Anybody unfortunate enough to pick up a copy of Wellington’s daily newspaper today was assaulted by a screeching headline ‘Pricking the housing bubble’. Accompanying this was an en[...]

Over-investment in housing and the lending largesse that underpinned that orgy of excess led to the sub-prime crisis in the US in 2007 which in turn led to widespread recession in [...]

Those ascribing the boom in Auckland house prices increasing to immigrants from Kolkata rather than Kaiapoi, have sunk into the gutter as they grasp for culprits to blame. Winston [...]

It’s decades overdue but at last the government guarantee on deposits at banks has been shown not to be cast-iron. The decision taken in Cyprus to impose a one-off 7% tax on all ba[...]

Resorting to stuffing their cows with palm kernel in response to the drought-induced shortage of pasture, is just the latest instance of a New Zealand dairy industry that continues[...]

It’s not obvious at first glance that allowing employers to breach minimum wage regulations is bad news for youth employment. Clearly if the price of youth labour is going down, mo[...]

  The Living Wage campaign is quite rightly drawing attention to the issue of pay and working conditions in New Zealand. With record numbers of Kiwis heading for Australia, it[...]

The consideration given by the Reserve Bank to controlling the bias in its policies that favour housing over all other lending types is most welcome (See NZ Herald article here). I[...]

January’s North & South magazine is headed “Is the Housing Market Rigged”? The article goes into depth on the resurgent property market and whether the take-o[...]

Spending a couple of hours in a pub in South Canterbury talking to the locals last week there were two topics of interest. Will Jamie Joseph be able to overcome the ‘big noter’ syn[...]