A prediction. On the basis of the sluggish Auckland rental market, the end of the Auckland property bubble could be sooner rather than later. (I’m picking October 2017, a month or two after the 2017 general election.) The ‘correction’ will come when enough people who have bought in Auckland for capital gain realise that they will have to sell soon, or risk the consequences.
Shelter is a human right, not a privilege. Private ownership of land is a privilege, not a human right. The debate is framed about getting ‘first-home buyers’ on the ‘property ladder’. Framing this as a right makes no more sense than having a debate about how to get people onto the ‘sharemarket ladder’.
The Brexit referendum means many things, only one of which is a requirement for Grand Bretagne (Big Britain; as distinct from Bretagne, Brittany) to leave the European Union. Most important, the outcome was the political equivalent of a magnitude five earthquake. It may have forestalled the magnitude eight earthquake that was otherwise coming to a politically comatose Europe.
Last week’s memorandum of understanding between the Labour and Green Parties will prove to be a wise move if it helps the combined Labour-Green vote to reach 48% or more. It seems a hard ask though, even in the event that the economy tanks next year.
The New Zealand government is trying to exploit Auckland’s housing crisis rather than to solve it or to ease it. Its agenda appears to be threefold: to unseat a non-compliant Council, to force the sale of productive assets owned by the people of Auckland, and to reward those who seek to financially profit by holding rural land.
Bill English has said that his fiscal policy priority is to reduce gross public debt to 20 percent of GDP. Is public debt really our number one economic problem?
If we encourage others to legally cheat on their own people, and encourage our people to help them cheat on their people, then the global market system fails
Our politicians will not address the empty-house syndrome. We can easily imagine why. Our mainstream media will not do so either; same reason. There are some issues that we, the middle 50%, have to raise – and keep raising – through other channels.
I didn’t once hear the words ‘Keynes’ or ‘Keynesian’ at the Future of Work conference. The issues we face today were all apparent and widely discussed in the late 1920s. The debate in 1928 was equally off the mark. Then, as now, we responded to a crisis of inequality and environment by, as individuals, trying to be more ‘competitive’ and arguing about immigration.
The guardians of monetarism are flummoxed. With almost no evidence, but supreme faith, they believe that there is a direct and (more or less) proportionate relationship between the stock of money and the level of prices.