestry and wood processing. For my article I have compared the 'innovation infrastructure' (How to get an idea from a lab, through a pilot scale manufacturing process to a full market implementation!) in New Zealand with the likes of Finland, South Korea and The Netherlands. Those countries have all a public/private funded innovation infrastructure in place which drives the effectiveness of it. In New Zealand it is only public but at a much lower level than is required. The government can't sit on the fence. It has to pull out it's checkbook to pay for their part. Without it New Zealand innovators/inventors will remain stuck in a technology readiness level (TRL) 3 and can't carry their idea to a TRL 8. (See: https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/technology-readines…)

We have a tax system that discourages risk taking.

We have very limited R&D funding.

We have an RBNZ who encourages the banks (or mandates them) to be risk averse and not lend to businesses.

We have short term government cycles that mean infrastructure projects are constantly canned, reintroduced, canned, reintroduced etc (3 waters, ferries, etc). A continuous stalemate on making real changes or improvements.

We have a dumbed down population who elects populist leaders and who aren't even interested in policies from parties, who mostly don't read them or don't care.

You really don't want to pay any attention to nominal gdp.

Thanks and that last paragraph resonates, it really does. The pandemic provided a stark example. Crash dive interest rates, save the property market and simultaneously urge the folk to borrow to spend to save the economy. Except it didn’t. Instead it precipitated an unprecedented stampede into property investment and/or speculation and resultantly sky rocketing values for the same and today,  overly large segments of the population burdened with thoughtless debt. 

Apparently, the US Govt can increase the money earned (GDP) by deficit spending at a rate of around 6% of GDP. Who would have thought it?

So this means Sleepy Joe great President??

Works for decades until it doesn’t. 

It won't!! The Saudies have already a big budget deficit and need the petrodollars.

Will be interesting to see if they allow NZers to benefit from it at all, or all the benefit flows off overseas.

And figure out how they are going to get double. The amount of coal over the alps to lyttelton harbour

New Zealand risks becoming a "net exporter" of population in the next few months if current trends continue, economists are warning.

In November, there were 12,800 migrant arrivals and 10,600 departures, for a net migration gain of 2200 people, compared to 7100 a year earlier.

For the year to November, arrivals were down 32 percent and departures up 28 percent.

The numbers could quickly reach a point where they started to cross and more people left New Zealand than arrived, Craig Renney, policy director at the Council of Trade Unions, said.

That would hit some parts of New Zealand particularly hard, he said.

"People come to Auckland, Christchurch and so on but they leave places like Palmerston North, Ashburton. So delivering economic growth in those locations become harder.

"If you want to - Mr Luxon's phrase - go for growth, it's relatively straightforward to have economic growth if your customer base is growing 2 percent a year. But if it's shrinking it makes it harder."

Post-Christmas was a time when more people thought about leaving, Renney said.

"It may well be that in the next couple of months we end up there. We have to think about what that means for the delivery of public services. There are some that depend upon migration - medical care, teaching."

It could also be a problem because some those who left could be the higher-skilled, higher-earning people who could help growth, he said.

Infometrics chief executive Brad Olsen agreed that it was possible net migration could go negative on a month-to-month basis this year.

Many interest commentators have been having wet dreams about this for years. But i suspect it won’t turn out as fantastic as they thought. 

Recall some years back Bob Jones started talking about the same sort of construction for an office block in Wellington. That was followed by an outbreak of publicity in the media. Not long after the whole project was abandoned and I think because he agreed with advice received, that he would have no chance of overcoming the bureaucracy that would be involved. 

All of this mass timber comes pre-cut - so the building goes up FAST !!!

The structure goes up fast, but it also does that with pre-done framing, or tilt slabs. And with tilt slab you have the structure and the framing all together.

The erection of the structure is only a small portion of the time needed to complete a building.

You also need larger beams (and more of them) to support the spans.

The actual time and cost improvement is fairly marginal, hence why this technique hasn't achieved wide adoption. Won't stop people from thinking a massively cheaper method is placed outside their grasp via bureaucracy.

Building in timber is a great idea but the contractor will have to monitor moisture levels in the wood.  If unprotected timber gets wet then it needs to dry before it can be lined etc.  If the timber gets so wet that it swells then there can be more problems.