Listener 28 June, 2003.

Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money;

Even the International Monetary Fund is beginning to talk about the possibility of world deflation, that is the general level of prices falling over the medium term. Although the tendency over the last thousand years has been for inflation (rising prices), deflation with slightly falling prices has happened: notably in England during the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, from 1660 to 1730, and during the life of Queen Victoria. There have also been sharp price falls for short periods – most memorably in the 1930’s depression. (My source is David Hackett Fischer’s splendid The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History.)

By R. Grynberg, D. Munro & M. White
Listener 26 April, 2003

Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money;

Those involved – including Fijian coup leader and subsequently Prime Minister, Sitiveni Rambuka – were anxious not to have too public the story of the financial crisis of the National Bank of Fiji (NBF). Instead the authors – then academics at the University of Fiji although two have since left – pieced it together from the public record and the investigative reporting of a few courageous journalists. Their story goes like this.

A Listener Sequence

This note prepared in the first week of October 2002. Since then I have published the following columns on the state of the world economy:
The Bubble Bursts: A “Millennium Depression”? (2 November 2002)
Deflating News: Just How Sick is the World Economy? (28 June 2003)
Recovery and Deficit: Where is the US Economy Going? (February 2004)

Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money;

Towards the end of the 1990s I became increasingly concerned that the US boom was not only unsustainable, but the reversal would lead to a severe recession or even a depression. In the early 2000, I wrote in a column Self -interest Rates (27 May 2000) which said
“Any monetary authority in an economy which has its share values so dangerously out of line with reality as in the US, cannot be given a top grade. History will be less generous with Greenspan’s reputation, after the millennium depression.”
With hindsight it reads as a bon mot, but it was almost certainly a careful – if gloomy – judgement following a trip overseas. The following is a commentary on the Listener columns which addressed the world economy since then. It was written in preparation for my planned column of 2 November 2002, probably entitled Will There Be Another World Depression?.

Listener 7 September, 2002.

Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money;

Don Brash recently claimed that ‘almost none of the big changes of the late 1980s and early 1990s have been reversed’ and described those who denigrate the economic policies of the 1990s as talking ‘cattle manure’. This may be inappropriate language for the National Party’s front bench economic spokesperson, but the greater worry is that he seems to be keener to repeat the past, than to learn from its mistakes.