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.
Negative interest rates – as in Europe and Japan – stabilise the debt accumulation process that gave us, for example, the 2008 global financial crisis.
Currently, the World Economic Forum meeting is taking place in the Swiss alps. This annual march to Davos brings together individuals across the public and private sectors where these privileged few get to discuss the issues that affect all of us.
The continuing meltdown on stock markets around the world didn’t slow down. China lost 3.6%, European markets slid hard and the Dow Jones just closed down 392 points.
To date most of the mainstream media focus on the collapse of Dick Smith has been the impact on customers not being able to cash in their vouchers. This small minded approach manages to miss most of the real issues going on.
Big banks and mainstream economists are now predicting an economic disaster befalling the world economy over the next few years.
It’s like no one is either watching the news or they have no bloody comprehension what is happening! We are witnessing a slow motion global crash that could herald in a depression unlike anything we’ve witnessed.
In New Zealand, as in most developed countries, poverty is measured relative to 60% of the weekly median income. The question remains: why measuring relative poverty matters when it does not necessarily relate to hardship the way absolute poverty does.