Worst may be over but not time to relax yet
Monday, 06 October 2008
Over the past few weeks in New Zealand, surveys have been released showing very sharp rises in the confidence of business people, consumers, and farmers. In fact a consumer confidence measure has risen to its highest level in six years while in our own monthly survey businesses’ confidence is the highest it has been since we started the survey in 2005. Why are people feeling so much happier?
|
Growth in sight soon
Tuesday, 09 September 2008
Growth prospects for the New Zealand economy still look relatively poor in the short term but in a way this is good because the scene is being set for reasonably good growth over 2010 and perhaps – dare one suggest – even from late 2009.
|
Day of reckoning
Monday, 11 August 2008
New Zealand’s economy is almost certainly in recession at the moment and this is not what any of us were expecting up until four months ago. What has happened is this.
|
Clean or green, oil or nuclear?
Friday, 04 July 2008
Its 2.15 in the morning NZ time and I’m sitting on a flight back from Tokyo to New Zealand. I never sleep when travelling, which makes a trip to London an extremely interesting affair for a few days after arriving and getting back home again.
|
It's time to get tough
Monday, 09 June 2008
There continues to be a wave of negative news about the New Zealand economy and it seems very unlikely that in the next few months the tide will turn – but turn it will. What it will take for things to start improving is to a great extent simply the passage of time.
|
How to upturn in a downturn
Monday, 05 May 2008
When an economy weakens not all sectors suffer to the same degree and in fact some sectors do quite well – pawnbrokers, insolvency practitioners for instance.
|
NZ could face recession, but we've got some insulation
Monday, 07 April 2008
The United States housing market started heading down in the middle of 2006 in response to the Federal Reserve increasing its funds rate from 1% to 5.25%.
|
Aussies' pain could be Kiwis' gain
Monday, 10 March 2008
If you are an exporter then here are a few thoughts on what the environment is likely to be for our main export destinations over the coming year.
|
Why we are not going into recession
Monday, 11 February 2008
If you took your guide as to what is likely to happen in the New Zealand economy over the coming year from newspaper headlines then you would be closing up shop around about now.
|
Lessons from Japan
Monday, 03 December 2007
I’ve just come back from a short visit to Japan giving an address at the annual meeting of the Japan New Zealand Business Council. It was my first time in Japan and I was quite fascinated by the very strong emphasis on infrastructure and most notably the transport system.
|
Inf lation still a big concern for growth
Monday, 05 November 2007
Recently Statistics New Zealand released numbers showing that over the September quarter consumer prices in New Zealand rose on average by 0.5%.
|
The good news and the bad news about the economy
Monday, 01 October 2007
Prospects for growth in the New Zealand economy have just become very interesting.
|
What made the Kiwi dive?
Monday, 03 September 2007
Exporters have finally received some good news over the past few weeks with the Kiwi dollar falling very strongly from over 81 US cents to just over 74 US cents at the time of writing. There are a number of factors one might consider responsible for the decline in our exchange rate. One is the intervention by the Reserve Bank in our foreign currency market. Its intervention on June 11 was the first in the 22 years of a floating currency.
|
Exporters warned; ‘Don’t put faith in policy promises
Monday, 06 August 2007
In this column last month we warned exporters not to get optimistic about the Reserve Bank’s intervention causing any decent decline in the Kiwi dollar.
|
More Headlines »
|
