Coronavirus - New Zealand
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@anonymous said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@jc said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@siam Yeah let's wait and see the impact 6+% inflation will have over the next year or two. I'm worried...
Would be interesting to know how many deaths are going to be caused from the inflation induced by our Covid response. Might take some of the gloss off of the Covid stats.
All the other non covid deaths dwarf the covid deaths
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@tim It depends who you mean by “we” and what asset classes you are talking about. My suspicion is the richest 2% of the NZ population are sitting on a stack of liquidity right now. An increase in mortgage rates would affect the poorer home owners pretty hard and I suspect the investor class would welcome the opportunity to hoover up some cheaper properties. Which would mean a blip for the market but a disproportionate hammering of the less wealthy. Inflation always hits the poor hardest. Stocks? That’s not really in our hands anymore. The game is now played by institutionals largely trading shares that don’t even exist. There’s nothing to support the prices being traded at the moment anyway, so there’s a n argument to be made that the market won’t crash because the big boys have taken it meta and they have control now. I’m not sure the actual performance of the companies matters anymore.
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@jc said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@tim It depends who you mean by “we” and what asset classes you are talking about. My suspicion is the richest 2% of the NZ population are sitting on a stack of liquidity right now. An increase in mortgage rates would affect the poorer home owners pretty hard and I suspect the investor class would welcome the opportunity to hoover up some cheaper properties. Which would mean a blip for the market but a disproportionate hammering of the less wealthy. Inflation always hits the poor hardest. Stocks? That’s not really in our hands anymore. The game is now played by institutionals largely trading shares that don’t even exist. There’s nothing to support the prices being traded at the moment anyway, so there’s a n argument to be made that the market won’t crash because the big boys have taken it meta and they have control now. I’m not sure the actual performance of the companies matters anymore.
and there is one of the most depressing things i have ever read
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@godder said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@jc no doubts about it, Bernard Hickey has pointed it out from Stats NZ aggregate data on money in bank accounts.
That whole Twitter thread is depressing, but this one in the middle of it...
Like other readers, I'd assumed the "$952b" must be a typo and it should be a matching figure in the millions. But Bernard is insistent (and I've yet to dig any deeper):
The national accounts show that household net worth rose by $629b between the end of December 2019 and the end of September 2021, while the net worth of non-financial businesses rose $323b. In short, asset owners got $952b richer during Covid, while the poor saw their real incomes go backwards and their debts to MSD rise by $400m to $1b by mid-2021 (CPAG)
The full article: Covid's big winners and losers revealed
The Labour Government, supported by the Greens, presided over policies that accidentally on purpose engineered the biggest transfer of wealth to asset owners from current and future renters in the history of New Zealand. I detail those numbers and explain how it happened below the paywall fold. (I have decided to open this up to all subscribers and the public given the public interest involved.)
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@donsteppa said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@godder said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@jc no doubts about it, Bernard Hickey has pointed it out from Stats NZ aggregate data on money in bank accounts.
That whole Twitter thread is depressing, but this one in the middle of it...
Like other readers, I'd assumed the "$952b" must be a typo and it should be a matching figure in the millions. But Bernard is insistent (and I've yet to dig any deeper):
The national accounts show that household net worth rose by $629b between the end of December 2019 and the end of September 2021, while the net worth of non-financial businesses rose $323b. In short, asset owners got $952b richer during Covid, while the poor saw their real incomes go backwards and their debts to MSD rise by $400m to $1b by mid-2021 (CPAG)
The full article: Covid's big winners and losers revealed
The Labour Government, supported by the Greens, presided over policies that accidentally on purpose engineered the biggest transfer of wealth to asset owners from current and future renters in the history of New Zealand. I detail those numbers and explain how it happened below the paywall fold. (I have decided to open this up to all subscribers and the public given the public interest involved.)
Time after time you see this. Lawmakers who’ve only had real exposure to people like themselves firmly believe they are smart enough to anticipate the unintended consequences of their policies. But quite frankly the smartest people are ones they will never meet, who are getting paid insane amounts to find the weaknesses and exploit them without conscience. They’re better resourced, have asymmetric access to data, they only have to find one weak point to open up entire systems, and they know that if they make a mess it’s the government’s problem to clean it up, not theirs.
I’ve been in meetings with GS analysts where I felt like Jonathan Harkness having dinner at Dracula’s place. It’s like you’re dealing with another species. A really predatory one.
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@jc said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@godder said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@antipodean said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
As we've seen, the myth of "vaccination will save us" has been just that. There's always a new hoop to jump through.
Vaccination seems to have saved lives and reduced serious illness requiring hospitalisation pretty well. Sure, deaths are not 0, but to be well under 100 total deaths nearly two years into this despite the massive incursion of Delta, a more dangerous and transmissible variant among unvaccinated populations, is absolutely a testament to vaccination's effectiveness.
Assuming you're talking about NZ exclusively, is that true? Despite our truly impressive vaccination rate, vaccinations haven't had to do any heavy lifting at all in preventing deaths here, have they? The low death rate is surely almost exclusively down to us isolating ourselves internally and globally as far as I can tell. Vaccinations are great, but we've never really stress-tested their effectiveness in NZ.
Agree that border restrictions and the Alert Levels did all the heavy lifting for the first 18 months at least, and border and now the Traffic Lights are still responsible for a major impact. That said, there is some data on vaccination's impact...
The first half (or so) of that page is case data since the August Delta outbreak, and it's crystal clear that vaccination has been very successful in reducing cases and hospitalisations even despite Simpson's Paradox.
11610 cases in total for 617 hospitalisations, but of those, 4325 were unvaccinated over-12s for 405 hospitalisations (9.36%), compared to 2325 cases who were fully vaccinated for 49 hospitalisations (2.11%).
That obviously requires actually contracting Covid, which that data also pretty clearly shows is less likely for vaccinated people compared to unvaccinated people.
If Omicron didn't exist, and we were only worried about Delta, I think NZ would have gone to Green last week (maybe not Northland). The reason for keeping some restrictions on unvaccinated people is they are still the main source of hospitalisations and deaths which is still the main concern.
is the latest (30 Nov 21) official information on vaccination status of deaths I can find. From that, of the 18 deaths in the Delta outbreak at the time, 4 (22.22%) were fully vaccinated and the other 14 (77.78%) weren't. By the end of November, vaccination rates were pretty high, so that's some support from local data that vaccination reduces deaths. Not stated there, but I think from memory that most of those 4 vaccinated deaths were elderly rest home residents as well (from case demographics, the survival rate of 90+ is much poorer than even 80-89). -
@jc said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@donsteppa said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@godder said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@jc no doubts about it, Bernard Hickey has pointed it out from Stats NZ aggregate data on money in bank accounts.
That whole Twitter thread is depressing, but this one in the middle of it...
Like other readers, I'd assumed the "$952b" must be a typo and it should be a matching figure in the millions. But Bernard is insistent (and I've yet to dig any deeper):
The national accounts show that household net worth rose by $629b between the end of December 2019 and the end of September 2021, while the net worth of non-financial businesses rose $323b. In short, asset owners got $952b richer during Covid, while the poor saw their real incomes go backwards and their debts to MSD rise by $400m to $1b by mid-2021 (CPAG)
The full article: Covid's big winners and losers revealed
The Labour Government, supported by the Greens, presided over policies that accidentally on purpose engineered the biggest transfer of wealth to asset owners from current and future renters in the history of New Zealand. I detail those numbers and explain how it happened below the paywall fold. (I have decided to open this up to all subscribers and the public given the public interest involved.)
Time after time you see this. Lawmakers who’ve only had real exposure to people like themselves firmly believe they are smart enough to anticipate the unintended consequences of their policies. But quite frankly the smartest people are ones they will never meet, who are getting paid insane amounts to find the weaknesses and exploit them without conscience. They’re better resourced, have asymmetric access to data, they only have to find one weak point to open up entire systems, and they know that if they make a mess it’s the government’s problem to clean it up, not theirs.
I’ve been in meetings with GS analysts where I felt like Jonathan Harkness having dinner at Dracula’s place. It’s like you’re dealing with another species. A really predatory one.
It's not just not knowing what the unintended consequences might be as Treasury and RBNZ do have pretty good economists and policy wonks - governments can't always implement the best options because voters won't vote for them if they do, and will actively vote for parties that will repeal them, making the best options counterproductive.
That said, the initial plan for the wage subsidy as announced was a lot more limited than it ended up being after National got involved and whipped up public support for an unlimited scheme including large businesses - https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/govt-takes-significant-economic-decisions-nz-readies-alert-level-4-covid-19-fight shows that the original scheme had a cap of $150,000 per employer, and removing the cap almost doubled the estimates of costs at the time.
Edit: here's the other side of the ledger, heavily reduced insolvency compared to the GFC - https://www.interest.co.nz/personal-finance/114034/bankruptcy-rates-low-despite-pandemic-kiwis-dodging-them-way-they-werent
Also, the quote above should include NZ First as part of the government in 2020 since they also engineered the original package.
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@donsteppa Hickey is likely understating the increase that the richest have seen, because he’s only looking at what has been allowed to accumulate in savings accounts, which the RBNZ has visibility over. But you can bet a load more when straight into funds and investments, which the RBNZ can’t see. Their opacity is the point.
I’m not sure he does a great service by aggregating “business” together as one group. You can’t really compare a person who runs a coffee shop employing 3.5 staff in Kamo with the New World down the road in Kensington. National chains and multinationals have had access to the cheapest cash they’ve ever seen, along with subsidies they barely need, as the banks recognise them as a sure bet and offload their low cost funding to organisations that least needed it. But the small businesses won’t have seen much of that.
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@godder said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@jc said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@donsteppa said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@godder said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@jc no doubts about it, Bernard Hickey has pointed it out from Stats NZ aggregate data on money in bank accounts.
That whole Twitter thread is depressing, but this one in the middle of it...
Like other readers, I'd assumed the "$952b" must be a typo and it should be a matching figure in the millions. But Bernard is insistent (and I've yet to dig any deeper):
The national accounts show that household net worth rose by $629b between the end of December 2019 and the end of September 2021, while the net worth of non-financial businesses rose $323b. In short, asset owners got $952b richer during Covid, while the poor saw their real incomes go backwards and their debts to MSD rise by $400m to $1b by mid-2021 (CPAG)
The full article: Covid's big winners and losers revealed
The Labour Government, supported by the Greens, presided over policies that accidentally on purpose engineered the biggest transfer of wealth to asset owners from current and future renters in the history of New Zealand. I detail those numbers and explain how it happened below the paywall fold. (I have decided to open this up to all subscribers and the public given the public interest involved.)
Time after time you see this. Lawmakers who’ve only had real exposure to people like themselves firmly believe they are smart enough to anticipate the unintended consequences of their policies. But quite frankly the smartest people are ones they will never meet, who are getting paid insane amounts to find the weaknesses and exploit them without conscience. They’re better resourced, have asymmetric access to data, they only have to find one weak point to open up entire systems, and they know that if they make a mess it’s the government’s problem to clean it up, not theirs.
I’ve been in meetings with GS analysts where I felt like Jonathan Harkness having dinner at Dracula’s place. It’s like you’re dealing with another species. A really predatory one.
It's not just not knowing what the unintended consequences might be as Treasury and RBNZ do have pretty good economists and policy wonks - governments can't always implement the best options because voters won't vote for them if they do, and will actively vote for parties that will repeal them, making the best options counterproductive.
That said, the initial plan for the wage subsidy as announced was a lot more limited than it ended up being after National got involved and whipped up public support for an unlimited scheme including large businesses - https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/govt-takes-significant-economic-decisions-nz-readies-alert-level-4-covid-19-fight shows that the original scheme had a cap of $150,000 per employer, and removing the cap almost doubled the estimates of costs at the time.
Edit: here's the other side of the ledger, heavily reduced insolvency compared to the GFC - https://www.interest.co.nz/personal-finance/114034/bankruptcy-rates-low-despite-pandemic-kiwis-dodging-them-way-they-werent
Also, the quote above should include NZ First as part of the government in 2020 since they also engineered the original package.
First off, it’s not just Labour, they’re all as bad. Winston is probably the worst TBH, because he has the arrogance to think he’s the smartest guy in the room when your average ANZ strategist will likely see him as a soft mark.
I don’t think you’re right any more about the RBNZ and Treasury having pretty good economists. That was once true but now it’s more of a myth based on distant memories.
An example: their Funding for Lending programme. Only banks got it, with non-banks, credit unions and building societies (which dominate lending to poorer people) explicitly excluded. At the same time the CCCFA changes which were well flagged up gave the banks who received the F4L funding every reason to decline lending to their poorer customers and applicants. The only winners were preferred borrowers and the banks themselves, whose balance sheets now look great. But you and me are paying for their balance sheet health, and will be for years. So will the poorer parts of our society. That was entirely foreseeable.
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And now apparently if you have a wedding you have to wear masks at all times unless eating and drinking. Even for the wedding photos. Time to tell them to fuck off I reckon.
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@jc and when at the gym, wear mask upon entry, and moving about, but when you are exerting yourself doing an exercise, ok to take off.
I feel for the businesses, owners, staff who are supposed to be enforcing these ridiculous rules!
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@jc Agree. The other thing I don't get is Omicron is the big bogey man because of it's exponential growth. So if all these measures are such great ideas why do we always delay their introduction in this case until 4th Feb?
I realise that in some instances businesses have to prepare but this mask mandate is simply a case of saying "right fuckers you need to keep your fucking masks on at all fucking times"
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@jc said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
And now apparently if you have a wedding you have to wear masks at all times unless eating and drinking. Even for the wedding photos. Time to tell them to fuck off I reckon.
How retarded are these fluffybunnies making these rules? How can you have a functioning health care system when this idiot (https://www.beehive.govt.nz/minister/hon-andrew-little) is advised by these spastics (https://www.health.govt.nz/about-ministry/leadership-ministry/executive-leadership-team)?
Govt: We're going to have a mask mandate.
Everyone else: Overwhelming evidence is masks don't work.
Govt: We'll mandate tight fitting surgical masks. Then they'll work.
Everyone else: Have you secured supply? There's a bit of a problem with supply at the moment.
Govt: Wear them while taking wedding photos.
Everyone else five years later: Oh look how happy and pretty you are. This is you isn't it? -
@antipodean But it’s to protect our overrun health services. I mean
They’re still operating off the concept of cases, which I thought they told is is now outdated? If a first world country can't operate with 612 hospital admissions without it becoming untenable, then we’re not a first world country.
“Oh, but Omicron!"
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@jc said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
If a first world country can't operate with 612 hospital admissions without it becoming untenable, then we’re not a first world country.
If the speed and comms of the contact tracing arm of the Ministry of Health is any wider guide, our public health system may still be triaging patients from the March 2020 outbreak...
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@jc said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@donsteppa I don’t know how you can say that. We are the envy of the world.
The gold standard.
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@donsteppa this gold?
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@taniwharugby All right, so turns out we’re the “calf-shit yellow” standard.