Markets nervous ahead of the Fed; US commercial foreclosures rise; Taiwan feels confident; China displays angst over economy prospects; UST 10yr 4.17%; gold and oil dip; NZ$1 = 58.8 USc; TWI-5 = 67.8

What do you mean serious? The Iron Dome has been depleted to the point they could make Tel Aviv hide in bomb shelters for a few months. They have been attacking the north of Israel for months and the IDF keeps putting off any invasion. The last time Israel tried to invade Lebonon they lost and Hezbollah is much stronger now.

The only way this is not serious is Hezbollah probably wont try to occupy Israel. The only thing preventing further escalation is everyone knowing that the IDF will go straight to countervalue targeting.

It's easier to win a conventional war than an ideological one. 

Well seeing as the Israelis are the smartest people on the planet, they just fly drone strikes to continually take out the Hezbollah leaders, no need to invade, their air force will fly in unopposed when it needs to. No need to escalate the fight until Gaza is finished, its 85% done on that front.

We didn't in the first place. At best we screwed together kits someone else shipped to us.

We'd end up buying them from someone else, probably at a higher price.

The DTIs limit lending. A shimmy to the left is better than a misstep, orr should never have raised official rates from one extreme to the next, he only had to look at the aussie more balanced response.

They had the answer - the now revoked extra landlord tax. The effect of which was to make the interest % higher for landlord than those just owning their own home. And the extra cost on landlords was tax revenue for all of us

It was simple, unavoidable tool that worked (never mind if you agree with the tax or not). 

Well, it’s more than just a geographic split. We’re really in a civilizational split, and it goes much deeper. What’s at stake is what kind of economy is the world going to have?

Is it going to be a financialized, neoliberal post-industrial economy, which is what the United States and Europe are pushing? Or is it going to be the kind of economy that textbooks talk about, where economies produce agricultural and industrial goods to feed themselves and make everybody prosper? I almost would use Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase, Barbarism or Socialism, because the West no longer has the means of real economic control over trade and production. It only has military force, terrorist violence and corruption to maintain its control.

The NATO West does financial control by having loaded down the global South and even many Asian countries with dollarized debt for the last 70 years. That dollarized debt holds them in a financial neocolonialism, an international debt peonage. Besides that, the ultimate power that the United States and Europe have to maintain their unipolar control to prevent other countries from going their own way and pursuing their own interests is to bomb them and mobilize terrorism.

The NATO West has lost its basic industrial or agricultural control because it has outsourced its industry to China and other Asian economies, and its sanctions against Russia and other countries has obliged them to become self-sufficient instead of relying on the West for a widening range of their basic needs. So these countries are now in a position to use their labor, industry and agriculture to make themselves prosperous and regain control over their economies, not to make U.S. and European investors rich. They want to take control of their economies in a way that will raise their wages and living standards.

That can’t be done if they follow a policy of privatization, World Bank advice and the IMF’s instructions to sell off their land and raw materials, privatize and sell off their public infrastructure, communications, electrical systems and water rights to foreigners while getting rid of government regulation and social-support programs. The West’s demand is to let the private sector run everything without government “interference.” Well, there’s no way that any economy can grow and get prosperous without being a mixed economy with strong public infrastructure providing basic needs at non-monopoly prices. Link

I think inequality has a considerable way to go yet. Technology is only going to further suppress the value of labour in coming years, to the benefit of capital owners.

The ecosystem, hard to say whether we'll do that ourselves or whether the impact of our entire species on the planet will make much agriculture tenuous. 

Population growth?

Are young resident kiwis about to feel flush enough to start having families that support population growth, or are you talking about immigration?

It's always hard viewing things in single digit years.

We had a pandemic that restricted outbound migration for around 2 years (so pent up demand).

Then we had serious inflation.

Now we're having an economic recession, because of the first two things.

So the impetus for people to leave, is fairly high. Although not unique to NZ at all (in Europe, they had the above, PLUS the looming threat of war), and potentially not a long term trend, depending what happens with local and global economics, and geopolitics.

Fair post and a valid rebuttal of Jfoe's otherwise many very valuable posts.  The post lockdown inflation was originally demand driven, due to the fiscal and monetary stimuli.

I know we will never reconcile our differences on this point, but I just don't buy that the demand was that relevant. I am not saying it didn't make a difference but it will be marginal. The picture link you have posted above doesn't work, but when I have looked at what you have shared before, it looked like you were measuring the amount spent (a function of price x volume) rather than the volume purchased (a better measure of demand). The amount spent went up because import prices went up. You can see this as clear as day here. You can compare the volume and value of imports here - how much does demand really shift there?

Where demand will have made a difference is in the extra profit margin taken by our huge wholesale and retail sectors in 2020/21 - a margin they could take because they had market power and people had money to spend. This added maybe 100pts to CPI in the early days, but those profits quickly retreated when costs started going up. Here's the figures all industries here.