This week, 20 economists published an open letter calling for increased government spending. They argue that spending now will reduce economic pain. Read more
Rugby, as readers of this newsletter will know, is a game played by men with funny-shaped balls. But as well as being a lot of fun to play and to watch, it turns out that the game has other uses. Read more
New Zealand’s fastest-growing sector isn’t tourism, dairy, or technology. It’s outrage. Read more
Most New Zealanders would struggle to explain what bank capital requirements are, let alone why they matter. Yet the Reserve Bank’s controversial 2019 decision to nearly double these requirements affects every mortgage holder and business borrower in the country. Read more
“We have no money, so we shall have to think.” That line is ascribed to New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford before he cracked the atom. The country’s current Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon and his Finance Minister Nicola Willis face a rather different conundrum, albeit under the same constraint: How do you deliver modern infrastructure when Treasury’s 2025 long-term fiscal statement projects government debt reaching 200 per cent of GDP by 2065? Read more
Some things that sound simple wind up being a bit messier than expected. Keeping kids off of social media sounds simple. Read more
Last year, Canadian First Nations leaders came to Tuahiwi marae, just north of Christchurch, for the third hui-ā-motu. They explained how they have been using their self-governing autonomy, which sounds a lot like rangatiratanga, to build economic self-determination. Read more
Sometime in the first half of 2019, Ji Ruan, a senior lecturer in computer science at Auckland University of Technology, organised an event to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He no doubt assumed that, in a free country like New Zealand, this would be no problem. Read more
Every time New Zealanders apply for a mortgage or business loan, they pay the price for the Reserve Bank’s controversial 2019 bank capital decision to increase capital requirements for major banks by almost 100%. The decision made our banks much more heavily capitalised than most of their international peers. Read more
Not long ago, doing anything on Canada’s Indian Reserves was almost as hard as doing anything on whenua Māori. Here, the roughly six percent of the country held under Māori land tenure is beset by regulatory difficulty far worse than that bedevilling the rest of New Zealand. Read more
The Local Government Commission has been consulting on a draft Code of Conduct for Local Authorities. The Code addresses what bureaucrats see as local government’s biggest crisis: councillors saying unpleasant things. Read more
New Zealand has a bad habit of trying to do everything everywhere all at once. It means national-level policy takes giant swings. Read more
Last week, Treasury released yet another warning about New Zealand’s fiscal future. It was the same message they have been delivering for twenty years: population ageing will create spending pressures that the current tax base cannot support. Read more
New Zealand’s economy shrank 0.9 per cent in the June quarter. A chorus of commentators, politicians and economists are blaming the Reserve Bank for this poor performance. Read more
A lot of changes are coming in competition policy. Last week, the government announced a package of reforms that, overall, set the Commerce Commission on a more activist tack. Read more