Plan for the inconceivable, so you don’t get caught up the creek without a Plan B. Listener: 12 June 2010. Keywords: Business & Finance; In November 1967, the inconceivable happened: the UK devalued the pound. The following weekend Leyland Motor Corporation implemented its Plan B, announcing new offshore prices for its cars. Much later, British…
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Why more townies should spend an occasional day on a farm. Listener: 17 April, 2010. Keywords: Business & Finance; Occasionally a townie should go to a field day on farming, as I did recently at Glenside Station, near Gladstone in the Wairarapa. Covering 1125ha and carrying about 10,000 stock units – mainly sheep and beef…
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Is the Government tipping the balance away from consumers? Listener: 18 April 2009 Keywords: Business & Finance; Some years ago I was involved in a merger case before the Commerce Commission. The chief executives of the firms involved did not know whether to co-operate, which was the (desired) outcome if the commission…
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Presentation to ‘Connecting the Dots’ a conference to celebrate the 30th anniversary of global standards (bar codes) in New Zealand. 25 February 2009. Keywords: Business & Finance; I cant remember bar codes and scanners being introduced into my shopping life. Except when I try really hard I cant REALLY remember what went before. Thirty years…
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This is a report I prepared for GS1 to celebrate their 30th birthday in February 2009. . The full report is available from http://www.gs1nz.org/ Keywords: Business & Finance; : Business & Finance; Executive Summary This report is about the GS1 Universal Product Code, its history, its uses and its future uses. There are three basic…
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Address to the Wellington Branch of the Institute of Directors, 4 December, 2008. Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money; When I was invited to address you, it was suggested I should – in the spirit of the season – say something light. After all, we are about to break for a few weeks to be spent with…
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Public-private partnerships are not free lunches. Listener: 20 September, 2008. Keywords: Business & Finance; Wastewater from my dwelling goes out through a public-private partnership (PPP) scheme called “Boot” (Build-Own-Operate-Transfer) in which the sewerage plant was built and is owned and operated by a private company. Ultimately, the plant will be transferred…
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Public ownership is not as important as public control. Listener: 26 January, 2008. Keywords: Business & Finance; Forty years ago Arnold Nordmeyer, then leader of the Labour Opposition, asked a group of students whether they wanted to nationalise corner dairies. His question has haunted me ever since. We don’t want publicly owned…
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The producer is no longer king. Listener: 29 December, 2007. Keywords: Business & Finance; It’s been a long way from the Agricultural Development Council (ADC) of 1963 to last month’s Primary Industries Summit – in both time and head space. The ADC focused on the pastoral sector. In those days, dairy,…
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The fine art of spotting creative accounting Listener: 3 November, 2007. Keywords: Business & Finance; Ian Cross, a former editor of the Listener, says I was one of only two commentators who warned in early 1987 that shares were overpriced. But even if I predicted the 1987 sharemarket crash – albeit not…
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House prices can be fickle but debt is loyal to the end. Listener: 22 September, 2007. Keywords: Business & Finance; Macroeconomics & Money; What is the value of your house? You might quote the “rateable value” given by Quotable Value for local authority tax (rates) purposes. Or you could go to a…
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The quality of mercy should never be strained, and businesses need to balance ethics and profitability. Listener: 30 June, 2007. Keywords: Business & Finance; The cause of Folole Muliaga’s death after a contractor for Mercury Energy cut off the electricity supply to her household remains uncertain, but the tragedy reminds us that…
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Are public-private partnerships the next problem? Listener: 2 December, 2006. Keywords: Business & Finance At the launch of Treasury veteran Richard Shallcrass’s memoir Family Silver, David Caygill, who had been one of Shallcrass’s Finance Ministers, rejected the suggestion in David Lange’s autobiography that there might have been corruption in the privatising of state assets. Shallcrass, who…
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As a consequence of some discussions on corporate tax policy, I wrote this paper to sort out my ideas. As I state, I am not a tax specialist. Indeed it turns out what I thought was a profound discovery – that New Zealand’s corporate tax on undistributed earnings is a sort of capital gains tax…
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Being brilliant does not mean you are right. Listener: 23 September, 2006. Keywords: Business & Finance; Like most senior executives, Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling could be charming, creative, inspiring and playful; he could also be moody, arrogant and intolerant. Described by some as “incandescently brilliant”, and “the smartest person I ever met”, he saw intelligence as…
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Listener: 1 July, 2006. Keywords: Business & Finance; It is not the first time that Telecom New Zealand has been “unbundled”. When it was a state-owned enterprise in the 1980s it was directed by its owner (the government) to provide the local-loop lines, which connect households and businesses to the telephone exchanges, separately from the…
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Regardless of whether the executive committed felonies, the company broke fundamental laws.
Listener: 28 January, 2006.
Keywords: Business & Finance;
I don’t know whether Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, top executives of Enron, the giant US energy company that crashed in 2001, will be found guilty of the various felonies for which they are about to be tried. That is a question of what they did, and the intricacies of any statute law that they may have broken.
Listener: 3 December, 2005.
Once in the heart of our cities were department stores. Many readers will have visited them as children, accompanied by mother, aunt or grandmother. Perhaps you played in the children’s area while they were shopping. There was the excitement of the lift with its own operator, and one even had an escalator that was so grand to ride. And sometimes – not always, and you had to be especially good – you were taken to the graciously tableclothed tearoom for orange cordial and a generous slice of that very special cake.
Listener: 19 November, 2005.
Keywords: Business & Finance; Political Economy & History;
One might think there is a standoff between government and business. A fortnight before the election, a Business Herald “Mood of the Boardroom” feature showed that many chief executives were antipathetic towards the Labour-led government and willing to say so in public. The impression was reinforced by leaks showing that business and a business lobby group had been involved in the making of Don Brash, leader of the National Party.
The Trekka Dynasty, by Todd Niall (Iconic Publishing, $29.95)
Listener 6 November, 2004.
Keywords: Business & Finance; Political Economy & History;
Making the boxy Trekka the centre of New Zealand’s contribution to the 2003 Venice Biennale bemused New Zealanders, as well as those who visited. Apparently artist Michael Stevenson saw it as a story about a small nation building an industrial economy, to be swept away by 1984. An easy image perhaps, but a superficial one.