Dawn chorus: No bubble before Feb
PM indicates preference to keep border closed until well into 2021; NZ Initiative editor suspended after discovery of his racist and sexist blog; ECB to print extra €500b; UK set to crash out of EU
TLDR: Morena. PM Jacinda Ardern indicated she preferred to keep the border closed until well into next year to ensure New Zealand stayed covid-free in the community. The NZ Herald’s Derek Cheng reported this morning after his interview with Ardern the Government did not expect the creation of any travel bubble with Australia before February.
Newsroom’s Marc Daalder reported this morning the NZ Initiative had suspended its chief editor Nathan Smith on full pay pending an investigation after it was revealed he had been writing an anonymous blog spouting racist, sexist and incel views since 2007.
Overseas, overnight, the European Union detailed plans for a very hard British exit from the union that would severely restrict travel and trade from January 1. Meanwhile the European Central Bank announced overnight it had increased its money printing and bond buying plans by €500b to €1.85t. That’s ‘t’ for trillion and converts to NZ$3.1t or 10 times NZ GDP.
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Coming up
Dec 16 - Treasury releases its Half Yearly Fiscal and Economic Update (a full week to recover)
Dec 17 - Stats NZ publishes Sept qtr GDP
Dec 22 - Final cabinet meeting of 2020
Feb 1 - The Climate Change Commission will release its first draft of the national carbon budget under the Zero Carbon Act
Feb - Financial Action Task Force’s mutual evaluation report of New Zealand is expected in February.
Ngā Mihi
Bernard
PS Thanks to John Parker via his instagram for today’s pic.
FYI: the LikeBulb blog site has been taken down, but here is an archive of it: https://web.archive.org/web/20201208235220/https://likebulb.blogspot.com/. (There also appears to be a related Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/INTELandAnalysis - but it hasn't been updated for a while).