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Musical Chairs

@musicalchairs.bsky.social

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Ugly graphs, insights and outbursts. NZ.

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · Dec 21

Whose fault is this recession? Let's rank the villains for giggles 🧵
Boss villain is easy, ol' Shock and Orr.
RBNZ took a hero pill in 2020 and went nuts juicing the housing market. Then they took *another* pill in late 2021 and slowed the flow of credit to a trickle through 2023 and 2024. [1/n]

Graph showing net bank lending (new bank loans minus repayments) vs the RBNZ interest rate (OCR). The graph shows a surge in net bank lending in 2021 followed by a slump in 2023/24.

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 6h

Wooohoooo! Last time we crashed interest rates like this was after the very brilliant global financial crisis... Oh, and then we did it again after that pesky pandemic shut the global economy down.
The good times are truly here again though. And this time we're going it alone! Great work everyone.

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 9h

Provide free banking and mortgage lending at OCR+1 as a public banking service, and nationalise fossil fuel electricity generation (and incentivise generators to reduce it's use). Split wholesale / retail grocery and force sale of half of supermarkets to several new entrants. No more half measures.

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 21h

Yes, and the increased inflow of credit (banks creating money for us to buy houses off each other).

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 1d

Another reason to regard monetary policy with great disdain: the 'long and variable lags'.
Folks are begging for cuts to interest rates tomorrow, but changes take 12 - 18 months to flow through. The damage was done two years ago when the ghouls were advising 'higher for longer'.

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 1d

Anyone working on a manifesto?

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 1d

Worth noting that we only see decent job growth for young kiwis when the economy is running hot - that's when employers give less experienced people a chance.
RBNZ respond to hotness by hiking interest rates to slow the economy down. Youth unemployment is a feature of our economic model, not a bug.

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 2d

What I'd say to the 65,000 unemployed young people in NZ is... move, and compete harder against the other 340,000 people wanting work or more work. Hell, there are 20,000 job vacancies out there! Nevermind that most of them are wholly unsuited to you. Try harder, bottom-feeders.

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 2d

Guaranteed.

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 2d

It's 2025 and our economic model is still reliant on maintaining a decent bufferstock of unemployed people. This model was *designed* to ensure that employers have the upper hand (and labour could be uberised). Govt distract us from this reality by bashing beneficiaries and abdicating responsibility

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 2d

It's a truly awful piece. It's like someone prompted an AI to pen a defensive piece that pins our current economic woes on the last govt. It's full of wild leaps in logic and ideology masked by the language of reckonomics.

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 2d

Show your reasoning and state your assumptions... so the world can marvel at how compromised and dangerous your discipline has become.

Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 2d

Dennis is the worse kind of reckonomist. Blinded by broken dogma and ideology.

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 3d

Ffs, I didn't even spot that!

Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 3d

Just 9% of 18 to 19 years olds claim jobseekers despite youth unemployment being nearly 25% (thanks to the ideologues at RBNZ/Govt crashing the economy).
But, I guess hating on young working class people gives their base something to cheer about.

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 3d

exactly - lots of minimum wage, split-shift, can only afford the rent if your're eight to a room in a bunkhouse kinda jobs.

Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 3d

There are 3 jobs on trademe in Kawerau (15 on Seek). Here's my favourite one...

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 3d

employment data - quarterly jobs by workplace location:
stats.govt.nz/information-...
MSD jobseeker numbers (WR and HCD) by territorial authority (tab 5):
msd.govt.nz/about-msd-an...
subnational population data (2023 closest):
stats.govt.nz/information-...
job vacancies from trademe search

Business employment data: June 2025 quarter | Stats NZ

Total actual filled jobs in the June 2025 quarter were 2.26 million. Total seasonally adjusted filled jobs were down 0.5 percent (10,560 jobs) in the June 2025 quarter (compared with the March 2025 qu...

stats.govt.nz

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 3d

A casual canter through the jobs and vacancies data from hot to not. Note that I have used Trademe jobs data, which is not as fulsome in some areas as Seek. Feel free to keep any "there are 12 more jobs in XX than you said, you're wrong" gotchas to yourself 😘 Data sources in reply.

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 3d

Yes, I'd agree with that. Some of the media folks trying to do the work don't have the data nerds they need either - so they end up going to the bank economists for quotable reckons. So, all we get is interest rates must go up, must go down, too many people in work, everyone panic etc.

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 3d

OECD comparison of changes in unemployment relative to 2019 average. Second image shows all oecd countries. I remain baffled by the media not asking the obvious questions here: 'How have we fked up so badly? Who is accountable?'

Image shows NZ unemployment climbing relative to other countries and groups of countries.

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Reposted by Musical Chairs

Ganesh Rajaram Ahirao @ganeshahirao.bsky.social · 3d

Group of 20 economists ... "change course urgently".

Text of letter at link.

ganeshnana.substack.com/p/group-of-2...

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 4d

Nice. The thing that riles me most about how we do things these days, is that we don't apply spare capacity to things that really need doing. It's ridiculous.

Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 4d

I love the Stats NZ yearbooks. A glimpse of a different way of thinking about the economy - when Govt knew what and who the economy was for (noting that the references to Māori in these old books are painful)

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Musical Chairs @musicalchairs.bsky.social · 4d

Damn straight. And, lest we forget, we're doing this to ourselves.

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Reposted by Musical Chairs

David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 4d

Biggest 6 month rise in youth (15-19) unemployment this millennia,
Q3 2023 - Q1 2024 + 6.9% (28400 unemployed to 42100).
Biggest Annual 2008-2009 (+6.8%, 26200 to 35200 unemployed), 2nd biggest annual 2023-2024 (+5.4%, 30500 to 38800 unemployed).
This is not caused by youths playing video games.

David Hood @thoughtfulnz.bsky.social · 5d

It is offensive for the person supposedly in charge of the government and its economic levers to suggest that youths, and their playstationing ways, are responsible for the most rapid surge in unemployment since the Great Financial Crash

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