Monthly Archives: April 1999

Possibilities: Could New Zealand Have a Financial Crisis?

This entry was posted in Listener, Macroeconomics & Money on by .

Listener 24 April 1999.

Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money;

If it were possible to predict the precise timing of a financial crisis, everyone would take precautions, and precipitate an earlier one. However the footnote has three lists of indicators. My scorecard for New Zealand gives 5 out 8 for macroeconomic performance factors and 5 out of 7 for macroeconomic policy factors (although some of our policy changes were more than a decade ago). But for microeconomic conditions (which the conventional wisdom says is the more important), I reckon it is 0 out of 8 (assuming reasonably competent bank management – who can tell until after the event?). Moreover, with one small exception all New Zealand banks are owned overseas. Megabank International will quickly and quietly bail out Megabank New Zealand if gets it into trouble, to protect its reputation elsewhere.

What Happened to the Nation Building State in New Zealand?

This entry was posted in History of Ideas, Methodology, Philosophy, Political Economy & History on by .

Paper for the New Zealand & Australian Studies section of the Conference of the Western Social Sciences Association, April 21-24 1999, Fort Worth, Texas.

Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;

Brent McClintock’s “Gordon Coates and the Nation-Building State: 1920-1935”, which precedes this paper, also sets its stage. [1] In the interwar period there arose a group of New Zealanders who were committed to use the instruments of the state to build a New Zealand nation distinctive and independent (as much as it could be). Coates may have been the earliest, but numerous other New Zealanders in politics, the public service, corporations, and cultural life also participated. Most are recognized in The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and many have full biographies published or in the process of being written: politicians Peter Fraser, Apirana Ngata, and Walter Nash (as well as Coates); public servants Clarence Beeby, Joe Heenan, Alistair McIntosh, Douglas Robb, and Bill Sutch; businessmen James Fletcher and James Wattie; writer Rex Fairburn and Frank Sargeson (with prominent artists coming a little later). Even so, acknowledging such great totara trees but locates the bush over which they towered: that bush below was dense with others equally committed to the nation building state. Curiously, there are no obvious women for the list. The tallest was Te Puea, but her vision was to build the Tainui nation.

Constant Crises: It Is True – There Are More Of Them

This entry was posted in Listener, Macroeconomics & Money on by .

Listener: 10 April, 1999.

Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money;

The worldwide trend of financial liberalisation since the early 1980s seems to have resulted in more financial crises. These include currency crises, where the foreign exchange market is disrupted, forcing the government to change its exchange rate regime (frequently either changing the peg of the fixed exchange rate, or shifting to some sort of floating regime). New Zealand had a currency crisis in July 1984 when there was a fixed exchange rate, and so much conversion of New Zealand into foreign denominated financial assets that the Reserve Bank (which funded the conversion) became short of foreign currency.