Reports & Media

The Reserve Bank has finally acknowledged it must review its controversial 2019 bank capital decision requiring large banks to increase their capital reserves from 10.5% to 18% by 2028. The timing is revealing. Read more

There is something tragic about watching the United States deliberately harm itself – especially when the damage spills over to everyone else. President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ trade tariffs are a disaster for America and the world. Read more

Many economists make international trade seem more complicated than it needs to be. Stephen Landsburg had a simple way of explaining it all. Read more

The primary care package recently announced by Health Minister Simeon Brown tackles our GP shortage with overseas doctor placements, more GP trainees and digital healthcare. These welcome initiatives recognise the critical challenges facing general practitioners nationwide. Read more

One of the pleasures of my job as Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative is hosting events with Ministers explaining their new policies to our members. Last week, we hosted Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden at our annual retreat. Read more

About a quarter century ago, my to-be wife introduced me to a card game called Flux. It was popular among the computer science and engineering students in Pittsburgh. Read more

My previous columns critiquing President Donald Trump’s constitutional overreach and foreign policy blunders prompted some readers to suggest I had failed to grasp the President’s strategic brilliance. Trump, they insisted, was playing four-dimensional chess while the rest of us fumbled with checkers. Read more

I am always glad that I am not an economic forecaster. Most people’s exposure to economists is radio or newspaper bits from bank economists making their best guesses about economic growth, the unemployment rate, or the track for interest rates. Read more

The pendulum theory of politics suggests that policies often swing from one extreme to another without finding a balanced middle ground. Consider New Zealand’s supermarkets. Read more

Health Minister Brown's primary care package takes aim at the country's critical GP shortage. He is right to be concerned. Read more

Struggling to think of a good topic for a humorous column this week, I unexpectedly got a major break when my name was – unbelievably – added to a Signal messaging group of top New Zealand government officials. The texts reveal the magnitude of some of the problems that New Zealand politicians have to deal with. Read more