Ask Me Anything on the week that was

Jump on here for an Ask Me Anything session at midday today on this week's key events, and/or join Peter and I and special guests for our weekly 'hoon' live webinar for an hour at 5pm today

TLDR: It’s that time of the week again where I’m on site to shoot the breeze with paid subscribers about the week that was for an hour from midday. I do this every Friday (usually) and it’s one of our most popular features. Then at 5pm Peter Bale and I run a live ‘hoon’ webinar that is put out later as a podcast.

This week’s news events I’ve been focused on include:

• house price deflation hitting double-digits for Auckland and Wellington in April, but business leaders, forecasters and households don’t yet believe the Reserve Bank’s suggestions that a 30% fall is feasible, or even that the ‘sustainable’ level of house prices is still another 5-20% below the already lower levels;

• algorithmically-determined stable coin Terra-USD collapsed this week, sending the dominant fiat-backed stablecoin Tether into its own buck-breaking spiral, along with a double-digit fall in bitcoin to levels not seen since the end of 2020;

• more pre-Budget announcements were made ahead of next week’s Emissions Reduction Plan on Monday and Budget 2022 on Friday, including the prospects for a congestion charge in Auckland and a cash-for-clunkers scheme;

• Russia threatened “military-technical” retaliation against Finland for saying it plans to join NATO, while also cutting off a major gas pipeline to Europe; and,

• talk is growing of recessions in Europe, the UK, the US and possibly even China as the triple whammy of higher oil prices and interest rates, Covid supply chain and labour disruptions and the war in Ukraine weigh on consumer spending and investment.

Paid subscribers can fire away in the comments below and I’ll be here until 1pm.