Liam Dann: The bad joke that spoiled a golden decade

A homeowner, an investor and a worker walk into a pub... Photo / 123RF

A homeowner, a sharemarket investor and a worker walk into a bar.

"How was your decade?' asks the bartender ...

Okay, stop me if you've heard this one before. It ends with the joke being on the worker.

The punchline: If you had all your wealth in the NZX-50 since the end of 2009, you'd have seen it increase by more than 300 per cent.

If you had your wealth in housing you'd have doubled it - at least.

If you were relying on wage growth to get ahead, well, I hope you got a promotion or two.

Otherwise that rate growth, based on Statistics NZ's inflation-adjusted Labour Cost Index, was just 19.2 per cent for the entire decade.

The brutal reality of the twenty-tens, or whatever we call them - has been that if you started the decade with assets it's been a golden age.

If you started the decade poor you've probably gone backwards.

While structural inequality has always been part and parcel of capitalism, it was supercharged by the fallout from the global financial crisis.

We knew things were bad at the time.

In December 2009 we still had finance companies collapsing, international banks were still teetering.

New Zealand had just emerged from recession with annual GDP growth tipping into the positive territory (0.7 per cent) for the first time in five successive quarters.

Unemployment was 6.5 per cent.

On paper things were unambiguously worse.

What wasn't so clear then was how the solutions being put in place to prop up the financial and economic system would change the world for years to come.

Interest rates were slashed, money was printed, inflation fell and productivity stalled and wage growth stagnated.

Meanwhile, capital poured into higher-yielding assets - property and shares - driving an historic asset boom which stood in stark contrast to an otherwise sedated, low-growth global economy.

We got through it but there was a price to pay, one we are still paying in political upheaval and intergenerational conflict.

A grim assessment?

Well, yes and no, you should read the one I wrote last time.

It seems remarkable that another decade ends in 16 days.

You know you're getting old when you can look back through the archives and check what your reflections were the last time a 10-year mark ticked over.

(The other sign - for the record - is having no sense of how fashion or music has changed since the dawn of the decade.)

My Message to readers in December 2009 was grim - black humour - a play on the impending zombie apocalypse. Survival was my word of the year.

Business confidence might be down now due to government policy uncertainty and issues like staff shortages. But companies aren't falling over like dominoes. Consumers haven't stopped spending.

The global financial crisis had a huge bearing on the subsequent decade. Photo / 123RF

So things are better.

Unless you're trying to buy your first house.

Or until we get to that wealth divide, the child poverty statistics, the homeless, the mental health issues.

And with it all the social conflict and the political upheaval.

New Zealand is lucky, in some countries people are rioting in the streets.

But even our placid little corner of the world still seems an uglier, less friendly place in 2019.

What happened?

Social media and technology have played a role.

There has been a revolution in the way we talk to each other and in the way we work.

Some blame the gig economy and the "Uberisation" of the work force for low wages.

But a recent report by the Productivity Commission found that, in this country at least, the hype around the gig economy is much greater than its footprint.

I still think it is our economic settings that define our problems - debt, low productivity and low wage growth - as much as they still keep us a float.

We're trapped in this high debt, low growth, asset bubble, world and there doesn't seem to be a way out that doesn't involve another crash.

There are large structural forces at play. Chinese growth - from which New Zealand has undoubtedly benefitted.

There's American politics and the demographics of the largest single generation in history moving into retirement and focused, hawk like, on their savings and investments.

New Zealand central banks don't really have freedom to run against the tide on monetary policy.

But in other ways New Zealand has been able to milk the conditions more than most.

Chinese demand for food, free flow of foreign money into our housing market, record rates of immigration have seen us outpace our global peers on economic growth.

It was the decade of the rock-star economy.

Did the John Key government do enough to offset the widening wealth gap. No, of course not.

But to be fair, its focus - to begin with at least - was on survival.

It might not have been quality growth, but it was growth and we took it.

Battling a recession and then Crown accounts stretched by the Christchurch earthquakes, the government was forced into austerity mode.

It took too long to see that we were out of the woods.

Now we are playing catch-up. But we're still battling our fears ... of recession, of market meltdowns and property slumps.

Hopefully something has to shift in the next decade. Perhaps fortune will favour the bold in the roaring 20s.