The visible hand in economics

So National’s redundancy package is out. It is different to my initial impression and slightly different to the Labour package.
As well as randomly asking banks to be generous National said it was increasing the accommodation allowance for people who are made unemployed and also increase working for families for people who are made unemployed [...]

So Labour is making it that people who lose their jobs during the economic downturn can get the benefit straight away – and over the first 13 weeks no-one will take account of their spouses income (ht the Standard).
Tell you the truth, this sounds a lot better than the scheme National are indicating they will [...]

According to figures out yesterday, New Zealand corp has greatly increased its spending overseas over the past year.  In part this seems crazy since we have been in a recession over the past nine months – however, there are reasons:

Our exchange rate fell (assuming demand is inelastic – or is not passed on through intermediaries),
The [...]

For those of you who missed the magic, before the credit crisis we were worried about a property crisis.  In the midsts of this madness Matt Nolan was itnerveiwed by Paul Henry on breakfast.  I was bored so I thought I would track down this video and relive the magic.  At Matt’s gesturing I’m posting [...]

We have discussed where we stand on the political spectrum before, but now it seems that there is a quiz that tells us where we stand (ht Kiwiblog). Below I will tell you the results of the different authors here:
Matt: National (83%), United (73%), NZF (64%), ACT (63%), Labour (61%), Progressives (50%), Greens [...]

Or so say economists at Infometrics (a organisation I am involved with ).
Why should we expect another recession over the first half of 2009 – especially when we are coming out of a drought!
Well one justification could be that households are highly indebted, and the price of that debt is going up – [...]

It appears that National intends to do just that following this election – providing grants to individuals who lose there job beyond the unemployment benefit, but only for “during the recession”, and only “needs based”.
This is probably one of the most ridiculous ways anyone could try to deal with the current recession – although I [...]

So investors are “rushing” to finance companies to invest money.  One of my economist friends just told me he tried to invest money in a finance company, just to be told that they were “over-subscribed”.
I have two concerns stemming from this:

Moral hazard:  Finance companies will invest in higher risk ventures to get the return – [...]