Morning Bernard,
This government, like the ones before it, continues to flail around neglecting the private sector debt elephant in the room. We live in a money system where nearly all new money is created as private bank debt, yet the policymakers keep leaving this factor out of their formulas, rendering them hopelessly flawed.
What they call responsible fiscal management, slashing public budgets and cutting services, is in fact complicit participation in a structurally extractive racket. Our so-called “economic growth” is underwritten not by real productivity, but by exploding private debt, mostly tied up in inflated land prices thanks to the deliberate exclusion of land from the CPI. That lets the Reserve Bank and Treasury pretend inflation is under control, while house prices rocket and mortgage debt piles up. It’s the oldest trick in the dirty dog loan shark playbook, only this time, it’s the whole damn society getting fleeced, not just a few little old ladies.
New Zealanders have been lulled into believing we’re living off the generosity of foreign savers. But we’re not borrowing their savings, we’ve gifted the credit reserves of our own land, water, minerals and energy assets to private investment banks, often foreign-owned, banks who create the money out of thin air and sell it back to us as compounding interest bearing loans(All a matter of public record if you care to look).
This is not investment. It’s not responsible stewardship. It’s monetary colonisation. We are being charged rent to live in our own home.
And the cruel irony? We have the constitutional and legal capacity, as admitted by the Treasury, to issue our own public credit, free of compounding interest, in service of the public good, infrastructure, homes, jobs, climate resilience. But we don’t, because successive governments have been ideologically captured or willfully ignorant of how sovereign money actually works.
If the public ever understood that the ‘loans’ underpinning our economy are literally conjured from the collateral of Aotearoa/New Zealand itself, and that we could do the same in the public interest, then yes, maybe this whole scam would finally be up for radical debate.
Until then, governments will keep doubling down on their deluded dogma, while our people sleep in cars and our kids freeze in campgrounds.
Cheers