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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (82619)	11/2/2011 9:49:36 PM
From: Maurice Winn	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217862

NZ is similar to Greece, except that people mainly pay their taxes as it's hard to evade. NZ has huge borrowings and borrowing $1.5 billion a month to make ends meet. That's not much in $trillion dollar company but NZ has only 4 million impecunious people rather than 300 million wealth ones. Nevertheless $18 billion a year and growing is real money in NZ. NZers also borrowed hundreds of $billions to bid their house prices higher and spent the "profits" on lattes, cars, overseas travel, and generally enjoying the borrow and hope lifestyle. But such borrowing can go wrong. 6 days ago, we paid $220,000 for an apartment at mortgagee sale which must have cost the "owners" about $400,000 five or six years ago. Apartments in the building are selling normally for about $320,000 and more. Houses in holiday zones such as south Papamoa are down 40% in price from the peak 4 years ago. Houses in busy productive places such as Auckland are at the previous peaks or even higher. NZ$ is still, mistakenly in my opinion, at US80c instead of US40c [but the competition is fierce to be the most fiscally irresponsible country]. Japan has soared against NZ$ and US$ - despite astronomical dilution of yen over a couple of decades and huge debts in Japan. Ireland and Iceland have already been chastened. Greece is front runner for the next one. Mqurice