Mustnt Grumble eh!

In reading this blog , it pays to start at the last post and flick up to the next , As laying out of the page is beyond my skills Still it gets the information up and out there, and hopefully will get people to start questioning the road on which New Zealand is following ! I quoted Mr Chris Trotter and Prof J Kelsey , the information used was out in the public domain and able to be used , My Thanks go out to these good people, Finally I really recommend the reading of the Five Families a Mexican case study . It really does apply to New Zealand Stephen

political party - with roots extending into every city, every suburb and every street of the nation. Oh, how their laughter would cease when a party like that started rising in the opinion polls. And, oh, how quickly their power would crumble when that party became linked to a militant trade union movement, with members in every factory, in every shop, in every office, and – yes – in every university. "Don’t mourn", said the great American union leader, Joe Hill, as they led him out to be executed, "organise!" And he was right. It can be done. It has been done – right here in New Zealand. The Labour Party, in its socialist phase, had all of the attributes that I have listed above, and it used them to transform New Zealand. It is one of the great ironies – and the great tragedies - of our history, that it was Labour which, fifty years after the election of Mickey Savage’s Government, set about destroying its socialist legacy. But what they could not destroy was the s...

They sincerely want us to be better qualified, better paid, and more productive as a nation. And, to achieve those goals, they have been willing to strap us into what the New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, calls the "golden straightjacket" of free markets and free trade. They desperately want us to accept what that guru of the Third Way - Anthony Giddens – insists is "the fact" of globalisation. But what they cannot seem to understand is that the economic and social order created by free markets and free trade is absolutely incompatible with the existence of free citizens. As Freidman is so fond of saying: "The purpose of the new capitalism is to shoot the wounded." The "new" capitalism is also, I might add, incompatible with a living planet - which means that the choice we have to make is not simply between – as Rosa Luxembourg wrote – "socialism and barbarism" (that choice, I fear, has already been made) but between a living p...

time of even those who cannot find regular employment. The reasoning behind the Right’s obsession with welfare reform is, however, perfectly logical. By reducing the state-provided income of the unemployed to subsistence level, and then requiring them to work for it, they are immediately transformed into a vast army of wage reducers and work intensifiers. And that means that the workers in paid employment are constantly looking over their shoulders and wondering what it will take to keep the boss from replacing them with someone cheaper. "Longer hours? – Sure Boss." "Work faster? – Yes Sir." "Can I come in weekends? – No problem." "Am I asking for a wage rise? – Hell no!" "Unions? – Never heard of them." Ever wondered why ecstasy and methamphetamine are the drugs of choice for your generation, when marijuana and LSD were the drugs of choice for mine? Well, it’s simple, grass slows everything down, while speed – as its name suggests – al...

days as a student, has no place in Steve Maharey’s brave new lecture theatres of the future. If you want to study classical literature, when the Tertiary Education Council wants you to study biotechnology, then you’ll have to pay the full tuition costs of a classical education out of your own pocket. Steve and his mates want graduates who can earn – not citizens who can think. Of course with a $30,000 student debt hanging over your head, you will want to earn too – as much and as often as possible. There won’t be a lot of time for anything else. Those student loans – by the way – are a lot more dangerous than even NZUSA has let on. In fact, they are proving to be sociological and demographic time-bombs. A healthy democracy requires a large and relatively secure middle class, and if that democracy is to be long-lived, it needs a middle class which is ready, willing and able to reproduce itself. Massive student debt is making middle class reproduction extremely difficult. Not only is it ...

Kathmandu. It was a wonderful time and a wonderful country in which to be young. There was time to grow up, time to learn, time to become a real human being. And that’s what I miss most about the world that passed away in the 1980s and 90s – the automatic assumption that, as New Zealanders, we had all the time in the world. It was an assumption that could only be made in a workers’ – not a bosses’ - world. The ability to limit the amount of time individuals are able to devote to themselves and their families is the true measure of Capitalism’s social, political and economic power. The more time you are forced to spend working for the money you need to survive, the more dependent you are on your employer, and the less freedom you have to tell him to get stuffed. Have you ever noticed how angry politicians and business people get about unemployed people on the dole "going surfing"? Even if the capitalists cannot find a job for you, they and their minions in the State apparatus ...

In one sense that is very good news for NZUSA. It shows that your national organisation has become a permanent fixture in the array of interest groups with which the New Zealand State must negotiate. Yes, that’s right, you are up there with Federated Farmers and the Plunket Society. From my own perspective, however, that gap of 22 years covers a period in New Zealand history during which much of what made this country a uniquely positive place in which to live has disappeared, or changed beyond all recognition. What I say to you today is, therefore, being communicated across a great abyss of experience and expectation. For you are, indeed, the children of the Rogernomics Revolution, and I am an overweight and ageing survivor of the ancien regime. Let me describe a little of the country I lived in when last I spoke to NZUSA – not merely for nostalgia’s sake – but because I believe it will help to place in context the challenges that face the present generation of student politicians; ch...

* Challenge the TINA ( there is no alternative ) syndrome .. ( again not I am not sure ) * Promote informed debate and critique .. * Promote participatory democracy .. * Embrace the Treaty of Waitangi as a liberating force .. * Encourage progressive counter-nationalism .. * Develop multi-level strategies .. * Hold the line .. * Localise politics .. * Ginger up party politics .. * Invest in the future .. * Support those who speak out .. * Promote ethical investment .. * Think global, act local .. ...

Major national assets are transferred to private corporate owners who have primarily very short-term goals which result in sub-optimal decision-making in times of economic stress, particularly in respect of strategic assets. Greatly increased disparity between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots'. Increase in attitudes of selfishness and 'me first' in the populace, more crime. Significant geographic regions of the country are severely depressed economically. Large decrease in all sorts of public service available as of right, resulting in a reduction in standard of living that is difficult to quantify - one example is information from the many Departmental libraries that there used to be - gone, or with highly restricted access. The bargaining powers of wage and salary earners are mostly minimized in the employment world as unions are disabled and power is vested mainly in the hands of employers; on the face of it, giving employees the power to negotiate for themselv...

In this and other works, Smith expounded on how rational self-interest and competition can lead to economic prosperity and well-being. It also provided one of the best-known intellectual rationales for free trade and capitalism, greatly influencing the writings of later economists. In 19th century Britain, laissez-faire capitalism found a small but strong following by Manchester Liberals such as Richard Cobden and Richard Wright. In 1867, this resulted in a free trade treaty being signed between Britain and France, after which several of these treaties were signed among other European countries. The newspaper The Economist was founded in 1843, partly in opposition to the Corn Laws. Free trade was discussed in places such as The Cobden Club, founded in 1866. However, Austrian scholars argue that laissez-faire was never the main doctrine of any nation, and at the end of the 1800s, European countries reintroduced economic protectionism and interventionism. The centre-right Gaullis...

coalition and centre-left government (1999–2002). However, the Alliance disintegrated in 2002. National was defeated in 1999 due to the absence of a suitable, stable coalition partner given New Zealand First's partial disintegration after Winston Peters abandoned the prior National-led coalition. When Bill English took over National, it was thought that he might lead the Opposition away from its prior hardline New Right economic and social policies, but his indecisiveness and lack of firm policy direction led to ACT New Zealand gaining the New Right middle-class voting basis in 2002. When Don Brash took over, New Right middle-class voters returned to National's fold, causing National's revival in fortunes at the New Zealand general election 2005. However, at the same time, ACT New Zealand strongly criticised it for deviating from its former New Right economic policy perspectives, and at the same election, National did little to enable ACT's survival. ACT currently has t...

converting New Zealand funds and credits to foreign currency, and then back to a larger quantity of New Zealand dollars. Remember Andy Krieger? The reformers argued that the speed with which the reforms were made was due to the fact that New Zealand had not adjusted to Britain’s abandonment of the empire, and had to move quickly to ‘catch up’ with the rest of the world. Douglas claimed in his 1993 book Unfinished Business that speed was a key strategy for achieving radical economic change: "Define your objectives clearly, and move towards them in quantum leaps, otherwise the interest groups will have time to mobilise and drag you down". Political commentator Bruce Jesson argued that Douglas acted fast to achieve a complete economic revolution within one parliamentary term, in case he did not get a second chance. The reforms can be summarised as the dismantling of the Australasian model of state development that had existed for the previous 90 years, and its replacement by th...

who pay a five-figure subscription fee, represent most of the large business interests in the country. The subscription fee funds the New Zealand Business Roundtable's activities. The New Zealand Business Roundtable has the aim of contributing to the development of policies that it believes reflect New Zealand's overall national interests. To this end, the organisation produces a wide range of publications (books, reports, submissions) and undertakes other activities that inform/influence public debate on key policy issues. Over the years the organisation has brought many prominent speakers to New Zealand, including Bjørn Lomborg, Francis Fukuyama, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times and Yegor Gaidar. The NZBR strongly supported the controversial market-oriented reforms undertaken in New Zealand during the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms were intended to play a role in lifting New Zealand's economic growth-rate. The country as of the early 21st century boasts one of the lowes...

series of economic problems brought on by changes in the global economy, many of which directly affected the country, such as Britain’s entry in to the European Economic Community in 1973. New Zealand was rating badly for living standards and economic performance compared to OECD averages: in 1980 it had slipped from being in the top five OECD countries to 19th Roger Douglas, who would later become finance minister, went so far as to say that the country stood “on the brink of economic ruin”. Prior to 1985 the New Zealand Dollar was controlled centrally by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand at a fixed exchange rate to the United States Dollar. In early 1984 the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank, Roderick Deane, became concerned that the dollar had become significantly overvalued and was vulnerable to currency speculation on the financial markets in the event of a "significant political event" Media speculation followed a leak that an incoming Labour government would b...

8 March 1983 The New Zealand Dollar was devalued by 6% against its weighted basket of currencies. The middle rate in terms of the U.S. Dollar was consequently changed to US$0.655=$NZ1, representing a depreciation of 8.3% from the middle rate of the previous day. 8 August 1983 The Reserve Bank practice of fixing daily exchange rates for the New Zealand Dollar against the U.S. Dollar was abandoned, allowing the unit to follow international currency movements. 1984 At the end of 1984, almost all foreign exchange controls were in the process of removal. 31 December 1984 The buying and selling rates for the U.S. Dollar were US$0.4723 and US$0.4823, respectively, per $NZ1. 4 March 1985 The practice of establishing a fixed exchange rate with respect to a trade-weighted basket of currencies was terminated. The exchange rate for the New Zealand Dollar was to be determined on the basis of supply and demand in the foreign exchange market. The Reserve Bank ceased to quote official buying and selli...

realigned to a new Official Rate of US$1.216 with a 4.5% fluctuation range, with unchanged gold content. The currency's link to the Pound Sterling was replaced with a pegging of the New Zealand Dollar to the U.S. Dollar. An Effective Rate of US$1.195 was also created with buying and selling rates of US$1.2017 and US$1.1887 per New Zealand unit. 23 June 1972 With the completed failure of Sterling on 23 June 1972, the Sterling Area was liquidated. 15 February 1973 Following the U.S. Dollar devaluation in February 1973, the Official Rate of the New Zealand Dollar was realigned to US$1.351, with unchanged gold content. 9 July 1973 Wellington's currency was placed on a controlled, floating basis with the Effective Rate determined by a basket of currencies of New Zealand's principle trading partners. 10 September 1973The controlled, floating Effective Rate was revised upward by 10%. 25 September 1974 Wellington, following Australia's lead, slashed the Effective Rate for the ...

the market in interest-rate caps and was caught by a rise in volatility. Colleagues only half-blame cap king Steve Edelson, since management didn't question his valuations. Meanwhile the regulators were trying to get some of these new risks properly reported and backed with appropriate capital. In July 1988 the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision, chaired by Peter Cooke, issued its guidelines on risk-weighted capital charges for credit risk. They were crude but effective for 10 years in forcing banks to build up more capital. And it was vital. "By the end of the 1980s Chase, Citi and Chemical Bank were practically bankrupt," recalls Lamfalussy. Japanese banks had special dispensation to count part of their equity holdings as capital. That came back to haunt them when Japan's bubble economy burst. Ok but where did this leave little old New Zealand... Remember that .. Financial technology was primitive. Spreadsheets were still done by hand inside the Wall Str...

Out of the volatility grew increasing trade in swaps, futures and options. IBM and the World Bank did the first well-publicized interest and currency swap in 1981. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange had started trading currency futures in 1972, but in the 1980s exchange-traded financial futures took off, with the launch of the Eurodollar future on the Merc in 1981, the opening of Liffe in London in 1982 and Matif in Paris in 1986. Early heroes of the derivatives industry were Merc chairman, Leo Malamed, academics Merton Miller, followed by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes (devisers of the Black-Scholes option pricing model), and Richard Sandor, tireless promoter of derivatives and securitizations. Midland Bank and Commerzbank fell foul of inexorable interest-rate movements in the 1980s which they could have hedged with derivatives. The frequency and scale of financial collapses and scandals goes up. Johnson Matthey Bankers in London, Drysdale Securities and Penn Square Bank in the US and B...

Citibank's John Reed gave a push in the right direction with a unilateral move, in May 1987, to take a $3 billion reserve on his bank's emerging-market debt. Reed knew he would be hated: he was forcing other banks, such as the crippled Manufacturers Hanover, to follow suit. Mulford, who was then treasury under-secretary, wanted to take things to the next stage, passing on that write-off to reduce the overall debt of the countries themselves. He feared that otherwise the nominal amount of the debt would simply be capitalized and passed from the private to the public sector. "There had to be some kind of debt relief for these countries," he said. Origins of the Brady Plan The October 1987 stock market crash showed that there was no escape for investors besides US, Japanese or German government bonds. Nicholas Brady, who completed a report on that crash, was appointed treasury secretary the next year. At a G7 meeting in Bonn there were the first discussions of what later...

The net effect of petrodollars on the world economy, however, was of rapid price inflation, as too much cash chased too few goods. When US President Reagan's administration addressed inflation by hiking interest rates, the emerging-market borrowers began to suffer. Zaire and Turkey had already defaulted in 1976 and 1977. After 1980 the high interest rates, close to 20% for six-month Libor, shook country after country off its perch. Interest rates weren't the only reason. The drive for 19th-century-style industrial development and import substitution piled up debt, so did the crippling price of oil imports. Without structural reforms there was no increase in productivity. The World Bank and other multilateral lending agencies were driven by lending volume. So were the banks. Some of the early casualties were Zaire, Poland, Romania. Hungary might have followed, but its case was somewhat different. The financial wizardry of its deputy central bank governor Janos Fekete had kept th...

Deutsche Bank, Midland, Société Générale, and Société Générale de Banque, with the ultimate goal of establishing a pan-European global bank. It had six separate banking operations including London (EBC), New York (European American), European Asian and European Arab. Yassukovich who was managing director of EBC, remembers setting it up in London in 1974 amid strikes and power cuts, often working by the light of a paraffin lamp. He acknowledges that consortium banks "had their moment. They allowed member banks to experiment and were a way of sharing risk. But it was always clear to me that they didn't have a long-term future." Says de Gelsey: "It was right for the banks to club together. Now mergers are doing the same thing. In time we found that our shareholders were competing with us." Orion was sold to Royal Bank of Canada. EBC was bought by ABN Amro. The end of the beginning London's Big Bang in 1986 spelled the end for a number of London-based co...

In its favour, London had a syndicated acceptance credit market, so its bankers understood the concept of syndication, whereas continental bankers didn't. "If the market hadn't come to London it wouldn't have grown so fast," Craven admits. It moved from its early base in Switzerland because the Swiss authorities refused to exempt Eurobond trading from stamp tax. The UK authorities were more enlightened, recalls Yassukovich. When he came to London to set up White Weld & Co Ltd in 1969, his tax advisers discovered a 19th-century exemption (designed to facilitate intra-British-empire trade) which levied tax on office overheads rather than trading turnover. Walter Koller and his team "rented houses in Wimbledon and got trading", says Yassukovich. "We started a stampede to London, although Merrill stayed in Geneva." Swiss banking goes Anglo-Saxon Rainer Gut, chairman of Credit Suisse, was unusual. He hadn't gone to the right Swiss school or ...

Mobiliare Italiano (IMI), which was the blueprint for all subsequent Euroloans: "We used the IMI loan to adjust for all the weaknesses of the Iranian loan," says Zombanakis. He was in competition with the Eurobond players for the same sovereign business. Evan Galbraith, a director at Bankers Trust International in London (later US ambassador to France), had allegedly invented the floating-rate note while watching a duck bobbing in his bath. BT and SG Warburg were chasing a mandate in Italy, a $500 million FRN for Enel. Warburg's Eric Roll was already in Rome when Zombanakis flew in and persuaded the Bank of Italy that IMI (Istituto Mobiliare Italiano) should do a $200 million Euroloan instead. "Compared with $9 million in fees for the FRN they paid us half a percent," says Zombanakis. "The new market for Euroloans then burst into life." But the Eurobond market was already flourishing. It resided mostly in two founding firms: White Weld and SG ...

and gold as an int'l. reserve currency to finance global trade. Modern exchange-rate volatility began when the US dollar came off the gold standard in August 1971. The foreign exchange market's biggest shock came three years later when Bankhaus Herstatt failed to settle the New York legs of its dollar foreign-exchange deals. Banks in other time zones, left with incomplete deals, or just fearing that they would arise, grabbed what they could, causing a general panic. A handful of banks ended up losing money. It decimated the medium-size German banks. 1971 Apr 1, The United Kingdom lifted all restrictions on gold ownership. 1971 Aug 15, Pres. Nixon suspended conversion of dollars to gold and imposed a 90-day price, wage and rents freeze and 10% import charge. He also cut various taxes and expenditures. This marked the end of the gold standard and fixed exchange rates. 1972 The Chicago futures market first began trading financial derivatives. On 10 July 1967, the dollar replaced t...

Bretton woods By the early 1960s, the U.S. dollar's fixed value against gold, under the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, was seen as overvalued. A sizable increase in domestic spending on President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs and a rise in military spending caused by the Vietnam War gradually worsened the over valuation of the dollar. End of Bretton Woods system The system dissolved between 1968 and 1973. In August 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon announced the "temporary" suspension of the dollar's convertibility into gold. While the dollar had struggled throughout most of the 1960s within the parity established at Bretton Woods, this crisis marked the breakdown of the system. An attempt to revive the fixed exchange rates failed, and by March 1973 the major currencies began to float against each other. Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, IMF members have been free to choose any form of exchange arrangement they wish (except ...

and now I cant delete it So I try again ! In the beginning. Heres a little song I wrote, you might want to learn it note for note... ( all through this debate I have highlighted important dates or points of interest ). 296CE Roman Emp. Diocletian ordered the burning of alchemical manuscripts for fear their discoveries would debase his coinage. This may have set back the science of distillation. 269BC The Roman system of coinage was established. Not a lot happened until man got greedy , 1720 Jan-Aug, Speculators in London bid up the price of the South Sea Co., which had been granted a trading monopoly with South America and the Pacific. The South Sea Bubble burst and London markets crashed. Speculation in government chartered trading companies had led to artificially inflated equity prices with high leverage. The average stock dropped 98.5%. It reportedly took 100 years for markets to recover. In 1999 Edward Chancellor published "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Spec...

So where did it start 1929 following word that Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower had suffered a heart attack. Here we go , again . We need help....... 1957 Oct 1, The motto "In God We Trust" began appearing on US paper currency. 1957 Alex Guinness, William Holden and Jack Hawkins starred in the film "Bridge on the River Kwai." Carl Foreman was the screenwriter. It premiered at the RKO Palace Theater in New York City on Dec 18 and later won multiple Oscars. It was rated #13 by the Amer. Film Inst. in 1998. Holden was the 1st Hollywood actor to earn a $ 1 million for a film. Hey feeling good ? Lets hit the town .......( this is where it starts .....) 1958 Oct 1, American Express launched its first credit card. 1962 Milton Friedman and his wife Rose published "Capitalism and Freedom," a good summary of Friedman’s economic thinking. This might hurt, but some light entertainment to keep the masses happy ...... 1963 The film "Cleopatra" starred Elizabeth Tayl...