Posts by BenWilson
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The real elephant in the room is neither the Jap or US currencies. It is the Chinese. If that is ever floated everything we have ever though we knew about monetarism is going out the window in minutes.
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I'm an exporter myself, and years ago made what is in retrospect a very wise, if novel decision. I pegged my charges to the *NZ* dollar. Why noone else ever thought of such a thing I don't know.
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He definitely is trying to talk it down and it definitely won't work. It is a dangerous game to play poker with the kind of money floating around that could run on our currency in a flash. Even a really good poker player loses a lot of the time. I don't know of any evidence that Cullen is a good poker player in this game. He's up against billionaires, and multibillion fund managers who have been doing it for decades.
I'm not the least bit convinced we're in a crisis. The dollar is very high against the US because the US is incredibly low. Otherwise it's only a little bit high. Interest rates are rising and that will cool the property market all by itself, already is. Commodities are cheap, which is great. Exporters are hurting, importers are booming. There's always this flipside. Anyone in property has been doing well for years. Everyone not in property couldn't give a crap about interest rates, except maybe on their credit cards. And I guess everyone has to learn the hard way about what a fucked idea having one of those is.
The only real negative is that when you're at the top of a wave you can only go down. Most likely the government will go down with it. At least they put Kiwisaver in place, the first serious attempt to address our pitiful savings and retirement planning. The impact will not really be felt for a decade or two, certainly not soon enough to save Labour now.
Perhaps a bitter fight in which Key really puts his cards on the table could lead to a closer race, but his strategy of basically withholding information on all National policy has been working for him and I can't see him changing that. He'll just talk empty rhetoric and pick holes in the real policy that Labour is forced to implement simply by virtue of actually being the government. Then we will see his true nature and find out if National really have left their bad old ideas behind them.
In a battle about currency speculation, I would back Key over Cullen any day. But it should be obvious that I hope we don't start doing that with our currency, because I back Soros and his ilk over Key any day, too.
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Will you also be the first to record your own satirical voiceover to such video?
Don't you dare. The last thing I need is a reason to watch Parliament.
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It is this kind of thing that makes me despair of party politics, when what I really want to vote for is a little of this and a smidgen of that and a mixed assortment of those things.
I think representative democracy is more to blame, and parties are just a symptom of that. If you periodically abdicate responsibility for choices to other people, those people will coalesce into large power factions, and you'll get the Clayton's choices that we are faced with today.
Yes - but there is a difference with being seen as being on the side of the people and being seen as an vacillating big ball of nothing, which is what Key is in danger of being seen with all his U-turns.
Labour would like to paint that picture, and possibly the media have latched onto that as their favorite controversy. That Clark has been doing it for years, the Foreshore and Seabed being a prime example, is something that is not faced honestly by Labour or big media.
I'm personally more concerned that Key does have an agenda, he just won't say what it is. If he doesn't, and is happy to leave it to watching the polls, great.
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I think there is a developing theme that Key will U turn at the whiff of a bad focus group.
That might be one of the good things about him. It's only something to sledge National for because they *pretend otherwise*. They like to project the idea of strong decisive leadership. In the past that has usually meant doing things most people really don't want them to. It could be the biggest triumph of MMP that strong leadership is actually interpreted as having the courage to do what the people really want, regardless of the influence groups and party machines.
Or he could be a liar, and will be a strong leader in the older, more fuxored sense. That's why I figure *bugger representatives* let's just cut to the polls.
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Yeah, but if the polls are driven by the news media's compliant reporting of Kedgley and Rankin's conspiracy theories, don't we have a problem here?
Perhaps. That's a big IF though. If polls had real direct power, people might be more careful what they said to them.
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Tom: I find it rather ironic that when Clark does a 'U-turn', or rolls over/sidelines her front bench to 'front foot' a politically sensitive issue, it's a sign of strength; when Key does he's a flake, at best, or a two-faced arsehole with some secret agenda.
It's definitely ironic. Key has basically learned from Clark to sit in the middle and read the polls. Which means there is little difference, at least in appearances, between the two main parties, which leaves me scratching my head over why Key/National is so popular. Surely part of it is simply fatigue. Another part is that the opposition are not really in a position to make any mistakes so they can't be hammered for them. Withholding policy is a cunning tactic, for sure. It's something the government simply can't do.
Time will tell if Key really is a slightly bluer Clark, or a wolf in sheep's clothing, though.
And having the leadership reading the polls seems to me a sign that MMP is working. It could be even better if the polls simply made the choices themselves, but this is a good compromise.
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Maybe it's because I'm reading this amazing Peter Guralnick biography of Sam Cooke right now, but these kinds of sentiments really do make me sad. That whole century of incredible popular culture, amongst other cool things, is now just... pfffft!... because that damn country won't get its head out of its ass.
You can't trade on past glory forever. Of course they've still got stuff to offer. It's just a matter of taking what's good and discarding the rest.
And as a sad mantra, I must reiterate that I don't dislike American people at all. Almost all of the ones I know are good people. The fuxor ratio is not higher than NZ. But their system and their culture are not what they were, which is lamentable, if inevitable.
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The crack about following security dictates refers to both the reason for our presence in Afghanistan and the ridiculous screening process one goes thru at the airport even when not flying to the US.
I think we get a lot out of presence in someone else's war zone. It's real training, hard to come by. But we can leave any time. That side of it is really an opportunity rather than a cost. But I tend to agree on some of the more insane screening practices. Is that not more from the airlines/ports than the govt, though?
Baseball caps can be useful, although I have to say something that covers the ears really does serve a better purpose. And I must be a bad PA denizen cause I never listen to the radio at all. Got tens of thousands of tracks of my own choice that I actually like to listen to instead. My big concession to American culture is loving their boxing and MMA stuff. Yank pounding yank, that's fun.
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