Adrian Orr is preparing NZ for the next great economic depression – will Australian Capitalism, neoliberal NZ quislings & Labour’s intellectual cowardice allow him?

When he’s not demanding Jacinda spends money, Adrian Orr is battling the dirty filthy Australian Banks by making them lift their capital requirements  from 10.5% to 18%.

This blunt refusal to acquiesce to free market mantra has quickly earned Orr real enemies.

Australia’s corrupt banking oligarchy have abused and molested NZ economically with their rapacious monopoly rentals unhindered by any real regulation and their backlash against these new requirements to protect NZers from the next great depression will be brutal and calculating.

By pushing up costs to the already debt drowned NZ public (especially farms), the banks will hope to generate political pressure to push Orr back from these new requirements. It will be a traumatic experience for those the banks chose to be sacrificial pawns in their chess game, but destroying individual lives is of no consequence to the notorious greed of the Australian Banking Oligarchy.

Orr will also face the wrath of the NZ neoliberal quislings like Matthew Hooton, Paul Goldsmith, the right wing think tank NZ Initiative and a plethora of other scabs and leeches who peddle free market mythology for a living. They will denounce Orr and blame him for any rise in the cost of borrowing…

National’s Finance Spokesperson, Paul Goldsmith, is predicting a substantial hit to the country’s growth prospects:

“The two primary effects of today’s decision will be higher borrowing costs than would otherwise have been the case and businesses and farmers will find it harder to access the funds they need to grow.”

The NZ Initiative (the successor organisation to the dark knights of Business Roundtable) echoes Goldsmith’s fear:

“The RBNZ’s decision to increase the capital banks are required to hold will have adverse effects for borrowers and the wider economy. The effects are likely to be felt most acutely by high loan-to-value borrowers, the rural sector and small-to-medium-sized enterprises.”

…but maybe Orr’s most dangerous opponent when attempting to chart a course for economic sovereignty will be Labour’s own intellectual cowardice?

Since the far right economic reforms launched by Lange’s Labour, the post-rogernomics Labour Party have cowered from waking the sleeping dogs of that ideological haemorrhage and have silently accepted the Free Market hegemony. That’s why NZ Labour looks so right wing in comparison to Corbyn’s Labour or Sander’s Democrats, in Britain and America the Left are politically engaged at countering neoliberalism, in NZ, our largest Left wing Party is too frightened to even contemplate the debate.

What might save Labour from Grant Robertson’s intellectual caution is the type of event Orr is desperately attempting to insulate NZs economy from.

This Government was forged under the belief by Winston that a great economic unravelling was under way in 2017. Trump’s obscene corporate tax cut has allowed that moment of reckoning to gasp out another couple of years but with large financial forecasters predicting a 1 in 4 chance of economic recession in 2020, Orr’s foresight could be all that stands between a correction and a tragedy.