The Temple of Juno Moneta is where we get the word ‘money’ from, because it was Rome’s Mint. Appropriately, “Moneta” comes from the Latin “monere” – to warn.

Here is your warning about our money, and how our parliament has become a den of thieves. Because the wealth addicts are in charge of politics, fiscasl policy, and media. Thats why NZ has stagnated while blowing asset bubbles for the last forty years. Because “neoliberalism” aka rogernomics, ruthenasia and Nact first, is a money racket that feeds the few while exploiting us all. Thanks Treasury!

Jim Bolger, RIP, called it out in 2017. “(neoliberalism has) failed to deliver economic growth, and what growth there has been has gone to the top” he told Guyon Espiner.

The top in this case is the FIRE sector. Finance, insurance, and real estate. The result is our rising, and economically unproductive debt, our rising costs of living and of business, the export of billions of dollars every year, and an infrastructure deficit.

The good news is; three key reforms can break the trap:

1. Create a National Development Bank – owned by the public, lending at cost for development. Eg. housing, energy, transport, and food security.
2. Coordinate Treasury and RBNZ – allow direct issuance of sovereign credit for infrastructure, with profits remitted to the Crown.
3. Keep transparency and fiscal rules, but redefine “prudence” as *productive investment* that *strengthens the nation*, *not* obedience to foreign creditors.

    

This is vital, because Treasury tells us that

“New Zealand’s current policies are not sustainable for the long term. Our modelling projects what would happen if spending and revenue policies were left unchanged until 2065. With unchanged policy, by 2065 government spending per person would nearly double – from $18,300 today to $35,900 (inflation adjusted). Government revenue would rise much more slowly. These trends would result in government debt rising to around 200% of gross domestic product (GDP).”

What they don’t tell us is that our unsustainable policies are their fault. What they don’t tell us is how we can fix it. Instead, they propose we punch down more on most kiwis with 32% GST and increasing PAYE tax by 10%. Those solutions serve their FIRE class, but not the national interest.

We should break this bankster racket.

 

The Illusion of Prudence

For nearly forty years, New Zealanders have been told that the “fiscal responsibility” of rogernomics and ruthenasia keeps us safe; and that we need more of it.

But the truth is the opposite. It’s not responsible, and it’s making us poor. More of it will simply leave our nation as wrecked as Maori were wrecked by colonisation. Because this is financial colonisation; and it’s not responsible. It’s ambitious, callous, criminal. Treasuries “Economic Management” has undone us.

Here’s the guts of the racket. Under the Public Finance Act 1989 and the Fiscal Responsibility Act 1994 (1994), our government is banned from directly funding investment through sovereign credit creation with our own dollars.

Instead, our nation must borrow our own dollars from privately owned commercial banks – at compounding interest. Where do those banks get our dollars from to lend us? They are licensed by us to create credit / those dollars in the first place.

That’s not prudence. That’s servitude. NACT tell us “Govt spending is like a household budget”, but its bollocks. NZ has the RBNZ – our own infinite credit creating bank (see page 3)

No household has its own bank. O, wait, I forgot. There are lots of dynastic banking families that have, or had, their own banks. Warburgs, Barings, Rockefellers, Medici, Mellon, Wallenberg, Rothschild, Fuggers, etc. and those ‘household banks’ lend to nations, and appear to fund local government in nz, they also influence national economies, politics. We know donor politics is a thing, and who has more money than banks?

So it’s useful to consider a debt free dollar of sovereign credit, issued by the state, as a national asset. It can be used to mobilise our people and our resources for production without compounding debt. If invested productively, it is also non-inflationary.

Because it provides a return on investment. Think housing, education, industry, manufacturing, energy generation etc. The strategic things a nation needs to develop its economy and human capital.

Yet instead of using that sovereign power to cheaply develop what Adam Smith called “the wealth of nations”, we instead irresponsibly borrow from “financial markets” by selling bonds (or assets) to private banks and investors, many of them offshore.

This is not responsible finance.

It is a racket. It’s a form of financial colonialism that pays rent to private money-creators while starving the nation of public investment.

When we are then ‘forced’ to privatise the commanding heights of our economy (eg. telecoms, energy, mineral resources etc) to pay our debts; the new owners of those monopolies then charge us monopoly rents. Raising the cost of living and raising the cost of business. While sucking out monopoly profits and failing to reinvest in the capacity the nation needs. It’s really very irresponsible. Don’t you think?

Yet today its still the failed policy of government, parroted by our ministers of finance, education, housing and health.

The Red line below shows our external debt. The Green line shows our use of public credit /sovereign credit, and the low cost development of NZ. The Green Dash line shows where public credit issue should be if we had maintained sovereign investment. The Brown bar at bottom shows the resource rent extraction from our economy.

Graph Data taken from Official History of NZ War Economy, 1965, ‘Muldoon, R. ‘The New Zealand Economy, A Personal View’ pp.165-87, 1985, and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

The Bankster Trap

When the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) later buys back those government bonds – as it did during the COVID crisis – it simply creates new money (“reserves”) out of nothing and pays the banks full value for the bonds.

Those reserves, which the RBNZ itself created, then earn interest at the Official Cash Rate (OCR) – currently around 5.5%.

That means taxpayers are literally paying rent on money the state created.

“Reserves are remunerated at the OCR, creating a cost for the Bank when the OCR rises.”

RBNZ: Monetary Policy Tools and the Balance Sheet (2021)

In substance, the state is paying tribute to private money creation — a system designed not to serve the nation, but to guarantee risk-free returns to financial intermediaries.

The ‘responsible’ result? A debt machine that extracts wealth

The so-called “prudence” of Rogernomics and “Ruthanasia” has turned New Zealand into a rentier colony of its own banking system. Its not prudent. Its not virtuous.

Its a racket. We have been betrayed.

The parasites have taken over the host. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

That’s why things don’t feel great. That’s why ‘economics’ is hard to understand. Because in a very important way, it’s garbage. We live in an abusive relationship with our political, economic, and media class. They’ve gaslit us from a sovereign economy into pure banksterism. That banksterism is what’s held Nz back for forty years, as our wealth has flowed up, and out, of New Zealand.

We are bleeding national wealth through interest, dividends, and offshore profit repatriation – every year, without fail.

https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/statistics/key-graphs/key-graph-monetary-policy

Treasury Debt Management 2024

RBNZ C5 Credit Aggregates

https://www.stats.govt.nz/topics/balance-of-payments/

NZ’s Total annual leakage = $25 / 40 billion, or around 8–12% of GDP.

That’s equivalent to every household in New Zealand losing $15,000–$20,000 per year in potential disposable income or public benefit. This is why V.C. Vickers, director and heir of Vickers munitions; and nine years a director of the Bank of England, felt banking should be run as a utility rather than as a for profit enterprise.

That’s the cost of obeying ‘the markets’, aka “pimping out nz to your donors”.

Think Fay, Richwhite, Gibbs, John Key of Merrill Lynch/ANZ; or have a look at who owns NZME and thus tells us what to think. Go figure, it’s owned by some of the biggest US banks and mining corporations. Follow the money. It usually leads to more money, and dishonesty.

Here is the racket, which is an irresponsible mechanism for our wasteful debt bondage.

1. Treasury issues bonds it creates to private markets.
2. Banks create credit to buy them, from new money conjured on their balance sheets against the ‘collateral’ of the bonds. Banks earn interest on bonds, and get paid back in full on their maturity.
3. Or, as in COVID, the RBNZ buys those same bonds back with Reserves (credit) it creates from nothing.
4. Banks then earn (higher) OCR interest on those Reserves.
5. Taxpayers cover the difference between low-coupon bonds and high Reserve rates.

    

It looks clean on a spreadsheet.

But in reality, it’s a tribute system – a transfer of wealth from citizens to financiers.

Even the Parliamentary Library confirms that the RBNZ bought bonds using “settlement cash balances it created,” while the Crown indemnified any losses.

Banks made billions, risk free. Without improving our productivity. Not bad – for them.

But it could have paid for our ferries, right? Or a hospital? Or a raise for healthcare workers? (Surely not as big as the 10% MPs got, …but why not?)

Our Political illusion is Orwellian.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act doesn’t restrain borrowing; it restrains public service.

It demands that governments “reassure creditors,” making obedience look like discipline.

As the NZ Institute of Economic Research observed in 2018, it is a “weak, non-binding policy that nonetheless altered political norms.”

Translation: politicians fear the bond market more than they trust their own people.

Yet the bond market lusts after our sovereign debt precisely because it is risk-free.

A sovereign currency issuer cannot go bankrupt in its own currency.

So why pretend otherwise? Who benefits? Not our nation. Quite the opposite.

The Alternative: Sovereign Credit and National Development

Every great period of New Zealand nation-building – the Vogel railways, hydro dams, and post-war housing programme – was financed through public credit, not private debt.

We can do this again, using the tools we already control.

Three key reforms can break the trap:

1. Create a National Development Bank – publicly owned, lending at cost for housing, energy, rail, and food security.
2. Coordinate Treasury and the RBNZ – permit direct issuance of sovereign credit for infrastructure, with profits remitted to the Crown.
3. Redefine “prudence” – as productive investment that strengthens the nation, not obedience to foreign creditors. Honestly, it’s mad I have to write this.

This is how Japan rebuilt after 1945, how Norway built its sovereign wealth fund, and how Singapore became debt-light but capital-rich.

The Economic Reality of Reform is this.

Reclaiming even half of today’s $25–40 billion leakage would:

• Fund 100,000 affordable homes or complete a national electrified rail system every decade.
• Cut external deficits by 3–5% of GDP.
• Keep profits circulating locally, boosting wages, innovation, and resilience.
• Stabilise the NZ dollar by reducing offshore debt dependency.
• Lower household interest burdens through low-cost, publicly financed mortgages.

   

This is not inflationary if managed transparently and tied to real productive capacity. As Professor Richard Werner explains in Princes of the Yen (2003)

“It is is not money creation that causes inflation, but the misuse of it”

 

The Moral Principle is this.

Sovereign credit should build public wealth – not provide private rents. The task of our elected representatives should be to develop our economic productivity and human capital so that our nation can thrive. Not to pimp us out to cartels so they can make money in their sleep from unbalancing and undermining our economy.

We can keep the good features of our current framework – honesty, transparency, accountability – while redirecting them toward national prosperity rather than financial servitude.

This means:

• Reforming the Public Finance Act.
• Replacing the Fiscal Responsibility Act with a National Investment Charter.
• Establishing a Development Bank and a direct RBNZ–Treasury credit channel.

Because New Zealanders should never have to beg for the money we already create.The National Choice is this. We can afford anything we can build. We do not need to borrow externally to fund our economic development.

Sovereign credit should build public wealth – not provide private rents. We can keep every good feature of our current framework; honesty, transparency, prudence; but redirect it to serve the nation’s prosperity, not the bond market’s bank accounts.

Our call to action is

Reform the Public Finance Act.

Replace the Fiscal Responsibility Act with a National Investment Charter.

Establish a Development Bank and direct RBNZ–Treasury credit channel.

Because New Zealanders should never have to beg for the money we already create; and think what we could do with our sovereignty.

New Zealand can afford anything it can build.

What we cannot afford is another generation of debt servitude disguised as discipline.

It’s time to end the fiscal illusion – to stop paying rent for our own money – and to start rebuilding the productive, sovereign, and prosperous nation we once were.

The IMF says that neoliberalism was about two things “The first is increased competition, achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets, including financial markets, to foreign competition. The second is a smaller role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt.”

Creating a bankster cartel for government finances that drives debt and privatisation meets neither of those goals. The IMF goes on to note that “Policymakers, and institutions like the IMF that advise them, must be guided not by faith, but by evidence of what has worked.”

Lets improve things New Zealand. It’s time to follow the evidence, our guts, and the lies.

 

Tadhg is a Historian and Teacher. Support activism by purchasing your Hemp Oils and balms from Www.tigerdrops.co.nz

Join us at www.thehempfoundation.org.nz

 

Sources / Further Reading

RBNZ Money creation in New Zealand 2023 (RBNZ Infinite money/credit, page 3)

Reserve Bank of New Zealand – Monetary Policy Tools and the Balance Sheet (2021) Monetary Policy Tools and the RBNZ Balance Sheet – Reserve Bank of New Zealand – Te Pūtea Matua

Reserve Bank of New Zealand (exec summary points 6, 8,9)

In retrospect: Monetary policy in New Zealand 2017 to 2022

Neoliberalism oversold?IMF Finance and Development June 2016Neoliberalism: Oversold? https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/pdf/ostry.pdf

Reserve Bank of New Zealand — Large-Scale Asset Purchase Programme

Parliamentary Library Research Brief: LSAP

Treasury — Financial Statements of the Government 2024

NZIER Discussion Paper 2018

Stats NZ Balance of Payments — Primary Income Outflows

Treasury https://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/ltfp/he-tirohanga-mokopuna-2025#executive-summary

RBNZ Credit Aggregates and Dashboard

IMF Fiscal Rules Database 2025

Werner, Princes of the Yen (2003)

Werner, R. A Lost Century in Economics

Hudson, Michael – Killing the Host (2015)

Hudson, Michael – The Destiny of Civilisation (2022)

V.C. Vickers – Economic Tribulation (1941) VCVickers.Economic-Tribulation.pdf

 

 

 

 

 

Tadhg Stopford is a historian and teacher.

Support change by purchasing your CBD hemp CBG at www.tigerdrops.co.nz