Fed delivers the expected rise and sets course for another; markets turn negative; US data weighed by rates & sentiment; EU industrial production soft; UST 10yr at 5.01%; gold falls, oil holds as war flares & Saudi scrambles; NZ$1 = 57.6 USc; TWI-5 = 61

An anecdote or two that may reflect that.

My second house was an old bach in Sth Brighton (ChCh) and in the process of renovating i lifted the lino in the kitchen to reveal newspapers from the 1950s in which one was describing the arrival of a sewage connection for a suburb near the inner city that had been developed years previously.....another is a friend I had in the 1980s who lived in Halswell that still used the services of a night cart at the time.

This was in NZs second largest city less than a lifetime ago.

Blip.

Sam Stubbs has - in my humble opinion - strong reason to avoid the (ramifications of the) links in my first post. 

As do others. 

Their self-justifying narratives don't stack up - Kiwisaver is a collection of forward bets on there being 'more', on and on into an indefinite future. 

Porcus volandum; the safer bet... 

Yes, i read that article. Projecting Kiwisaver at $trillion by 2050 is curious given the debt concerns around the world. 

He seems to project the future with little insight into current dynamics. 

Vested interest spruiking in my opinion. 

Nothing wrong with a little optimism now and then

Except they weren't 'carrying'. 

They were resource-sucking. 

As hegemonies have tended to do. 

They're in trouble - and we should be disassociating ourselves as fast as possible. 

What an incredibly ignorant comment by Trump, he has absolutely no understanding of how an economy works.  

We are “carrying” almost every country in the World

I believe the need for foreign countries to hold dollars for trade in oil and other goods, is what is carrying the USA Mr Trump. And this is decreasing year on year currently. 

"we are the Best Credit"

I'm sure that's what he told his bankers right before they pulled the plug on his credit lines. 

2001 the merger wasn't it, but the approval was back in the late 90s was it?

Agreed, Phoenix.

And perhaps the another interesting twist in all of this isn't simply that the BoE is stopping sales of 20- and 30-year gilts - it's why it is becoming increasingly reluctant to put additional supply into precisely the part of the market where yields are already under the greatest pressure.

The 30-year gilt has recently reached around 5.4%, its highest level since 1998, while Reuters reports that 20- and 30-year gilt prices have fallen to their lowest since 1998. 

The BoE has already been progressively shifting its QT sales away from the long end - which is where I think comparisons with Britain's 1970s bond crisis can be very revealing, as to just how different the underlying structural conditions are.

Britain previously experienced interest rates around 15%, but the underlying balance sheet was completely different. In 1976, public-sector net debt was only about 49% of GDP, and it subsequently fell rapidly as growth returned. 

By 1979/80 it was around 39%. The IMF intervention also provided external financing and imposed fiscal conditions while the economy still possessed a substantial productive and industrial base - today's problem is much more deeply embedded.

Decades of financialisation have allowed debt and financial claims to expand enormously while much of the underlying productive economy has been hollowed out or outsourced. 

The issue therefore isn't whether Britain could technically survive a 10% or 15% gilt yield. It's whether an economy carrying today's accumulated public and private debt can absorb rates anywhere near approaching those levels without the interest burden itself becoming another accelerant of the debt spiral - that's a very different proposition.

And there is another important difference - who is going to provide the external balance sheet now that the major Western economies are experiencing these pressures simultaneously?

In 1976 Britain could turn to the IMF in a world where the problem was principally a British balance-of-payments crisis. Today we are looking at highly indebted Western sovereigns facing broadly similar structural problems at the same time.

The BoE's dilemma therefore becomes rather circular...

Sell more long-dated gilts → prices fall → yields rise → government financing costs rise → fiscal pressure increases.

Stop selling them → QT becomes increasingly constrained by the condition of the market.

And if the private market ultimately demands still higher yields to absorb the supply, the central bank faces the uncomfortable choice between allowing the market to impose those rates and intervening to prevent them - I think that is the much bigger story.

The 1970s were a crisis in a highly leveraged economy. Today's problem is what happens when a highly financialised economic model becomes highly leveraged.

Britain didn't choose the latter overnight. It spent decades building its own demise.

Eventually the piper comes for the accumulated debt — and no amount of financial engineering can substitute indefinitely for the productive economy needed to service it.

Good luck, Perfidious Albion in your quest... you are going to need it. 

"The global stockpile of spent nuclear fuel has reached an estimated record of roughly 448,000 tonnes of heavy metal discharge worldwide"

https://www.iaea.org/

That's about 1/3 more than NZ household median income.

Of course they don't have the range of social services we have or an ACC equivalent, and a lot of their medical costs, insurance etc are way more than here