Showing posts with label Crash. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crash. Show all posts

June 13, 2025

Air India Crash

Here is a very useful step-by-step guide to what might have happened to the Air India plane that crashed soon after takeoff from Ahmedabad, on its way to London Gatwick.

August 08, 2015

New Zealand, What I Think Is Going On

Two things making the news right now, ever increasing house prices, especially in Auckland, and the plunging milk price paid to dairy farmers. 

Is it Chinese buyers bidding up house prices? Well I think, only partly, in a broader sense it's everyone buying houses, not just the one ethnic group of immigrants and investors.

What I think is going on is monetary inflation, or something akin to that, with money brought in by the banks, not just investors. If you look around the world most developed economies offer very low returns, while others such as Greece are actually bust. In NZ returns are much higher, so the banks look to shift their funds from low interest countries to places like NZ, and the result is funds available for lending to everyone. That means more money available chasing the same number of houses, equalling a general rise in house prices.

We are all recipients of this, particularly when we sell our houses at inflated values. The safety valve of sorts is that a large proportion of those sale proceeds heads to Australia, particularly the Gold Coast.


There is no easy fix here. If NZers are stopped from house trading then the result for the NZ economy will be dire. The house price inflation is just about all that is holding things up. To a certain extent NZ is like a drug addict, hooked on the banks supply.


A possible solution would be controls on the inflows and outflows of foreign exchange. A return to the seventies. It may have to happen.


Then we have the milk export price farmers receive. Something not pointed out but I think is relevant; what happened to world population, did they suddenly stop eating? Hmm? No they didn't, so the drop in NZ milk export price must mean global supply has increased. 

What did you think New Zealand, did you think the rest of the world would be prepared to sit there paying for your milk rather than make it themselves and much cheaper? The big buyers, like China, aren't sitting round twiddling their thumbs, they're setting up farms at much lower cost than in NZ and producing milk at home and in South America, Africa, Asia, even the USA. 

Further complicating this is the ban by Russia on imports from the EU. Dairy makes up a large proportion of that volume and now the EU are dumping their output anywhere they can find a buyer, directly competing with good old NZ.

Here yet again, is another lesson NZ fails to heed. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. NZ gets carried away on the latest big thing, and forgets we need a balanced, diversified and developed economy, making products with real value, middle and high tech, the lot. If we fail to develop, then we're going to see more boom and bust.

March 22, 2015

The Last Time Oil Price Collapsed

The Last Time Oil Price Collapsed

That's right, the last time we found ourselves in this position was late 2008 and the start of the Global Financial Crisis. Michael Snyder provides the following analysis, read it and weep;

Guess What Happened The Last Time The Price Of Oil Crashed Like This

Now let's be careful, I'm NOT saying the oil price drop is causing anything, what I'm saying is it's indicative, a symptom of a wider malaise, a general lack of demand for anything. Why do people need more stuff ? We've got enough already.

Less demand, lower production, less employment, lower incomes; recession.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/last-time-oil-price-collapsed-ken-horlor?trk=prof-post