Utopia, you are standing in it!

More than a decade ago now, I got interested in the sovereign debt defaults in the 1930s. Debt was in the wind, between the severe economic recession and financial crisis and the Reinhart and Rogoff book. And so it was while I was working at The Treasury that I first became aware of New Zealand’s sovereign default in the 1930s. A couple of years later that story ended up written up here and our (quite limited) default joined the published lists of sovereign defaults.

The biggest defaults globally weren’t, and often still aren’t, in such lists. I wrote here a few years ago about the US government’s abrogation of gold clauses in debt instruments, in effect depriving bondholders of a big chunk of their real purchasing power, all as written up in UCLA economist Sebastian Edwards’s accessible book.

But on a global scale the most important series of defaults in…

In the Sunday Star-Times yesterday there was a double-page spread in which various moderately prominent people (all apparently “leading speakers” at some “annual University of Waikato economic forum” this week were given 100 to 150 words to tell us “How can NZ build back following a string of serious economic and social setbacks”.

Most of the contributions were pretty underwhelming to say the least. To be fair, 150 words isn’t a lot, but real insight tends to shine through and there wasn’t much on offer in this selection. But then, who really cares much what the chief executive of the Criminal Cases Review Commission or the co-founder of an advertising agency think on such issues.

By contrast, Paul Conway is a statutory office-holder in an economic field. He is the (relatively new) chief economist of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and in that capacity has been appointed by the…

Let’s begin with first principles. We are never going to get a “definitive” documentary that takes in everything, talks to everyone and tells us all we need or could possibly want to know about the inscrutable genius, Stanley Kubrick.

Consider just what’s available for a fan or fanatic’s perusal on Youtube at this writing. There’s “Lost Kubrick,” a pretty good “unfinished films” doc made for TV. A fan has pieced together all the film footage — including childhood home movies, much of it with sound — “All Video Footage of Stanley Kubrick.” Somebody else uploaded a “rare” hour long taped interview with him. There are collections of actors and directors talking about him, “behind the scenes” footage from any number of his films also archived there.

And that’s on top of the many other fine documentaries on him, about him, or deep diving into this or that…

On 8 February, the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous judgment in Re Allister [2023] UKSC 5. What follows is an attempt to clarify the judgment’s significance for the doctrine of constitutional statutes, as first canvassed by Laws LJ in Thoburn v Sunderland City Council [2002] EWHC 195 (Admin).

I think that the Court’s remarks inRe Allistercan be read to show that there is no distinct doctrine of constitutional statutes in UK law. On one side, the Court seems to accept that the principle of legality—the interpretative presumption that Parliament does not wish to legislate against fundamental constitutional rights (R v Home Secretary, ex p Pierson[1998] AC 539;R v Home Secretary, ex p Simms[2000] 2 AC 115)—can extend to such rights even when they are created by statute. On the other side, the judgment affirms Parliament’s ability to enact ‘subject…

An interesting (?) concept from renewables promoters here, partly to boost ‘innovative’ (generally expensive) technologies. We’re supposed to believe that bigger subsidies, or ‘fiscal incentives’, will lead to lower bills.
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The energy sector is ramping up pressure on the government to bolster investment in green projects, with Renewable UK the latest to raise concerns the country could be overtaken by rivals such as the US and EU, reports City AM.

The industry body, which supports wind and tidal energy, has called on Downing Street to bring in fiscal incentives such as new capital allowances for renewable technology.

It also favours sustained supply chain investment in the UK to expand green jobs, and speeding up the planning process – with offshore wind developers waiting an average of five years for planning approval under current restrictions, and some projects taking up to a decade to secure a grid…

Christopher Luxon has been making it very clear what the National Party in 2023 stands for, and it’s not for New Zealand. I’m not sure when National changed its reason for being, and I doubt many of it’s supporters realise it yet, but National stands for NZ the way Labour stands for the working man – not in the slightest.

There was something extremely chilling in today’s about-face declaration of loyalty to Net Zero 2050 and man-made climate from Maureen Pugh. She was a woman with her own opinion at the start of the day and merely a drone by the end. Whatever her opinion had been, it was subsumed into the collective adherence to the quasi-religious cult of climate change, a cult of which the National Party is now an overly enthusiastic participant, and likely has been for some time.

What happened today reminded me of a Bill Maher…

Wind turbine makers are bleeding cash, and several are terminal. Siemens Gamesa has been axing hundreds of jobs in Europe and America. Vestas, Nordex and Enercon are also on the ropes. The cause of all this corporate misery is down to a collapse in wind factory investment, which is down to a collapse in wind power subsidies, and the sudden realisation that the economics of wind power, even with massive subsidies, never stacks up.

In the States, General Electric’s wind turbine manufacturing unit booked a $US2.2 billion loss in 2022.

And, as Thomas Lifson outlines below, the worst is yet to come. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

Wind power makers suffer huge losses, want to abandon major project
American Thinker
Thomas Lifson
5 February 2023

The greenies’ dream of “clean” (except for millions of dead birds) energy from wind farms is dying in the face of the poor economics (even…

By Larry Bell ~

During his State of the Union Address, President Biden blamed high U.S. energy prices on greedy oil companies despite as former presidential candidate Biden having virtually pledged to put them out of business.

During a Democratic primary debate with Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden said, “No more subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill — period, [it] ends, number one,” later adding, “No more, no new fracking.”

Joe has largely kept his promise, evidenced by an aggressive war against fossil energy which has included banning of the Keystone XL pipeline along with myriad other executive orders placing regulatory restrictions on drilling.

It is perhaps forgivable then, that Republican attendees loudly groaned at his ironic SOTU temerity when Biden said, “When I talked to a couple of…

The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst
by David Nasaw
704 pages
Houghton Mifflin
Published: June 2000

Although more recent biographies of Hearst are now available, David Nasaw’s “The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst” remains the standard biography of this idiosyncratic media tycoon. Nasaw is a biographer and Professor of History at City University of New York. His most popular books are biographies of Joseph P. Kennedy (which I liked) and Andrew Carnegie (which I loved).

William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) is a remarkably fascinating, but often infuriating, biographical subject. He was born with a silver spoon nearby…if not quite in his mouth. But he learned the art of hard work and perseverance from his father – a self-made mining millionaire. Handed a golden goose (the San Francisco Examiner) at the age of twenty-four, he built an enormous media empire which survives to this day.

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
by David Nasaw
868 pages
The Penguin Press
Published: November 2012

David Nasaw’s “The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy” was published in 2012 and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee in 2013. Nasaw is an author and a professor of American history at City University of New York. Among his most widely-read books are biographies of William Randolph Hearst and Andrew Carnegie (which was a 2007 Pulitzer Prize nominee).

Nasaw began this authorized biography after Kennedy’s two youngest children (Jean and Edward) approached him to assess his interest in the project. Once he was assured unrestricted access to Kennedy’s papers and complete editorial control he spent six years researching his subject’s life – documenting his personal and professional lives and investigating a variety of alleged misdeeds.

It is unusual for a biography…

From the Emperor’s Desk: I will not do a complete biography of Queen Mary on the anniversary of her birth, instead I will focus on how she came to marry King Felipe II of Spain.

Mary was born on February 18, 1516 at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, England. She was the only child of King Henry VIII and his first wife, Infanta Catherine of Aragon, to survive infancy. Her mother had suffered many miscarriages and stillbirths. Before Mary’s birth, four previous pregnancies had resulted in a stillborn daughter and three short-lived or stillborn sons, including Henry, Duke of Cornwall.

Throughout Mary’s childhood, Henry negotiated potential future marriages for her. When she was only two years old, Mary was promised to François, Dauphin of France, the infant son of King François I, but the contract was repudiated after three years.

In 1522, at the age of six, she…