Matisyahu's Blog

I swear I was losing it towards the end of my shift but thank goodness it is over and I can relax. I’ve got the roast chicken out of the freezer so when I wake up tomorrow it’ll be all defrosted so then I can put it in the oven along with some roast vegetables – I’ll have a bigger meal during the day because on Monday night I’ll be going to bed early because I’ve got a 6am start on Tuesday where I’m having to go into the office.

There was an announcement regarding an agreement between China and the US regarding trade but personally I think it is all rather meaningless given that it isn’t a real treaty and more importantly Trump can just decide for ever reason to break what ever arrangement there is. Unfortunately we have another 3 years of this chaos and because the US is the biggest players in the world the result is that the rest of the world gets dragged into their lunacy whether we want to or not.

There are rumours regarding the Trump administration is wanting to make the US dollar weaker to encourage an export led recovery but the problem with that is a) if you’re running a massive budget deficit then it is inevitable that the value of the dollar will go up because the US is seen as a safe haven – when you buy US debt you need to buy US dollars to do so thus pushing up the value b) they’re wanting to have more investment into the US but how can you do that without having to first buy US dollars to make the investment? c) they haven’t announced that they’re getting rid of the ‘strong dollar policy’ so how serious are they went they cannot even give a signal to the market about the administrations intentions?

The problem is that with the New Zealand economy is just how exposed we are to the international economy because of how small our domestic economy is – sure, there are decisions that the current government are making that aren’t helping the situation but that being said I think we’d still be struggling even if a Labour led government was in power (probably less so than the current situation but still struggling). I have to admit, I do like the capital gains tax and the focus on spending it on healthcare reminds me very much of Helen Clark and the pledge card from around 25+ years ago that was used to explain what the top tax rate of 39% would pay for.

Personally I think they need to go further and setup a Ministry of Works with a focus on turning Housing New Zealand into the primary provider of rental accomodation with income related rents. If there is a focus on decommodifying housing it should result in the demand for houses as investment properties stall as those who rent go into the public sector (the private sector cannot compete with the interest rates the government can borrow at along with the rent being income related thus putting it below the market rate) and empty houses go onto the market which will hopefully either stagnate (so it stays the same nominal price but in real terms going down in price) or going down in price. I’d love to see that but something tells me it would scare middle New Zealand who see themselves as a would-be landed gentry.