Peter Bale & Bernard Hickey hoon around the week's news with Julie-Anne Genter on climate policy, bank profits & rail; Robert Patman on geopolitics; David Hall on climate politics & Ben Reid on AI
On the co-pay for drugs, you wrote "...all to earn the Government about $150 million a year in fees and to repay public debt just a tiny bit faster" - where is the calling out the Treasury nonsense Bernard? NZ Gov is the monopoly issuer of NZD, their deficit is "our" surplus, to the dollar. If they "pay off" the Tsy debt" the NZ economy loses interest incomes, if they "pay off" ALL the debt (so cash outstanding as well), then the NZ economy collapses. They have no need to increase revenues if real resources are not at risk of over-use. In the case of medicines, there is no risk of medicines being under-supplied, so no need on earth for a co-pay.
NZ Government fees and levies are never about funding the government, they cannot run out of NZD. It is about not putting real resources at risk. Treasury do not understand. F-ing bean counters. They still think of NZD as like "gold" and in metaphysically short supply so Parliament has to "get them off someone" - which is moronic, and they DO NOT UNDERSTANDING FLOATING EXCHANGE RATES. Talk to Warren Mosler, I beg you. warren.mosler@gmail.com
Thanks for the link Bijou. Some reading for me for next week. I do regularly call out Treasury, but have to be careful not to be too ranty. Keen to state the factors and let them tell the story, not necessarily just me asserting things.
You can let your readers like me do the rants. ;-) But at some point an honest journalists has to start not allowing officialdom be the only story told to the public, especially when it's an ignorant fraud.
It has to be possible to get a few Treasury, Parliamentary, and RBNZ insiders together for an MMT pow-wow, so at least they cannot claim ignorance. It does not have to be many for a start, just one or two with decent job security and moral+intellectual scruples. I hope to have at least one (from Treasury) soon.
I appreciate that you call them out Bernard. I wish other RNZ/TVNZ journo's had the same gumption. They cannot cure Treasury/RBNZ/Beehive staffer ignorance if they don't call it out, which means they cannot just let the data do the talking, they need to provide a robust counter-narrative. They can give them the rope to hang themselves, but if the penalty comes 25 years in the future they're all retired and are not going to be held accountable, they passed the noose on to some other blithering idiot "math whizz" at the CB/Tsy.
(I can give you "dumb" ANN models that forecast more accurately than the DSGE models. Being a math whizz does not correlate with understanding macroeconomics. In the neolib era it anti-correlates, all the more strongly because their base understanding is backwards. Sun orbits the Earth stuff.)
Macroeconomics is not weather forecasting, it's a matter of Ptolemaic epicycle DSGE modelling at Treasury and RBNZ analyst desks -- they can tune parameters to fit their narrative of the indicators. Which is either ignorance or fraud, and a good journalist ought to make it their professional business to know which, and inform the public.
More weekend reading: for a more technical overview of state currency operations I'd recommend Mosler's "Soft Currency Economics" (https://tinyurl.com/2gx8ycmn). Whether you read 7DIF first or second hardly matters, both together are a good enough overview for understanding the maximal policy space available for a currency sovereign nation. But the bottom line is free of left/right ideological preferences for investment (war+oligarchy versus green energy+emancipation, etc.) one can *always* run a fiat currency system on a floating exchange rate with *proper full employment* and price stability (flatten the Phillips Curve). On fixed exchange rates or "hard currency" (peg to gold) one cannot flatten the Phillips curve without continuously strong exports. Point being, world wide, it is logically impossible for all nations to be net exporters. But in the case of a net importer like NZ, we can have full employment (nairu = 0%) because we run a floating exchange rate. It is a simple (and epic tragic) policy mistake to leave anyone in NZ unemployed who is willing and able to work for public purpose.
The more journo's calling out the officials at the fiscal & monetary authorities, the less ranty any one journo needs to be. Rantiness has a cumulative effect I reckon. We need more journalism solidarity. Do any journalists get together and strategically write with a unified purpose? Or is it all just individualistic commentariat?
On the co-pay for drugs, you wrote "...all to earn the Government about $150 million a year in fees and to repay public debt just a tiny bit faster" - where is the calling out the Treasury nonsense Bernard? NZ Gov is the monopoly issuer of NZD, their deficit is "our" surplus, to the dollar. If they "pay off" the Tsy debt" the NZ economy loses interest incomes, if they "pay off" ALL the debt (so cash outstanding as well), then the NZ economy collapses. They have no need to increase revenues if real resources are not at risk of over-use. In the case of medicines, there is no risk of medicines being under-supplied, so no need on earth for a co-pay.
NZ Government fees and levies are never about funding the government, they cannot run out of NZD. It is about not putting real resources at risk. Treasury do not understand. F-ing bean counters. They still think of NZD as like "gold" and in metaphysically short supply so Parliament has to "get them off someone" - which is moronic, and they DO NOT UNDERSTANDING FLOATING EXCHANGE RATES. Talk to Warren Mosler, I beg you. warren.mosler@gmail.com
We need more smart and influential journalists correcting the Treasury and RBNZ backwards thinking. Because the little guys like myself and your readers just do not have the media pull. For your "weekend reading" for heavens sake try getting through https://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Seven-Deadly-Innocent-Frauds-of-Warren-Mosler.pdf
Thanks for the link Bijou. Some reading for me for next week. I do regularly call out Treasury, but have to be careful not to be too ranty. Keen to state the factors and let them tell the story, not necessarily just me asserting things.
You can let your readers like me do the rants. ;-) But at some point an honest journalists has to start not allowing officialdom be the only story told to the public, especially when it's an ignorant fraud.
It has to be possible to get a few Treasury, Parliamentary, and RBNZ insiders together for an MMT pow-wow, so at least they cannot claim ignorance. It does not have to be many for a start, just one or two with decent job security and moral+intellectual scruples. I hope to have at least one (from Treasury) soon.
I appreciate that you call them out Bernard. I wish other RNZ/TVNZ journo's had the same gumption. They cannot cure Treasury/RBNZ/Beehive staffer ignorance if they don't call it out, which means they cannot just let the data do the talking, they need to provide a robust counter-narrative. They can give them the rope to hang themselves, but if the penalty comes 25 years in the future they're all retired and are not going to be held accountable, they passed the noose on to some other blithering idiot "math whizz" at the CB/Tsy.
(I can give you "dumb" ANN models that forecast more accurately than the DSGE models. Being a math whizz does not correlate with understanding macroeconomics. In the neolib era it anti-correlates, all the more strongly because their base understanding is backwards. Sun orbits the Earth stuff.)
Macroeconomics is not weather forecasting, it's a matter of Ptolemaic epicycle DSGE modelling at Treasury and RBNZ analyst desks -- they can tune parameters to fit their narrative of the indicators. Which is either ignorance or fraud, and a good journalist ought to make it their professional business to know which, and inform the public.
More weekend reading: for a more technical overview of state currency operations I'd recommend Mosler's "Soft Currency Economics" (https://tinyurl.com/2gx8ycmn). Whether you read 7DIF first or second hardly matters, both together are a good enough overview for understanding the maximal policy space available for a currency sovereign nation. But the bottom line is free of left/right ideological preferences for investment (war+oligarchy versus green energy+emancipation, etc.) one can *always* run a fiat currency system on a floating exchange rate with *proper full employment* and price stability (flatten the Phillips Curve). On fixed exchange rates or "hard currency" (peg to gold) one cannot flatten the Phillips curve without continuously strong exports. Point being, world wide, it is logically impossible for all nations to be net exporters. But in the case of a net importer like NZ, we can have full employment (nairu = 0%) because we run a floating exchange rate. It is a simple (and epic tragic) policy mistake to leave anyone in NZ unemployed who is willing and able to work for public purpose.
Nuf of a rant for you? ;-)
The more journo's calling out the officials at the fiscal & monetary authorities, the less ranty any one journo needs to be. Rantiness has a cumulative effect I reckon. We need more journalism solidarity. Do any journalists get together and strategically write with a unified purpose? Or is it all just individualistic commentariat?