Lindsay Mitchell: PM's new line

The Prime Minister is back from his holiday and insists the economy has turned a corner.

But it's not showing in the unemployment data. June 2025 benefit data is just out (scroll down).

Mike's Minute: Is America now a global laughing stock?

Ken Langone started a small operation called Home Depot. 

These days he is a billionaire and major donor to the Trump campaign and Republican Party. 

He is, like all the rest of us looking on, incredulous, or furious, or in disbelief, or confused.

Professor Robert MacCulloch: The graph that shows how the RBNZ Mistakenly Caused NZ's Worst Slump since 1991 (barring Covid's 2020)

What have we got to know about Reserve Bank of NZ Governor Adrian Orr over the years? He's hot headed, can't take criticism from folks more knowledgeable about economics than himself, gets carried away & overexcited, and is desperate to be in the news. Orr told the country he wanted to "engineer a recession" to stop the inflation he created. Instead he engineered three (Stats NZ data has become as unreliable as the Census since the Chief Statistician / CEO there hasn't has a statistics qualification for over a decade). But there was never a need.

Dr Bryce Wilkinson: Please Ma’am, can we have some more fiscal largesse?

Last week, eleven New Zealand economists issued a public letter advocating more government spending relative to revenue. That means yet more debt.

The belief that more government borrowing lessens recession severity has a long but professionally embarrassing history.

The theory that recessions can be due to insufficient (government) spending is widely attributed to English super-star economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946).

Peter St Onge: China Enters the Economic Doom-Loop

China is going pear-shaped as Beijing panics and wheels out the “monetary bazooka.”

Cue the Worldwide inflation.

Just a few weeks ago I did a video about how China is on the edge of recession. Weeks later, the edge of recession has now progressed to a full-blown Chinese fire drill.

Ryan McMaken: America Now Has Fewer Employed Workers than It Did a Year Ago

According to the most recent report from the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US economy added 142,000 jobs during August while the unemployment rate fell slightly to 4.2 percent. Since the highly disappointing July jobs report, media reports on the state of the job market have become far less positive. This report was described by CNN as “mixed news.”

Yet, the employment situation has not fundamentally changed from what has been common over the past year. Claims of solid, or even “blowout,” gains in employment throughout most of the past year have always been unconvincing if we look at the bigger picture. August’s “mixed” jobs report simply shows a continuation of the gradually weakening employment market that we have been seeing for months.

Michael Reddell: Treasury says one thing in a speech but quite another in the BEFU

I picked up The Post this morning to find the lead story headlined “Recession hits homes harder than businesses”, reporting a speech given earlier this week by Treasury’s deputy secretary and chief economic adviser Dominick Stephens. There was an account of the same speech, but with some different material, on BusinessDesk a couple of days ago. Astonishingly, despite being an on-the-record address, on what are clearly high profile macroeconomic issues, including touching on monetary policy, The Treasury has not issued the text of the address, so the rest of us – not the Auckland “business crowd” who heard it live – are entirely reliant on journalists’ reporting of what the chief economic adviser to the government’s principal economic adviser (which is how Treasury likes to style itself) actually said, let alone the context within which he said it. That seems less than ideal (to say the least).

Michael Ryan: Does fighting inflation always lead to recession?

Does fighting inflation always lead to recession? What 60 years of NZ data can tell us

There is an ongoing global debate over whether the high inflation seen in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic can be lowered without a recession.

Professor Robert MacCulloch: When will the Reserve Bank of NZ Stop Spinning

When will the Reserve Bank of NZ Stop Spinning and Stop Misleading Parliament and the Nation?

Yesterday the Reserve Bank kept the Official Cash Rate Unchanged. It released a statement saying, "The NZ economy continues to evolve as anticipated by the Monetary Policy Committee". What a line coming from a Governor who told Bloomberg News in the US in 2021, whilst he was busy printing $50 billion in cash, which is the primary cause of our current high inflation, that "The fear of the 70s, the 80s, stagflation, it is such a different world [now]".

David Farrar: Empathy for those affected

It is important to differentiate the need to trim back the massive increase in the public service, with the impact it has on individuals and their families.

The next few months will be a very challenging time for many public servants. They face possibly losing their own job, but also there being very few new jobs to apply for in the next few months. This means that they have to worry about paying the mortgage, kids expenses etc. No-one should lose sight of this.

idbkiwi: Wellington Is Running Out of Rocks

I’m titillated by the term ‘technical recession’ being bandied about the state of the economy. It’s a bit like ‘technical pregnancy’: you either are or are not experiencing one. We are. We’re in a recession and it behoves those with a public voice to speak to that fact. To say it loud and clear: the economy is shrinking, our trade balances are worsening, there is no magic pot of money to pretend it away – and yet they do not. They prevaricate – ‘technical recession’ – as if it’s not really happening.

Kerre Woodham: Did we actually need the public service increase?

Back in 2022, Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr was appearing before a Parliamentary Select Committee trying to explain how and why the bank was too slow in moving the OCR and therefore increasing interest rates. He was asked by Parliamentary Select Committee member Chloe Swarbrick whether the Reserve Bank was deliberately engineering a recession to rein back inflation.

Professor Robert MacCulloch: Let the Good Party Times Roll at the Reserve Bank of NZ

Let the Good Party Times Roll at the Reserve Bank of NZ - the architect of our Recession - no austerity there.

The Reserve Bank has doubled staff numbers in five years to 510, with its personnel costs rising to $80 million in 2023 from $32 million in 2018 - that's up by a whopping 250%. I guess when you get to print $50 billion in cash & flood the markets with liquidity, causing runaway inflation that now requires the Bank to now "engineer a recession" (in the words of the Governor) to get it back down again, there's always a bit of that cash floating around to spend on your own employees.

Mike's Minute: The world is looking at us for what not to do

So, a recession it is then.

Another one.

We had one at the end of 2022, going into 2023. Remember those good times? It got revised initially and the Government of the day said "see, told you it wasn't a recession".

Robert MacCulloch: NZ's Big News Story should be "Treasury Pre-Election Update shows plummeting consumption per capita"

I can't make sense of the Finance Minister's statements today regards the "Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Update" by the NZ Treasury. He claims the country is in better shape than expected and that the "forecasts showed New Zealand would avoid recession, with wages keeping ahead of inflation".

So here's my question - GDP growth up to June 2024 is forecast to be just over 1% (the forecast has been raised slightly from 1.0 to 1.3%). On the other hand, it is also stated immigration is now running at 100,000 a year, corresponding to an increase in 2% of our entire population. But if total GDP is only growing at a bit over 1% and the population is growing at 2%, then GDP per capita must be declining (since GDP per capita equals total GDP over population size).

Robert MacCulloch: Has Grant Robertson got a hole in his forecast for 5 million Kiwis....

.....but not for 100,000 immigrants?

I can't make sense of the Finance Minister's statements today regards the "Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Update" by the NZ Treasury. He claims the country is in better shape than expected and that the "forecasts showed New Zealand would avoid recession, with wages keeping ahead of inflation".

Robert MacCulloch: New IMF data ranks NZ's GDP growth as worst out of 159 nations in world along with Equatorial Guinea

What has PM Hipkins done? The newly released IMF Regional Economic Outlooks say NZ is projected to be the worst performing economy in the entire world in 2024 in terms of GDP growth, with one exception, Equatorial Guinea, which has been ripped apart by civil war. No other time in our history has NZ been bottom of the planet.

Mike Hosking: Our high wage growth has been engineered

In watching the Prime Minister yesterday in the house, I once again wondered to myself whether he either has a clue economically, or whether he actually does but just assumes the people who may vote for him don't, so he can pull the wool over their eyes.

This time it was about the wages. He was crowing about the wage stats, saying the wage stats are up, hourly earnings are up and the median wage is up. Everything is up!

But - it's up above inflation.

Lindsay Mitchell: Recession starts to bite

In just one month the number of people receiving a main benefit has risen by almost 3,000.

Data released today shows that the percentage of the working-age population dependent on a main benefit rose from 11.2% at the end of June 2023 to 11.3% at the end of July 2023.

Over the same period in 2022 the increase was just 1,100 claimants meaning the proportion of the working age population stayed at 11%

Cam Slater: Everything Is Going along Sweet as Bro… Oh Wait!

The Government and Grant Robertson would have you believe that everything is going swimmingly in the economy. This is despite them tipping us into recession, borrowing and spending like a drunken sailor, with poorly targeted government spending, like the multi-billion dollar Covid fund, all fuelling rampant inflation.

Everything is just fine. Except it’s not.