The last thing Europe needs right now is a war. Or, more precisely, another war. Read more
In February, New Zealand’s PCR Covid testing system fell apart. The Ministry of Health, the Director-General of Health, and the Ministers should have known it would happen. Read more
I always believed that Magna Carta left us with a most valuable inheritance: the right to trial by jury. Even after learning that legal historians now regard this assertion as fiction, I did so. Read more
Paul Bloxham, HSBC’s chief economist, once described New Zealand as a “rockstar economy”. That was back in January 2014. Read more
On Monday this week, the prime minister said she was optimistic that the economy would not shrink further in the second quarter. That would avoid New Zealand officially being in recession. Read more
Just before 3 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, about a dozen NZTA and Ministry of Transport officials received a weekend-ruining email. Subject: “Cabinet paper: Urgent”. Read more
This month, Central Banking, the journal for the world’s monetary policy experts, hosted its virtual Summers Meetings. With inflation returning, the onset of a new European debt crisis, and the implications of geopolitical conflicts, central bankers have enough reasons to be worried right now. Read more
Pick your favourite bit of bad economic news. How about a 10 percent hike in food prices? Read more
On 4 June, The Dominion Post published a lengthy and disturbing article highlighting the woes and dilemmas of earthquake safety regulation in Wellington. It highlighted the arbitrariness of current building standards and decisions. Read more
On 31 July 2022, New Zealand's borders will fully reopen. This will be a welcome development for education providers, especially those in the tertiary sector. Read more
The moderate increases in the European Central Bank’s interest rates are far from being brutal but the writing is on the wall that Europe’s monetary party is about to end, and Southern Europe has remarkable parallels to Mexico and Latin America in the 1980s. Of all the places in history, Mexico in 1982 could give us a hint about the future of European monetary policy. Read more
Bring on the bondholders. New Zealand’s proposed Three Waters Reforms, which would force the amalgamation of council water services into four large providers under convoluted governance arrangements, is an attempted solution to a real problem. Read more
Hades, God of the Greek underworld, decreed that Sisyphus, for trying to cheat death, must forever push a heavy boulder up a hill. It would roll back down again every time. Read more
A lot of problems have no good solutions – just ones that are bad in different ways. Pricing greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture is important, and every way of doing it is going to have problems. This week, the agricultural sector put up its proposed solution. Read more
Our education system is becoming a bit like a gym in which people use robots to pump iron for them. The trend began in the 1980s when hand-held calculators became cheap. Read more