Issue 30 November 2009
How did a few dodgy housing loans precipitate the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression?
Much has been written about the role of bankers and financiers in the 2008 financial meltdown, with a common view being that these sectors were characterised by too much greed and too little regulation. Glenn Boyle suggests that a more detailed analysis of the historical chain of events identifies an altogether different culprit.
Kindling copyright fires
Nineteen Eighty-Four has become famous for its portrayal of state control and the violation of individual rights. Ironically (but something Orwell himself might have presciently posited), the novel was recently caught up in a chain of events that gave rise to questions about who has the right to control copyright works in a digital world. Mina Moayyed and Susan Corbett investigate.
Authors:
Susan Corbett, Mina Moayyed
Saving our savings: Kiwisaver and the New Zealand Superannuation Fund
Retirement savings pose a challenge to governments throughout the OECD. But for nearly 20 years, from 1988 to 2007, New Zealand provided no incentives at all for private retirement savings - and not surprisingly these declined. The New Zealand Superannuation Fund and Kiwisaver were belated attempts to address this gap in policy. Now they've been weakened. Lisa Marriott says it's time for New Zealand to get its head out of the sand.
Author:
Lisa Marriott
Public-private partnership placebos
For New Zealand's baby boomers, notions of our nation's state-funded 'cradle to grave' healthcare system were liberally dispensed with mother's milk or swallowed down alongside school milk and fluoridated local water supplies. The common assumption is that the passing of the ground-breaking Social Security Act in 1938 - which conferred 'free' public hospital care to patients - was synonymous with central government taking on full responsibility (via taxation revenues) for both the services and the facilities in which hospital services were provided. Bronwyn Howell points out the fact-defying holes in such an assumption.
Is a credible exit from government debt and deposit guarantee programmes possible?
On 22 September 2009, the Australia-New Zealand Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (ANZSFRC) met in Melbourne to consider the future of the debt and deposit guarantee programmes introduced by the Australian and New Zealand governments in response to disruption in financial markets. Its subsequent Statement 6 examined the principles that should underpin these types of schemes, considered how the implemented schemes have met those principles, and outlined what ANZSFRC believes to be desirable futures for such schemes. This article is an abridged version of the Statement.
Waves in the waterbed
Will the recent recommendation to regulate New Zealand mobile termination rates reduce the costs of mobile calling, as many advocates claim? European evidence suggests instead that some customers might actually face significant increases in call prices. Brownyn Howell investigates the 'waterbed effect' and its impact on mobile telephony charges.
