We just got rid of something that was offensive .. for most of past 6 years ;)
and it just wasn't all a byproduct of rancid burnt stale sausage rolls :)
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Interesting article in the herald on Saturday, Interview with Grant Robertson.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politi...F3WDVA7SM2ONE/
They discuss using things other than the OCR to control inflation such as Don Brashes petrol tax increases or decreases, or adjusting Kiwisaver contributions. I am starting to feel a bit like Seymour in that the govt should get out of the way and let the chips fall where they may.
This was a quote regarding the covid response.
With the Bank doing everything it could to keep interest rates low, asset values, particularly house prices, shot up. REINZ’s measure of New Zealand’s median house price was $612,000 in January 2020. It climbed to $925,000 by November 2021, before finally falling.
Wow a 51% increase in just under two years. The people arguing that land supply constraint is the main issue re house prices might want to re read the figures and have a look at what changed over those two years.
Early in 2020, before Covid arrived, Treasury and the Reserve Bank warned Robertson that should these tools ever be used, there would be uncomfortable distributional side effects, like inflating the price of assets, making the owners of those assets very wealthy, at the expense of non-owners.
So they knew what would happen but went ahead and did it anyway. Grant Robertson has done more to reduce social mobility and increase the wealth gap than any other finance minister in recent history. What a piece of s*it. Good riddance. Now we have Chippy making his "no capital gains tax on my watch" call.
What do labour stand for, why do the unions still support them? They offer nothing for the working man wanting to get ahead, in fact Grant Robertson has managed to raise significant barriers to this ideal. More so than anyone else.
I guess Labour and Greens can fight over the woke warriors vote and we can spend all our time being offended at homophobic slurs.
For a date farmer he got off pretty lightly over the years on the homophobic slur front. Maybe that is why he has not been pilloried by the left for his outrageous actions against the poor people of NZ, because of his homosexuality.
Not since Sir Robert Muldoon have we endured a finance minister whose decisions would leave such a toxic legacy; yet the failings are obscured by his charm and political acumen.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/350...ons-ascendancy
Maybe he wasn’t pilloried because the left wanted to prioritise their Treaty partnership and social policies. For that, they needed to remain in office. Introducing higher deposit to house values, a general capital gains tax and other asset taxes would have ruled that out. Rising house prices is a tax free elixir to those that actually turn out to vote.
It would be interesting looking at the election voting statistics, do the poor and working class get out and vote? If not why would you tailor policies that benefit them, you wouldn't get in power anyway. Maybe the Logen Ninefingers of the world are right, and the poor are where they are because they are lazy and stupid. I am definitely a bit of both. A bit, a lot, like Grant Robertson I don't like to judge myself too harshly.
Hang on, it wasn't Robertson that reduced interest rates to near zero it was Adrian Orr.
I remember at the time all the big real estate agencies and economists saying it doesn't get worse than this for real estate, only to have to do an almighty back flip three months later.
Not saying Robertson isn't to blame for other things but he wasn't in charge of interest rate decisions.
Don't get me started on the incompetence of Adrian Orr. He was concerned about a 10% downward correction to the housing market prior to the lock downs and also wanted to create a "wealth effect". Mission accomplished a 51% increase in house prices in less than two years during the most extreme response to a bad cold we have ever seen.
The article I quoted above describes how complicit Grant was in the RBNZs actions. To quote.
Robertson said the conversation involved what the tools would be, giving the tools to the bank, and then asking, “how are you then, Adrian Orr and your team going to use those tools?”
One of those tools, printing more than $50 billion of digital money and buying injecting it into the economy by buying Government debt from banks and financial institutions. The tool worked. The economy bounced back and employment stayed low. But it had massive consequences, particularly in the housing market.
Looking back, does he think he made the right call when the Reserve Bank asked Robertson for the Crown to indemnify the purchase of up to $30 billion worth of bonds in March 2020?
Robertson said the conversations around the indemnity were “iterative”.
Iterative? I had to look it up but it means he just looked at the numbers not the consequences of his actions.
To keep up appearances the money printing to buy govt bonds had to go through the banks (banks no doubt clipping the ticket at the taxpayers expense) and with Funding For Lending the banks made record profits.
So a massive overreaction to a bad cold resulted in exacerbating the wealth divide and asset owners making out like bandits as well as record bank profits and a now heavily indebted NZ taxpayer via our govt debt rising from (to quote from Ithaka article) just over $80b in 2017 to over $130b; or 42% of GDP to nearly 70%.
The young and the poor saw any dreams of homeownership crushed and they are now paying the regressive inflation tax.
So who was Grant Robertson working for? or was he just in over his head and money printing and borrowing was his solution to everything and what has the nation got to show for all his excesses?