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As the New Zealand dollar reached an all-time high against the British pound and keeps rising against the US dollar, the euro and other major currencies, New Zealand manufacturers are renewing their complaints about the damaging effects of our strong currency. However, currency movements usually produce losers and winners. Read more

Broken windows and Warrant of Fitness (WoF) checks have more in common than first meets the eye. And no, we’re not talking about cracked windscreens. Read more

As the opposition’s parliamentary inquiry into manufacturing gathers pace, it is worth taking another look at manufacturing and the chief culprit blamed for its troubles: the high dollar and the monetary regime. First, the recent decline of manufacturing has been grossly overstated. Read more

When cyclist Lance Armstrong finally confessed to Oprah that he won all his Tour de France titles by using a cocktail of banned substances, he received widespread condemnation. Rightly so. Read more

This week, we heard news falling straight from the category “Only in Ireland”. What happened? 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

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

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