I was in Wellington for work a couple weeks ago and lucky enough to hear Brian Easton, an economist based in Wellington, speaking at Drinking Liberally.
Brian's paper, split in two, is on his website, dealing with the world and domestic economies respectively.
You should read this. It is deeply scary. My friend Conor recently came back from Europe and wondered at the extremly upbeat media here around the crisis: the zen was heads-buried-in-sand.
Easton usefully and frighteningly points out how tight things are both globally and locally.
Read this and you will wonder where the Prime Minister and his Minister of Finance are getting their smiles from. I am not sure I can tell. Given the lack of actual new policy taken here one does begin to get the impression that the new government is to some extent sleepwalking over a cliff. One also gets the impression, after reading Brian's material, that there is relatively little the NZ Government could do to help. But: it ought to do what it can, and I am not confident it's doing so.
Anyhow have a read and say what you think.
I detected a whiff of the old Treasury manufactured crisis / shock doctrine in Bill English's words today (25/02), when he stated that the effects of this recession would be lasting for 15 years. If there's a debt level of around $US 90 billion, then the natural Treasury response may just be to sell off a power company or two to get closer to the target. Or serious public sector cutbacks.
Posted by: Peter Wilson | Wednesday, 25 February 2009 at 11:32 PM