James Hogan's Personal Blog
Really really really get the pressreader.com appFrom The Wall Street Journal, 27 February 2026 Anthropic Turns Down U.S. on AI Guardrails The Wall Street JournalBY AMRITH RAMKUMAR Anthropic said it wouldn’t back down in a dispute with the Defense Department over artificial-intelligence guardrails, complicating efforts to reach a compromise ahead…
I was listening to the new Reserve Bank of New Zealand Governor on RNZ today. She’s awesome! I’m liking the cut of her jibb.Her economics are orthodox, her communication is on point and not distracted from the minimalist message she wants to say, and she’s quite happy to jump out of…
I’m wondering about the systemic effects of large mortgages. I might be wrong, but here goes. The scenarioSo we are looking at moving houses. But moving up in house quality means moving up in price. Twenty years ago, moving up in quality meant going from a $100,000 house to $200,000 –…
New Zealand is currently in the worst economic recession since the Mother of All Budgets back in 1990. Our Golden Years (1998 – 2008) are well behind us. The business cycleHere’s a little thing I fizzed up when I was at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research but have…
BTW: a gentle plug for Pressreader.com, my source of truth, alternative truth, and the most likely thing that occupies the middle.Is he good? Is he bad? Does he care? Is he strong? Does he love America and hate war? Or does he love power, and hate freeloaders..Frequent readers of my…
I’ve previously written about how the US Dollar is the ultimate IOU: the USA seems impervious to monetary crisis. The US Government seems to be able to continuously borrow from the world running some weird sort of international ponzi scheme where it keeps issuing more debt, and international creditors keep…
Check out this pretty normal photo in today’s (26 June 2025) New Zealand Auckland Herald from the NATO Head of Government meeting:… until you zoom in closer and wonder who let in THIS absolutely mad screamer… NATO Heads of GovernmentSo I went to the NATO website and pulled this picture…
… did President Donald Trump really just drop the single biggest explosive motherlode since Harry Truman?!?I give it 3-6 months before America sees the next 9-11 terrorist attack.Note to world: Iran “didn’t have strong cards”
As an Economist, this REALLY annoys me: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/560417/opposition-ramps-up-to-government-s-pay-equity-moveThe whole concept that you can look across different industries and try to equate remuneration rates without looking at the demand and supply pressures on the industries themselves is economic ignorance and massively annoying!For Economists, its like people claiming the Earth is flat…
Key Pay Equity CaselawWith a good head of steam built up, I dived into the main caselaw: Terranova Homes & Care Ltd V Service And Food Workers Union Nga Ringa Tota Inc Ca631/2013 [2014] NZCA 516 [28 October 2014] (Bartlett Case), fully expecting to find another ugly piece of activist…
Extracted from the Wall Street JournalPOLITICAL ECONOMICS By Joseph C. Sternberg · Apr 11, 2025The goal of all these tariffs for avowed protectionists is to make Americans less able to purchase things.President Trump’s sudden reversal this week is unlikely to mark the beginning of the end of his adventures in…
Because when you have removed options for shared agreement all that remains are “nothing to lose” alternatives.And the world just witnessed American President Trump and Vice President Vance personally humiliate Ukrainian President Zelensky, and remove the Ukraine’s options for achieving a shared agreement to end the bitter war with Russia.The…
Book first published in 1993, so current up to then Land and Natural Resources Law
“So lets go check out this place”, I said to myself this morning after two strong coffees. It was this, or Plan B involving sparking up PlayStation and cracking open a beer. And at 10:30am on a Saturday, Plan B just seemed unseemly.Komoot (a cycling app I’ve got) suggested I…
The Conversation“What happens if we just write bad legislation?”Actually said the senior ranked New Zealand politician in the private sector meeting I personally sat in on (ie…. this is not hearsay – I’m not making this up).“We really want to give a tax break to the rich. But in THIS…
Nobody except economists thinks that hard about money. Admittedly, it’s the root of all evil (which is why it appeals to us black-hearted-rational-robot-like economists), but other then working hard to get it and using it to buy food and beersies, most people don’t really think about money all that deeply….
I and every economist with a bit more than pudding between our ears saw the economy crashing coming mainly because of the Reserve Bank doing this and this clown doing everything I’ve accused him of in this.Grant and Jacinda started this with REALLY bad economic management, which all the lefties…
The first thing which struck me is how good Te Pāti Māori’s Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke voice is! Her’s are not my politics: I’m all for the conversation ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill has started.The modern set of Treaty of Waitangi’s principles have been developed by courts since 1975’s and have been accepted by…
Yeah! Good News! New Zealand’s nailed inflation.Don’t get me wrong – I dislike inflation, and everything about it. I don’t like how sustained persistent inflation is created by the government spending money it doesn’t have and buying up large on both the taxpayer and consumers ticket (inflation is a tax)….
I’ve long been an admirer of the Singaporeans. For the modern day equivalent of Greek city states, the Singaporeans have no lawrels to rest upon. They’re not endowed with mineral resources like Australia. They don’t have old money like Europe. They weren’t endowed with fertile lands like New Zealand. And…