![Brian Fallow: Lima's main gain - We're all in it together](/pf/resources/images/placeholders/placeholder_l.png?d=815)
Brian Fallow: Lima's main gain - We're all in it together
At least the global climate change conference at Lima was not a train wreck, like Copenhagen five years ago.
At least the global climate change conference at Lima was not a train wreck, like Copenhagen five years ago.
A $6 billion drop in dairy farmers' incomes this season is a blow to the wider economy, no question, writes Brian Fallow. But it's not all bad.
The new leader of the party whose brand is to represent the interests of working people recognises that it needs to update its understanding of who working people are.
To suspicious eyes, it starts to look as if the Govt is in ideological thrall to the 1980s dogmas that the smaller the state the better, and whatever the problem, the solution is a market, writes Brian Fallow.
Germany has come to be seen as the miser among major economic powers, saving too much of its enviable income and spending too little. Germans, naturally, do not see it that way.
They turned out in impressive numbers - hundreds of thousands at least - to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago.
Where has inflation gone and does it have a return ticket? Little wonder the Reserve Bank has just left interest rates on hold and the markets expect no change in the official cash rate for another year or so.
It is a sign that the times, they are a-changin' when leading central bankers, of all people, are publicly deploring prevailing levels of, and trends in, inequality.
If the country has just voted for three more years of the status quo, one area where that is not nearly good enough is climate policy.
The Productivity Commission has been sent back into the minefield of housing costs.
The National Party's pitch for a third term boils down to the slogan: Don't mess with success.
How's this for an anomaly: if a commercial property is munted in an earthquake, and maybe even kills someone, it gives rise to a tax deduction, but seismic strengthening work to reduce the risk of that happening does not.
Just how far we still are from political consensus on climate policy was evident at a pre-election debate on the issue organised by Business New Zealand in Auckland on Tuesday.
As the general election approaches political opinion polls are coming thick and fast.
The jobs numbers out yesterday were less encouraging than the headline drop in the unemployment rate to 5.6 per cent suggests.
Exporters can only hope that the economic news out of the United States this week will reinforce, or at least not reverse.
Is poverty for life? A Treasury report suggests not, writes Brian Fallow. Only 24 per cent of those at the bottom decile in 2002 were there seven years later.
If the Budget Bill English delivered in May was fiscally responsible and appropriately countercyclical.
Bank bosses argue capitalism must a regain sense of social responsibility to restore public faith in its virtues.
The exchange rate may have eased in recent weeks but two reports remind us of just how overvalued the kiwi dollar is, writes Brian Fallow.
The Greens are open to negotiating offsetting subsidies to emissions-intensive, trade-exposed firms whose survival might be threatened by their proposed carbon tax.
Under its equivalent of the cover of darkness Parliament has legislated to stop a rort by a subset of a subset of participants in the emissions trading scheme.
You can have too much of a good thing, as the saying goes, and right now it is a live question whether immigration is one of those good things, writes Brian Fallow.
Budget 2014 lifts government spending by $1.5 billion or 2 per cent in the coming year but that will represent a cut in real per capita terms, writes Brian Fallow.
With today's Budget expected to herald a return to surpluses - skinny next year but plumper in the following years - it is time to start thinking about what to do with them, writes Brian Fallow.
The contrary view to Labour's plan for monetary policy and savings goes broadly like this: It is a cute idea but it won't work, writes Brian Fallow.
Graeme Wheeler pointedly reminded us of his power to intervene if the kiwi dollar continues to climb while export commodity prices fall, writes Brian Fallow.
What we got from Labour's finance spokesman David Parker on Tuesday was a much broader economic policy than that would imply, writes Brian Fallow.