"The Commerce Commission has calculated the supermarket duopoly extracts $1m in excess profits every day – profits, in other words, above and beyond those they would make in a competitive market. That $1m a day comes straight out of shoppers’ wallets."
#MaxRashbrooke, 2025
https://thespinoff.co.nz/business/27-02-2025/we-need-to-stop-shadow-boxing-on-competition
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#AntiMonopoly #ComCom#SupermarketDuopoly
Max Rashbrooke gave the NatACTs way too much credit back in 2023
"... an incoming administration can hardly cancel signed contracts or halt work underway."
https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/25-09-2023/did-national-really-just-simply-sell-off-state-houses
If only that were true.
"Administrative waste in US healthcare – generated by every private player trying to shift the cost onto another – is so great that it would pay for every uninsured American to get insurance. It is also greater than the entirety of Britain’s NHS budget."
#MaxRashbrooke, 2025
"The maddest examples have come when monopolies – water, rail – have been sold to private firms, even though competition is the only thing that makes markets work. A private monopoly is the worst of both worlds: no competition-based incentives to improve, and no public-good ethos pushing the organisation to look out for citizens’ interests."
#MaxRashbrooke, 2025
"In 1993, financiers Fay Richwhite were allowed to advise the government on the sale of the state-owned New Zealand Rail – and then be one of main shareholders in the winning bid.
After that things really went downhill ... And while cutting maintenance to a level [economist Bill] Rosenberg labelled 'abysmal', Fay Richwhite and their fellow owners took out at least $370m in profits from a firm for which they had paid just $328m."
#MaxRashbrooke, 2025
As #MaxRashbrooke pointed out on TheSpinoff;
"Our spending is not really the problem: our failure to raise enough tax revenue is. The projections of a surplus by 2027 rely on the annual allowance for new spending shrinking from the current $3.5 billion to just $1.6 billion in 2026 (once existing commitments are factored in)."
"[Aotearoa] continues to run current account deficits – importing more goods and services than it exports, often loosely described as 'living beyond our means'. The deficit will be a large 8.1% of GDP this year, falling to 4.3% in 2027."
A result of successive govts doing anything they can to increase exports, while being effectively banned from reducing imports - even of designer landfill like the garbage sold in $2 stores - by "free trade agreements".
The right claim National are better protectors of economic health than Labour. It's never been true, and still isn't;
"No recession is expected. The economy will continue to grow at 2.6%, on average, over the next four years. Inflation will be back under 3% some time next year, and wages will easily outpace it. Unemployment will rise, but only to 5.4%, a below-average amount.
Government debt remains low by global and historical standards..."
Strypey
Stephen
Struth