If you ever wanted to see a German church moderately filled, you will now have to wait for another year. With the possible exception of natural disasters and other emergencies, Christmas is the only time you struggle to find a seat on a church bench. Read more
In case you have not noticed it, the euro crisis is over. It must be because EU Commission President Jos Manuel Barroso, ECB President Mario Draghi and French President Franois Hollande all said so over the past six months. Read more
Dear Insights subscriber, This is the last issue of Insights for 2012 before we break for the Christmas and New Year holidays, so please excuse me from deviating from the normal format of this newsletter. Every Friday for the past six months, we have been delivering you three short opinion articles along with links to our favourite stories on the web – whether outrageous, important, interesting or just funny. Read more
Not just since Silvio Berlusconi’s announcement to run once more for the top job in Italian politics has Italy been a perplexing country. In any other nation, the prospect of a 76-year-old convicted tax evader re-entering politics would be laughed at – especially if, like Berlusconi, he was with one foot in prison, had a dubious personal reputation and a poor political track record. Read more
New Zealand’s government must always remember the line attributed to Lord Earnest Rutherford: “We don’t have the money, so we’ll have to think.” Government accounts are already under pressure. And in the longer term it is hard to see this pressure letting up. Read more
According to the Mayan calendar, the world will end on 21 December this year. It’s not clear, though, whether this was the motivation for the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) to cut interest rates to 3% doomsday levels. Read more
Up until the last Olympics, most Kiwis would have known little about Belarus. But after the rather masculine Belarusian shot-putter, Nadzeya Ostapchuk, was caught out as a drug cheat, and the gold medal was awarded to New Zealand’s Valerie Adams, Belarus was noticed a lot more. Read more
One of the most oft-quoted sayings in economics is Herbert Stein’s famous dictum that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. It is so often quoted because it is logically true. Read more
Negotiations on an extension of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free-trade agreement meant to liberalise economic relations across the Pacific, are to go into their fifteenth round next week. Proponents of the TPP hope it will improve conditions for foreign direct investment (FDI). Read more
Exports are the thing! At least that is the refrain of many economists, commentators, and observers: we need to export more, we should help exporters, and so on. Read more
Sir Peter Jackson, a man of many talents, has put New Zealand on the map again. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has made the NZ film industry bigger and better than ever, revolutionising cinema by filming with double the usual number of frames (48). Read more
It was a different era: Vague prospects of making money on the internet were enough to mobilise billions of dollars. Political scientists still believed in the end of history and the final triumph of liberal democracy. Read more
The announcement of ‘KiwiBuild’ by Labour leader David Shearer was certainly bold. Under Labour, for the next decade the government will build 10,000 homes every year, for less than $600,000 each. Read more
World share markets rose markedly on Monday this week: the US S&P 500 (by 2%), London FTSE (by 2.4%), Paris CAC (by 2.9%), Tokyo Nikkei (by 1.4%), and the Hong Kong Hang Seng (by 0.5%). Europe saw the biggest daily gain in 10 weeks, but from the lowest levels for months. Read more
Does watching TV change your life? And in particular, do TV commercials change your consumption habits? Read more