Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 9.10 am today in association with NZ Mint.
As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.
See all previous Top 10s here.
My must read articles today are #8 and #9 on the looming battle of the generations. Worth reading together. #8 from The Economist the best summary I've seen in a while. #9 a nice personal take on it from the National Journal.
1. Between the wars - Martin Wolf at FT.com points to the comparison made by the IMF between Europe's debt crisis now and the one faced by Britain between the wars.
I didn't realise Britain's post-WWI government pursued a tough austerity strategy aimed at repaying debt and returning Britain to the gold standard.
It ground the British economy even further into the dirt.
Output didn't recover to 1918 levels until just before 1938.
And even then it only happened because Britain abandoned the gold standard in 1931.
New Zealand suffered a similar fate in the 1920s, largely because our economy was so closely aligned to Britain's at that stage.
The lessons are clear: government austerity doesn't work when the private sector is heavily indebted and your currency is too high.
Here's Wolf:
It is far harder to control fiscal deficits if the private sector wants to lower its own excessive indebtedness too: less spending by one side means less income for the other. In the absence of strong external demand, the result is then likely to be deleveraging via default and depression. That is the worst imaginable outcome.
This is an extremely useful study, not least for bringing out the lessons of the UK’s interwar experience for the eurozone today. There is a high risk that the combination of tight fiscal policies with stringent monetary conditions will push Italy and Spain into debt traps via the interaction of high interest rates with low growth. At least the UK retained control over monetary conditions: in the end, it went off gold and lowered interest rates. Members of the eurozone do not have those painless options. But fiscal austerity and efforts to lower wages in countries suffering from monetary strangulation could break societies, governments and even states. Without greater solidarity, the story is unlikely to end well.
2. Bank lobbyists winning in fight to avoid regulation Version 1 - It's been a theme of the last four years. As fast as regulators and lawmakers try to shackle European and American 'Too Big To Fail' banks, they spend hundreds of millions on lobbying to avoid regulation, including the Volcker Rule to prevent such mega-banks from gambling with depositers' money.
The banks are winning. They didn't in the early 1930s when FDR imposed Glass Steagall to prevent investment banks joining up with retail banks. The repeal of Glass Steagall in the late 1990s turbocharged the US housing boom with the jet fuel of bank leverage.
Here's the WSJ reporting on Goldman's latest plan to avoid one particular rule:
Goldman Sachs is lobbying regulators to exempt investment vehicles known as credit funds from the "Volcker rule" in a bid to preserve the firm's lucrative merchant-banking unit. But if Goldman fails, it has a backup plan. Some executives at the New York company believe they have found a way to extricate the credit funds from proposed limits on how much can be invested in hedge funds and private-equity funds, according to people briefed on the efforts.
The skirmish over credit funds is just one example of how big banks are fighting to influence how the rule is applied.
Since Congress passed Dodd-Frank, the financial-services industry has spent more than $330 million on lobbying, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of expense filings that cite Dodd-Frank as an issue lobbied. The filings don't break out how much was spent on any specific issue, such as the Volcker rule.
"It's the biggest trench warfare that's happened in this town maybe ever," says Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a nonprofit group funded by an Atlanta investor. It seeks to represent the public's voice in Dodd-Frank's implementation and has met with regulators. The fierce lobbying campaign is a reason why regulators have moved slowly to produce the final version of the Volcker rule. They failed to meet a previous deadline of October 2011.
One very effective tactic of the banks is to say that increased regulation would worsen the deleveraging suppressing growth and There Is No Alternative right now...
UK-domiciled banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds and HSBC and UK subsidiaries such as Santander UK can treat that new lending as basically risk-free for regulatory purpose.
London regulators have also stepped back from tough overall capital rules they imposed after the Basel III reform package was adopted. No longer will UK banks be required to achieve and maintain a core ratio equal to 10 per cent of their assets, adjusted for risk by the end of next year.
Instead, individual UK banks have been set numerical targets for capital and have been told their ratio can drop below 10 per cent in the meantime. The absolute number means banks cannot meet regulatory targets by cutting lending and the flexibility on the ratio gives them room to expand lending as demand grows.
“The goal is to avoid rapid deleveraging that would harm activity in the economy,” Andrew Bailey, head of the FSA’s prudential business unit, told the Financial Times.
4. Iran's hyper-inflation - Pragmatic Capitalist has 10 interesting factoids about Iran's latest bout of hyper-inflation, which now has an annual inflation rate of almost 200%.
It's interesting though that the academic studies of hyperinflation show it is mostly due to the breakdown of economic law and order during or after (or before) wars.
At the current monthly inflation rate, Iran’s hyperinflation ranks as the 48th worst case of hyperinflation in history.
Iran currently comes in just behind Armenia, which experienced a peak monthly inflation rate of 73.1%, in January 1992.
5. Xi Jingping to be a great reformer? - That's what the Washington Post reports Henry Kissinger as saying of China's next leader after meeting him and his predecessors over the last 40 years.
The new generation, Kissinger said, faces a “transformation over the next 10 years” of moving “400 million people from the countryside into the cities.” This will involve not just technical infrastructure problems but a change of values and also a change in the role of the Communist party, he said.
Kissinger said he had spoken to Xi Jinping, the expected next Chinese president, and believes he will seek such enormous internal changes that “it’s unlikely that in 10 years the next generation will come into office with exactly the same institutions that exist today.
6.Where's the memory stick? - Greece's political class is agog right now with a hunt for a list of 2,000 tax evaders, many of whom may be members of the government. Somehow, it got lost...
Here's the NYTimes. HT Andrew.
Can a memory stick bring down a political order? That is the question in Greece, where a tragicomic debate over what became of a list of nearly 2,000 Greeks with Swiss bank accounts is rapidly turning into a full-blown political crisis that is imperiling Greece’s fragile coalition government at a crucial time.
The investigations have also revealed the close ties between Greece’s political establishment and its oligarchs and business elite. There is growing public outrage that no Greek government wanted to touch the infamous list of 1,991 Greeks with accounts at a Geneva branch of the global bank HSBC that the French government gave Greece in 2010 to crack down on tax evasion.
7. Depression economics - Paul Krugman weighs into the debate over fiscal multipliers in this piece pointing out that private sector deleveraging makes the multiplier bigger than 1. The Austerians are assuming, based on multipliers measured during the leveraging up part of the cycle, that it is less than 1.
A large leveraging/deleveraging cycle is likely to be followed by a persistent shortfall in aggregate demand that can’t be cured using ordinary monetary policy; what I consider depression economics.
Now, the same thing that makes deleveraging so hard to handle also makes the fiscal multiplier larger than it is in normal times. Normally, expansionary fiscal policy is offset by monetary tightening, contractionary policy by monetary loosening. Hence the lowish multiplier estimates based on recent history. But if deleveraging has pushed you into a liquidity trap, there are no offsets.
So how big would you expect the multiplier to be under these conditions? Bigger than one.
8. Sponging boomers - That's the headline in the Economist. Just so you know I'm not the only one saying things like this.
ANOTHER economic mess looms on the horizon—one with a great wrinkled visage. The struggle to digest the swollen generation of ageing baby-boomers threatens to strangle economic growth. As the nature and scale of the problem become clear, a showdown between the generations may be inevitable.
These boomers have lived a charmed life, easily topping previous generations in income earned at every age. The sheer heft of the generation created a demographic dividend: a rise in labour supply, reinforced by a surge in the number of working women. Social change favoured it too. Households became smaller, populated with more earners and fewer children. And boomers enjoyed the distinction of being among the best-educated of American generations at a time when the return on education was soaring.
Yet these gains were one-offs. Retirements will reverse the earlier labour-force surge, and younger generations cannot benefit from more women working. There is room to raise educational levels, but it is harder and less lucrative to improve the lot of disadvantaged students than to establish a university degree as the norm for good ones, as was the case after the war. In short, boomer income growth relied on a number of one-off gains.
It's an interesting read, in-so-much as it's set up as a debate between a father and son. It illuminates the issues well.
He (the son) concludes thus:
I am 34 years old. I have some pretty successful friends. How have we sacrificed to balance the budget, to slow climate change, to deliver better opportunity for our children? We haven’t. I own an SUV, and I don’t compost my trash. We are barreling, generationally, toward higher and higher levels of carbon emissions; a demographer from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research estimated last year that an individual’s emissions rise some 50 percent from the time he is in his 30s until the time he retires. Worst of all, we don’t seem to care about changing things: Only about a third of registered 25-to-44-year-olds voted in the 2010 election, compared with half of registered baby boomers.
If my father is a leech on the future, then I am becoming one, too.
“Your generation should be thinking about how you’ll step up to the plate,” my dad says, brown eyes boring into mine. “And you also need to step up to the plate, learning from us about the politics. Just say no to the kind of politics that get in the way of what you perceive are the solution.”
10. Totally Jon Stewart on Mitt Romney's fiscal and mathematical wizardry.
60 Comments
Oh dear , Bernard ...... not only are you showing that you havn't learnt from the displeasure here & at the NZ Herald to your incessant inter-generational financial warfare debate ...... but you've also admitted now , that as a self-confessed financial journalist you knew nothing of Britain's economic quagmire between the two world wars ......
...... one must learn from history , dear boy , it may not repeat exactly , but it sure as heck-fire rhymes....
I find it an interesting concept that a financial journalist appears to not recognise the historical influence of Politics and Political Science as the drivers of the Economy and Financial sector.
If you want to know where the problems lay Bernard - you will have to start looking under the right tree. Fascism, Socialism, Crony Capitalism, Communism, Regulation, Compliance, philosophy, pyschology, history etc are excellent places to start looking. And one day hopefully you will understand the real problems.
All these are always there in a greater or lesser degree. What you miss is nature abhors a vacuum. So remove or decrease one or more of these and one of the others or a new one fills the space. Scum always rises to the surface, all the libertarian viewpoint ensures its not constrained to do so, not a choice of 99.999% of the population for that reason.
regards
Steven - Given your statement "If scum can always rise to the surface, all the libertarian viewpoint ensures its not constrained to do so, not a choice of 99.999% of the population for that reason".
Do you think the problems NZ and the world are experiencing are the result of a libertarian viewpoint????
Yes and no.........Yes, for the last 30 years we have headed down the road of less regulation and freer markets. The US in particular has canceled laws that were put in place in the 1930s to stop what happened then happening again and idnt even bother enforcing the laws that were left....so its happened again. Under Greenspan the libertarian/objectivist "do nothing let the market sort it out" is shown to be a disaster....its caused what will become the second Great if not Greatest Depression.
Given lack of [fossil] energy from now on I cant ever see us ever having a greater and more complex society and economics system than in 2007...so this will I think be the biggest debt un-winding.
The only way you could say "no" is if you see the world in black and white, ie fully libertarian (black) or not, ie ignore ever darkening shades of grey causing ever worse problems.
regards
Steven - Just because Greenspan says he aligns with Libertarianism doesn't mean he is one. In fact if you look at what has been implemented it is not Libertarianism in the purest form at all, it is all a smoke screen. Greenspans actions contradict libertarian philosphophy. It would be my view that Greenspan advocated Crony Capitalism or Crony Libertarianism. Libertarianism is about responsibility, it is not about repititve insanity and entertaining bizarre concepts that provision some people with opportunity over others. Libertarianism provides equal opportunity for all individuals. There is sacrifice however as one must take some form of action and the personal responsibility for that action whether it is a positive or negative.
True Libertarians believe that you should be free to do as you choose with your own life and property as long as you don't harm the person or property of others. Did Greenspan achieved this?
To state there is less regulation and freer markets is not acknowledging the new regulation and controls that have been implemented both internally and externally. The sand always shifts with the tides.
"True Libertarians believe that you should be free to do as you choose with your own life and property as long as you don't harm the person or property of others"
But since we live in a finite system this can never be the case - hence libertarianism actually turns out to be a delusional justification of self serving venality, a state of pseudo intellectual cognitive dissonance
Neven911 - Tell me just where in the World a true Libertarian Society has ever existed?
Now provide me with the facts on the outcome of that Libertarian Society?
How does this Libertarian Society compare with other society models?
Many people practice Finite thinking !
Many Finite thinkers are also delusional.....
Self-serving - applies to those who are getting a benefit off someone elses input.
Venality - hardly a principle of Libertarians and what I wrote above.
Self-Serving Venality - Crony Capitalism, Socialism, Communism etc come to mind.
Pseudo-intellectual - the general term to abuse someone when one dislikes or disagrees and/or acting pretentiously to win an argument or impress rather than trying to modestly find the truth.......
Cognitive Dissonance - Hmmm.....Conflict......Belief.......Behaviour........
Anti-Libertarians frequently confuse libertarianism with anarchy , and cite Somalia as an example of a libertarian society ...
.... Mark " Tribeless " Hubbard could clear this issue for us .......
I don't believe that libertarians believe " anything goes " .... we have to abide by some codes of behaviour .... " do not murder " springs to mind , " do not steal " is probably another ... " do not become a central banker " ...
No I dont think they do. I like anarchy as a system, at least its its honest, you get absolutely nothing and it costs you nothing. Unlike libertarianism that will used the courts and military that you pay for to enforce rules against you....
When you quote somalia then maybe you should consider why say from nothing libertarianism didnt rise from the ashes as the best system. All possibilities are equal at that time...if its the fitest it should, it never does.
"do not steal" yet taking from the eco-systems without returning something of equal value is stealing....if only from our children and granchidren.
regards
Don't really understand what is your objection to the enforcement of only the single rule that you may not harm another's person or property. You keep saying that libertarians want to impose the views of 0.000001% of the population on everybody else.
Can you give some examples of what it is that would be "imposed" - things you would be forced to do when you don't want to, or things that you would be prevented from doing when you do want to, in a libertarian system?
Is your objection that you want to be allowed to harm others' persons or property - and therefore, presumably, don't mind if I harm yours - or that you want to be prevented from doing things which don't harm others' persons or property? What sort of things?
This rule is obviously too simplistic to base a code of laws on. What appears to happen, to me, is that what ever cause the libertarian is supporting they apply this rule selectively to in order to make their case.
Isn't it funny that every time the who owns that property question comes up, its a Western European property ownership framework? If Libertarians really believed in a neutral property framework it wouldn't just happen to be the one based on a whole bunch of prior conquests, slaughters and land grabs.
And talk about assuming the worst, Stephen points out some property ownership laws and use do harm other people, and you as already accusing him of assault, homocide and theft. I assume thats a tactic to avoid the question, because its a really badly handled question by libertarian principals, which to me appear to assume that no-harm can come if everybody follows libertarian principals. Since harm does come, maybe you should try to answer what is the moral course in these cases.
So let me get this right, your proposition is that Libertarinism cannot be eveluated because it has never existed? I will no longer call you pseudo-intellectual sorry, I think Steven was closer to the mark, I think you should move to a small villiage in India, probably as close to a Libertarian Utopia as you'll find in the corporeal world
Well in its true form he has the right to call himself a libertarian as much as anyone else, I mean who owns the term and defination? cant have that now can we....someone else owning it....
Oh wait first come first served maybe?
Greenspan, well like a said, shades of grey....the Libertarian view point is you are either 100% libertarian or not 100%....so half way to being a libertarian simply doesnt count, to me thats nonsense and not taking responsibilty.
regards
Steven - Maybe the Law of Action-Reaction will assist you.
Anyone can place any type of label on themselves - the shades of grey evolve because of the inconsistencies and condradictions between the label they use and the actions they take.
The old adage - actions speak louder than words is very true and allows one to cut through all the BS.
Boomers were only doing what was economically "rational", told that the optimal outcome for society was everyone acting in their own self interest - a very seductive message.
I do however find it ironic that the Woodstock generation became the most rapacious consumers in history. Human nature I guess. Show me the money and the most noble of ideals are negotiable.
So Kissinger "knows" Xi Jingping just by talking to him (usually in a formal setting, in frot of a few hundred others)...Does anybody really know what a politician really is ???
I suppose Kissinger the Uber Politico should...
However, in China Xi Jingping is know to be a clean politician. (The NYT tried to do a hatchet job about his "possible tainted family" but could not fine anything to pin on him, finally have to declare him "clean"). The Bo Xilai scandal gives Xi a good opportunity to clean house on Chinese Corruption, as public discontent is extremely high and disgust with high level corruption is strong.
Let's hope that he is now strong enough to take on his fellow "princeling" and "uncles" in the CCP and clean house...not for the sake of China but for the sake of the CCP continued rule of China......if that is not enough a reason, I don't know what is ...
As regard Paul Krugman, the problem with the developed economies is not just deleveraging per se by both private and public sectors, but the excessive debt level of BOTH.
Other than a huge level of debt forgiveness on both sides or at least on one side of the coin, the problem cannot be solved...ala Greece (public debt forgiveness) or private debt reduction (ala mortgage reduction etc in US)
The next alternative will be high inflation (so far unsuccessful) to wipe the debt burden.
Actually there's another option for lowering debt levels: liquidation. This accomplishes the goal of debt forgiveness but by a much fairer method and sees ownership of assets transfer from most indebted to least indebted. It doesn't require printing money or bailing out losers; in fact, it doesn't require any government intervention at all as it is a natural market process. Perhaps this is why governments loathe this option, as it prevents them from meddling in the name of "doing something".
or maybe it stops the sharks feeding frenzy on those who listened to ppl preaching "free markets" etc....
or those who just wanted their first home to raise kids in but have paid x2 fair value to the the specualtors and gamblers who have taken adavantage....the ones who have little debt but will see those mentioned bankrupt, just to make a coin.
or maybe its stops bank closing and us not being able to buy food..
or maybe it stops a 20 to 30 year depression and huge un-employment...
all those nasty wee things...
maybe thats the difference between those that have morals and want to live in a society and those who are amoral and just want to sponge off it.
regards
#8. "Sponging boomers - That's the headline in the Economist. Just so you know I'm not the only one saying things like this."
Nobody thought you were the only one saying that. You appear to be good at regurgitating stuff generated by others and at finding the wrong stuff to regurgitate.
Well I'd suggest there is a "point of no return" I think we have crossed that point probably a decade ago in terms of debt and mess. Really once past, piling on more is going to make no significant difference to the outcome, we are royally screwed anyway. It is possible however that muddling along and gradually de-leveraging might work....a very big MIGHT....but if the alternatiive is social breakdown eg riots and starvation then Im all for trying it...
Its like being 5 runs down on the last ball you might as well go all out for a six.
regards
I think its the in-evitable end game. There are two types of default of course private and public debt default
Private, in the short term the problem with allowing default is, if you do the banks go bankrupt and banks are the way we distribute money to buy and sell things. If you cant use eftpos to buy food at pak-n-save or pak-n-save cant buy food off the producers how do you think that will play out inside a week?
Hence the open door policy is for me a critical piece of legislation, right now not having it means the banks know full well our Govn has to step in and prop them up, its a gun to our heads....then that of course leads to Govn defaulting....
Its also a Q of scale...Iceland and Greece are not that similar...the former has a robust economy, the latter doesnt....NZ with its housing mania is way more like Greece than Iceland IMHO.
Balancing the budget smacks of austerity, thats hugely counter-productive...and shown to be so. Not sure about Iceland as an example, I would I suppose have to look at it in detail to understand the difference and why they have done so well.....
regards
Bank of England paper on Reform of the International Monetary and Financial System - looks excellent.
http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/109588372?access_key=key-uggag3xt2w9jy…
RW - interesting read, but if you ask the wrong people the wrong questions, you get the wrong answers via the wrong hypotheses.
"where the G20 Framework for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth is an important attempt to develop such a mechanism"
Can't be had. They should have read this (note the date....)
http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/opinion/34180/hard-times-here-stay?page=0%2C
Bernard, I had a thought.
Under the current system of money creation, where banks create debt for the private sector to feast on, there seems a certain inevitability that private debt will be cyclical. That is to say debts are run up in a period of spending enthusiasm and then like and over the drawn credit card the system must go into reverse as it is slowly paid back down.
On the face of it using government fiscal policy as a kind of counter weight to this kind of cyclic trend would seem quite sensible. It certainly seems attractive right now to increase government spending to strengthen the economy because we're in a phase of private debt contraction that seems impossible to stop. However, there seems to me a weakness in the argument; in that if fiscal policy is to act as a counter weight it must be applied consistently in both phases. Both when private debt is increasing and when private debt is contracting. That would imply that when consumers were out spending up large and running their debt load up that government fiscal policy must contract into surpluses that are as proportionally large as the debt load the private sector is creating. This to create a counter weight of equal proportional size when the reversal comes. If that doesn't happen what results is the current situation where the government of the day has but a limited counter weight up its sleeve for the task at hand.
Our current political environment is characterised by a large sense of entitlement within the electorate coupled with quite a lot of anger if we don't get what we decide we deserve. In the light of of that I ask you, how likely is it a government will be able to deliver such fiscal prudence in planning for a future down swing many will argue (at that time) isn't necessary. An opposition party need only throw money at voters and the whole counter weight strategy lies in tatters.
So my question becomes, is the New Zealand government fiscal cannon big enough?
Labour ran big surplusses and paid off a lot of debt in their 9 years which is why we are in a much better position than a lot of countries. I hope National would do the same if they are elected in the next boom (if there is one). Other countries didn't seem to do this though, which is why they are in so much crap.
Yes, Labour paid off government debt by transferring it to us, and encouraging us to multiply it and enjoy the heady days of a boom in house prices. They also increased government spending which is difficult to cut. Labour got the boot when house prices started going down.
National took steps "to soften the hard edges of the recession" - ie, make sure house prices didn't do what Bernard thought they would do, which was go down 30%. So National got re-elected but houses are still at silly prices.
No pain, no gain.
Those big surpluses came from robbing peter (overtaxing salary and wage earners) to pay paul (those who believe they are entitled to something for nothing & shouldn't have to earn their income). Those tax changes contributed to increased property "investment" and the use of trusts & other entities specifically to avoid the higher tax rate.
Then, to hold on to power they successfully bribed the sheeple with their own money by implementing WFF. Add interest free student loans to the mix and you have a spending trap that is almost impossible for any political party to reverse.
Not only is the welfare state expanded but the entitlement mentality of the sheeple is also increased making it harder to force them off the teat. A large number of non productive public servants feeding from the trough do not lead by example.
Yes,
The surpluses were an end result of having to over-tax to pay off the debt. Debt which if we had slightly over-taxed before hand and saved would have given us a rainy day fund to draw on a far less volitile effect.
In terms of WFF and bribing the sheepie, well Brash promised tax cuts in 2005, these would have been more top ended and well we can see how thats being spent just as Natioanl's tax cut is being spent now what a waste v WFF which is lower ended and I suspect most of it goes on essentials, in some respects less wasteful IMHO.
Yes Im sure its going to be politically hard to reverse. The top end of WFF strikes me as poorly targetted, when I read that wifes can now afford not to work because of it or are p*ssed that once kids are 16 it stops and they have to go back to work, well that strikes me as badly targetted and wasteful....thanks Labour/Cullen, useless sod.
regards
Christov: Hickey's at it again. Twice today. Even though you were dirt poor, grew up on struggle street, did the hard-scrabble thing, Hickey is labeling you a sponger (number 8) and a parasite (number 9)
By way of comparison, it would be good to know IF Bernard, when he got married and bought their first family home, all they had was a mattress on the floor, two chairs, and sheets covering the windows.
Ultimately iconoclast, the difference was that I was always, largely happy, self assured in that I knew ,early on ,education was the way out....in separating from the shitmunchers.
I do hold some strong views on assimilation as the kids I grew up around were of that generation (institutionaly speaking), and so I guess you can't help but harbour some empathy on a socialist level........as in I know what they( the assimilators) did, didn't agree with it then, still don't.
Back to Bernard....no I dare say he's always been a glass half empty sort, needs to spend more time or some time at least in the water, very invigoration and centering, tends to remind you of our perspective in the bigger scheme of things.....no, it's his little Crusade looking for a Sancho Panchez to carry the banner. You have to wonder how a syndome like that came to posit itself within him..? economics..? not likely because if it were it would be Disney style....maybe some tightfisted old Aunt left it all to the SPCA..? huh who knows, it bores me now.....
Got out yesterday for a kayak fish, four good snapper 4lb plus, a coupla good size kahwai..then had a nice old paddle from Bean Rock to Rangitoto n back to Orakei just to finnish off .....
there's a good tired , and then there's a bad tired,,,,I think Bernie needs some good tired.
BTW...iconclast no , no sheets on windows, bird sheets maybe , but we had those bloody awful venetians, the wide ones......needing a pulley n rope.
Careful with that historical clip on there ,or you'll have me livin at coal mine lickin road clean wit tongue..............
bloody luxury....!
.. a demographer from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research estimated last year that an individual’s emissions rise some 50 percent from the time he is in his 30s until the time he retires.
This is as simplistic as saying as a baby grows it emites more carbon. Very lazy piece of thinking.
Bernard, I suggest you and Mr Wolf learn your history before writing about it. The lesson of the Britain's 1920s experience is NOT "government austerity doesn't work when the private sector is heavily indebted and your currency is too high."
Here's the actual lesson: after going off the gold standard so you can pay for the largest (then) war in history by printing and borrowing truckloads of money, DO NOT attempt to go back on the gold standard at the same rate. You will only cause monetary deflation and a crash.
This decision, made then-chancellor Winston Churchill on "patriotic" grounds rather than anyting to do with economics--"the pound will look the dollar in the face" he insisted, despite the reality that it couldn't--was one of his worst decisions out of a whole career of bad decisions.
Because the attempt didn't just put Britain in an economic straitjacket for nearly a deade, arguably the attempt made by the Bank of England and The Fed to back Churchill's bad decision by hugely expanding American credit led to the boom and the inexorable crash.
#4 Iran is now finding out economic sanctions are the first stage of war, a prelude to physical combat. Their intent is too create chaos and ferment dissent amongst the population hoping that this will result in the replacement of a government the US doesn't like anymore. Britain and the US have already had success in Iran in the 1950's with this strategy replacing a democratic government with the Shah. They have also tried it with mixed success in parts of Central and South America. Apply economic presure, forment dissent and support a coup (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Gautemala, Honduras). If all else fails support groups like the Contras (Nicuragua) or invade directly (Haiti, Grenada, Panama, Iraq)
This also explains why both Labour and National are too scared to deviate far from the neo liberal play book - the "markets" led by the US would attempt to crush the NZ economy. It would make the anti nuclear freeze look like a play fight. Last thing the US wil tolerate is even a small member of the west challenging the approved Washington Consensus. With all the sanctions available under the WTO and other multi lateral agreements we have bound ourselves too, change is untenable.
Couple of parallel denials up-thread.
One is that somehow a Govt was responsible for the mass greed which gripped middle NZ, re housing.
The other is that a Govt was responsible for the '29 crash. Actually, greed-gripped folk (some, like Groucho Marx, with entirely enough intelligence to know better) who may well have been trying to put a dark period behind them, went on a borrowing-and-investing spree.
When folk vote for their hip-pockets, the Govt they elect reflects their greed. Hard to imagine any other outcome, but it's wrong to blame the elected for the faults of the elector. Blame-shift it is. No more, no less.
# 's 8 & 9
Another nail in the coffin of journalist. The only thing you people are good at is self destructing.
You are supposed to be seeking a new future for journalist and try to achieve it by suicide.
Who would be stupid enough to pay for this sort of unprofessional, unsubstantiated rubbish. It is just opinion and not backed by any facts.
All journalism is subjective. Objectivity is a myth. By merely deciding what issues to write about and which to ignore; who to ask for an opinion or interview and who to ignore, the media is slanting an article in a certain direction of their or their editors choice. As long as that "slant" is backed up by a reasoned argument, it is a worthwhile contribution to the debate.
If you get the chance read Nick Davies Flat Earth News (2008), a real eye opener to the pressures journalists face these days, particularly Chapter 4: The Rules of Production.
Bernard, just for a moment substitute the words "Baby Boomers" and put the word "Journalist" in its place and you get something like this
Journalists have sat on their backsideds for the past several decades living off the fat of the land as millions of advertising dollars rolled into the print media, TV, Radio and magazines. They all lived it up during those lucrative years and now they should give some back. ...............................blah, blah,
Does that ring a bell bernard?
But really what does it achieve shooting each other down. We are all in the same boat whether we like it or not.
Finally, i have no objection to you having a go at BB's so long as you give us some sound reasons as to why. Then we can say, either, Bernard makes a good point, or i disagree and this is why. But after all you are in the drivers seat and you stear the vehicle in the direction YOU choose.
So many disparaging comments made to, and about, BH.... I look forward to reading my top 10 each day and thank BH for searching the internet, whilst I do my mundane work that allows me to live well, and then posts his top 10 for me to preuse.
Long may this site continue.
And Christov, from the other day on Amanda's comments, I like my towelling hats, even though they're impossible to buy now and I have to have them made.
oops, a little bit of proofreading would have helped...
So many disparaging comments made to, and about, BH.... I look forward to reading my top 10 each day and thank BH for searching the internet, whilst I do my mundane work that allows me to live well, and then for him posting his top 10 for me to peruse.
BH, a really good thread over at Doctor Housing Bubble
Sort of a cross between Reggie Middleton, Hugh the Pav, and PDK.
Go on, ye jest gotta read the whole thang....
We welcome your comments below. If you are not already registered, please register to comment.
Remember we welcome robust, respectful and insightful debate. We don't welcome abusive or defamatory comments and will de-register those repeatedly making such comments. Our current comment policy is here.