Source: Household crowding: The Social Report 2016 – Te pūrongo oranga tangata.
House crowding continues long run fall despite the dead hand of neoliberalism
24 Sep 2016 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, economic history, politics - New Zealand, poverty and inequality
Street Scenes of Manchester in the Edwardian Era
24 Sep 2016 Leave a comment
in economic history, economics of media and culture Tags: British economy
The history of colonization, 1492 – 2008
24 Sep 2016 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic history Tags: age of empires, Age of exploration
Did @AnnPettifor correctly predict the global financial crisis in 2003?
21 Sep 2016 1 Comment
in economic history, global financial crisis (GFC), macroeconomics, monetary economics
You are not much of a leftover Marxist if you are not predicting a crisis in capitalism is on the horizon.
https://twitter.com/PolicyObsAUT/status/778456702655995904
Capitalism is supposed to collapse under its own inner contradictions.
Professional stock market tipsters are notorious from specialising in predicting doom as well and they still get listened too despite terrible forecasting records.
Plenty of people warned of dark days ahead in the lead up to the global financial crisis. An essay anyone can read with profit is Ross Levine’s An Autopsy of the U.S. Financial System: Accident, Suicide, or Negligent Homicide? His abstract says
The evidence is inconsistent with the view that the collapse of the financial system was caused only by the popping of the housing bubble (“accident”) and the herding behavior of financiers rushing to create and market increasingly complex and questionable financial products (“suicide”).
Rather, the evidence indicates that senior policymakers repeatedly designed, implemented, and maintained policies that destabilized the global financial system in the decade before the crisis. Moreover, although the major regulatory agencies were aware of the growing fragility of the financial system due to their policies, they chose not to modify those policies, suggesting that “negligent homicide” contributed to the financial system’s collapse.
The New York Times warned in 1999 that Fannie Mae was taking on so much risk that an economic downturn could trigger a “rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s,” and emphasised this point again in 2003. Greenspan testified before a Senate committee in 2004 that the increasingly large and risky Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac portfolios could have enormously adverse ramifications.
You predict a financial crisis by pointing to adjustments in your share portfolio to take advantage of shorting the market and then showing how big a profit you made afterwards.
The movie The Big Short highlights that its protagonists had skin in the game. They were investing in mortgages or shorting the same in the expectation of the crash they were predicting. Much of the drama in the film is about how long their foretelling of a crash took to come true.
There were no windbags and armchair critics in The Big Short talking gloom and doom on the horizon without investing their own money to profit from their forecasts.
Facts about the The Great Escape
21 Sep 2016 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic history, growth miracles Tags: The Great Escape
Rise and Fall of the Ottoman Empire 1300 – 1923
14 Sep 2016 Leave a comment
in economic history Tags: age of empires, maps
NZ inflation rate since 1991 with 1% CPI bias adjustment
13 Sep 2016 Leave a comment
in economic history, inflation targeting, macroeconomics, monetary economics, politics - New Zealand Tags: CPI bias, inflation rate
The inflation rate is overstated by about 1% each year because of difficulties in measuring new goods entering the consumer price index and improvements in the quality of existing goods in the consumer price index. With that adjustment of 1% in the chart below, a common measure of that bias, New Zealand has had zero to negative inflation for four years
Source: Reserve Bank of New Zealand Key Statistics.
One of the reasons for an inflation target band of 1 to 3% is an inflation rate of 1% is actually an inflation rate of 0%.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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