NZ Banks make an obscene $6billion profit during Covid! Why the Left can’t respond
Record profit: NZ banks made over $6 billion in 2021, KPMG report
Despite battling the second year of a global pandemic banks operating in New Zealand collectively made more than $6 billion in 2021, according to a report by KPMG.
Its Financial Institutions Performance Survey of banks found net profits rose nearly 48 per cent last year to hit $6.13b – the first time it had gone over the $6b mark since KPMG began monitoring the sector.
Once upon a time when the Left were more focused on class and economics, we would have had a plethora of responses to this madness.
The economic stress TDB has been pointing out for sometime will hurt everyone except the very rich…
Leading economist says inflation will worsen, could see Kiwis pay ‘bit more’ towards their mortgage
A leading economist has a grim outlook for inflation over the rest of the year saying “it’s not going away soon” and could result in Kiwis paying more for their mortgages.
…sadly the entire movement is infected by woke identity politics with no intellectual muscle beyond micro aggression policing and cancelling people on Twitter.
The Right look for recruits, the Left look for traitors and right now, the dangerous far right are winning. The Dumb Lives Matter violence on Parliament’s Lawns proved that.
Thanks to Middle Class Marxists, the Left have spent more energy on virtue signals than hegemonic economic reform.
Look at this…
…In 2010, the 388 richest individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth
By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals
In 2018, it was 42
In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.
And now in 2021, 20 people own more than 50% of the entire planet.
This isn’t democracy, this is a feudal plutocracy on a burning Earth!
Labour have failed us over 4 years because they had no plan to scare the public service into serving the public. They see the lumpenproletariat on Parliament’s lawns as an embarrassing reminder that they haven’t been transformational and so label all protestors as Nazis.
They need 5 big Radical Centre ideas that actually do more than woke virtue signalling to challenge inequality and poverty .
1 – Financial Transaction Tax – TAX BANKS!
Society needs money for social infrastructure and to rapidly adapt to the climate crisis. It is unacceptable that citizens pay more tax. A Financial Transaction Tax set at .001 cent would capture all those speculators who trade and the banks that enable their gambling. Hit the corporates with this tax and the beauty is that it’s unavoidable because every electronic financial transaction is recorded. This would see billions available each year and start to push back on corporate power.
2 – Use Public Works Act to seize 90% of all golf courses in Auckland.
The Housing crisis needs an immediate solution, not more empty promises. Using the Public Works Act, central Government should seize 90% of golf courses in Auckland and build a mix of state houses and first time home buyer owner/occupier tiny houses using the best environmental & urban design housing. Fuck the golfers. We could solve homelessness, provide extra resources to these new communities while giving first home buyers an immediate way into the housing market. Why not turn golfing privilege into economic justice?
3 – Feed the bloody kids – all of them!
Not just some bullshit unhealthy food, I’m talking community garden, local produce, parents paid to come in and help serve up the most nutritious and healthy breakfast and lunch at every school we can provide. To actually care about our children and set standards of what is most healthy for us. Hungry children can’t learn and removing this cost from the poorest parents pockets would do more to put money back into those pockets than any welfare increase would do without getting clawed back by MSD. We would build community at schools, while providing healthy food to our kids, while putting money into the poorest parents. Make this universal.
4 – Break Supermarket Duopoly with 30% State owned competition
A new Supermarket chain with a focus on better prices for consumers and producers with better conditions for workers is the very type of market regulation New Zealander’s are screaming for.
5 – Free Public Transport
You want Aucklanders to get out of their cars? Make public transport free. Again this would help save the poor money and force change by providing and enormous incentive to get people out of their polluting cars.
This Government is failing in every indicator except keeping us safe from Covid but that’s not enough.
What is required are some big ideas with immediate pay off that enables the Government to bypass the public service and their fiefdoms.
Keeping Covid out isn’t enough. Those 200 000 kids in poverty, those 25 000 on emergency housing wait lists, the 50 000 households living in poverty and the generations locked out of home ownership deserve better.
We need to be kinder to individuals and crueller to corporations.
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Well many in the Left still bank with one of the overseas banks which is dumb!
Well many in the Left, Right and Middle still bank with one of the overseas banks which is dumb!
We need a militant workers labour party in power to nationalise the banks without compensation.
Well weren’t our Politicans stupid selling the National Bank of New Zealand, and the Bank of New Zealand for peanuts. Old Roger the Rat and David Lange Labour 1982 New Neoliberal Economics
Because its not golfing privilege. You seemed determined to turn golf into an elite sport when its not. Why not just all sports grounds, race courses, in fact why not take the Auckland Domain. Cornwall park etc. Hell who needs green spaces
Not to demean the five big Radical Centre ideas. On the face of it they do have merit. One has be positive, do something about it. But evidently in the bigger picture these kind government interventions are not a major factor [The Great Leveler: Violence and the history of inequality from the stone age to the twenty-first century]. The thesis of Walter Scheidel, a Stanford University academic, is that only one of the “ four horseman” can adequately deal to inequality and redistribute wealth, albeit it seems only temporarily: total war, in our living memory the kind seen throughout Europe – and later spreading to the Pacific – in the early /mid 20th C; large scale revolution; complete state failure; wide spread plague, pestilence and pandemics. Ironically, it seems that the most recent pandemic has worked the other way.
Granted, we can’t believe everything academics have to say. But better perhaps those in the ivory tower than those in the halls of power or the dreary corridors of commerce.
Many NZers bank with all the foreign banks because they are financially lazy to change banks this was obvious when Kiwi saver was set up as many remained in the default system. I changed to the Cooperative bank from Westpac cause I got sick and tired of Westpac wanting more and more of my money when they already had most of it. NZers need help and encouragement in this area. I would like to see children and teenagers taught about money and financial literacy in school. I believe people aren’t dumb they are just lazy and tend to accept the status quo.
Many NZers bank with all the foreign banks because they are financially lazy to change banks this was obvious when Kiwi saver was set up as many remained in the default system. I changed to the Cooperative bank from Westpac cause I got sick and tired of Westpac wanting more and more of my money when they already had most of it. NZers need help and encouragement in this area. I would like to see children and teenagers taught about money and financial literacy in school. I believe people aren’t dumb they are just lazy and tend to accept the status quo.
Reminds me of a comment I saw by a young Chinese man….’In China the Govt tells the corporations what they can do….in the West the ‘Banks’ and corporations tell the Govt…what to ..do!
And in which country is the person in the street better off?
China …I imagine.
I think your analysis is correct Martyn. The neo left care about controlling speech and their so called inclusivity is about superficial inclusivity.
I was alerted to this about 3 years ago when a hobby group I was part of said they wanted more women of colour to join. what the neo left hate is diversity of thought and ideas. They can’t/won’t tolerate it. Eg the Listener 7 so will try and shut them down
Fuck all choices, who would you recommend I live in Auckland, all gets to hard and I am a minimum wage earner.
It seems that the Labour Party all took their grandchildren to see the Disney? film Frozen and came away with protruding, gob stoppers for eyeballs – can’t see, won’t see.
The banks are keen to get rid of money – that’s people’s currency. They want to remain in the arcane niche of fantasy money that with luck never morphs into real money in hand! But that’s what we use to handle our living expenses and transactions. So where do we fit in – we don’t – as we can see right now and it will get worse. We have the education, the intelligence, the food and clothing that has enabled us to live till now, but we haven’t learned the skills of critical thinking, following thoughts forward to the likely conclusion, and/or backwards so we can see the foundation and history of that procedure or habit.
Our Reserve Bank has just closed the latest enquiry of three into the future of money. I put up the link for the online channel they set up. I exhorted people to take part but I got overtaken by events that concerned me and didn’t myself. They have the replies before closing off. But it only closed 7 March so like the sneaky mouse in my kitchen that I have to deal with, perhaps some sneaky late entries will get at least glanced at if they are succinct, bulleted and have a bit of personal reasons for the entry?
Anyway read their info on this link. They are going to produce a report in April 2022. Let’s be there. They might at last have some value for the people and not just grand economic theory for big business and financing war which was the impetus for early economic theory. How we advance!
https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/notes-and-coins/future-of-money
Some entertainment of a sort – the MONIAC.
https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/research-and-publications/videos/making-money-flow-the-moniac
Labour had their chance for true transformative change, they utterly failed to capitalize on it. There is no saving this current iteration of Labour from political oblivion. But you have suggested some good policies for the next Labour government, whenever that will be.
And how’s Ireland doing these days MickeyBoyle?
Have you made Business Roundtable financial experts Fay and Richwhite National Irish treasures after they left NZ/AO to transform Ireland’s economy?
You should invite them back to transform New Zealand’s economy, especially if National gets elected in coalition with ACT. In 1984, ACT and Muldoon would have made a formidable alliance, but for the fact that Rob Muldoon was a socialist within National and Roger Douglas and his cronies were ACT party within Labour.
I wonder what would be the clamor coming from Labour if National had been in charge for the last 4 years. Covid threw a curved ball but surely if you put your hand up to lead you need to have a a plan to meet unexpected happenings. I am afraid I have seen little to give me any feeling of them being on top of the present situation with regard to finances
I just feel that if you’re working 40 hours or more a week and are driving a reasonable distance to work in a vehicle that you personally own, you shouldn’t have to pay at least 20 percent personal income tax, 15 percent goods and services tax on the food you buy, plus $2.85 a litre in petrol which includes a mixture of GST and Excise Taxation; while your employer owns vehicles which perhaps aren’t used very often but from which the cost of fuel, maintenance, and depreciation is removed before they are obligated to pay any taxation.
If she does step away, it’s no wonder she has “lost interest” Frank.
The bile, vitriol, personal attacks, lies, Karen portmanteaux, MAGA execution threats perpetrated by Dirty Politics operatives, Arps Corps, Alt Right, Groundswell, Density Evangelists, Counterspin, My Cocksking, Liz Gunn and the Karen Choir is f-cking disgusting.
The hatred towards our PM makes me ashamed to have actively sought citizenship here in NZ
I just want to slap the sense into these nasty pieces of work, but it’s like pushing shit uphill with a fork.
Misogynistic racist pricks like we see in this site, attack her every waking moment. Jeremy, Danny Boy, New Kraut, Sour Kraut to name but a few.
I challenge all the Tory shills to denounce https://www.nuremberg.nz/, but they won’t, because they know they are just another cog in the alt-right destabilization of democracy in general and a hideous targeted undercutting of a fantastic PM.
New Zealand ought to be ashamed of itself for the last 2 years, well 6 months really, since Judith Collins was benched and could go full commando into Dirty Politics full time. I wonder whether her kneeling in the church was a prayer for “forgiveness for what she was about to do!”
Jacinda Ardern has seen NZ/AO through a pandemic that has infected over 500 million, and killed north of 6 million.
It would be a travesty if Jacinda “hits the eject button”, as you suggest.
Housing is so expensive NZ children are born into serfdom – never to own property. Normally there would be a revolution but dna testing, cameras and policing + government owning media make it difficult. 9/10 youth can only go on benefits to support their children. Soon as the borders open again there will be more cheap labour to keep wages down and fight inflation – and those foreign labourers will return with enough $ to buy property in a cheap country.
The New Zealand sharemarket along with many other sharemarkets throughout the world have bounced back. Sanford Limited being one example. This is a NZSE listed company which was trading at $9.00 per share pre-Covid, and it dropped in value to around $2.80 a share right after Covid. As an exporting business, the closed borders had a direct and immediate effect on the company’s profitability. Now the share value has risen again. The borders are set to reopen. It will likely increase in value even further.
This scenario can be repeated with a large number of firms. Air New Zealand, too, along with many others, experienced this effect because of the global pandemic.
As banks are heavily invested in shares, their profits are now immense as things begin to pick up again in the economic world. This is a similar scenario to KiwiSaver account holders, many of whom lost up to ten percent of the value of their investments due to the pandemic because of the dip in the domestic and international share markets. This is now changing, and those who opted to invest in Growth Funds in particular, which invest largely on shares, are also experiencing a surge in the value of their investments.
Let us now apportion blame to our commercial banks for something which is a technical error perpetuated by successive governments. That is namely that inflation has been able to take root, and rapidly of late, due to a lack of controls and due to the New Zealand government having a vested interest in high fuel and grocery prices. The higher these items are, the more money the government will make in Goods and Services Taxation.
I’d like to moot the idea that the Reserve Bank be given more discretionary power but also more responsibility. In times such as this, it is needed in order for the cost of everyday goods to remain reasonable.
If you really want to blame any groups in the business world for any of it, then what about the merchant bankers or the speculators in the financial markets? For it is the merchant bankers who are powerful and who lobby the government more than any other group and have done so since the 1980’s. Their influence is seen in the corridors of power more than that of the environmental groups, even. As for the speculators, their rumours, gossip, innuendo, and greed continue to perpetuate a system filled with boom and bust cycles which adversely affect the poor.
For it to be resolved properly, we will need to have a major restructuring of the personal income tax system. The brunt of the tax obligations will need to be taken on by the wealthiest earners for at least a decade. None of this removing GST from fresh fruit and veges, implementing a Financial Transactions Tax, or introducing a widespread Capital Gains Tax. These would only be Band-Aids on a gaping wound.