Ask Me Anything about the week that was
Paid subscribers are welcome to throw me questions for an hour from midday on the events of the week around housing, poverty and climate change in Aotearoa-NZ's political economy
It’s that time of the week again where anyone who is a paid subscriber and commenter can Ask Me Anything about the events of the week that was, including:
The Reserve Bank’s decision to hike the OCR by 25 basis points to 1.0% and start selling its Government bonds back to Treasury at a rate of $5b per year;
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine;
The third week of anti-mandate and anti-vaxx protestors surrounding Parliament with tents, piles of rubbish, huge concrete blocks, lines of police and a visit from Winston Peters;
Aotearoa-NZ’s move into phase III of our omicron response as case numbers surged over 6,000 a day and businesses scrambled to get their hands on RATs; and,
CoreLogic figures showing home owners made $7.5b of capital gains on the homes they sold in the December quarter, with the median gain being $420,000 per home, almost double gains from before covid.
I’ll do my best to answer in the comment thread below for the next hour.
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Essential Reading "Winter is Coming" Gary Kasparov. He has been warning about Putin for years.
Hi Bernard - With respect to Child Poverty, is this not a serious misnomer? It is not a child's fault that its parents may be in some degree of poverty. And talking about child poverty is an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff approach. Like so many political solutions, politicians try to deal with the consequences. Is not the "root-cause" of child poverty, parents who have children who are not 'qualified' to be parents, ie they cannot afford to pay to raise and nurture children. Maybe would-be parents should be put through a 'fit-and-proper-persons' evaluation and then issued a Warrant of Fitness.