Keith Rankin, 14 May 2026 – Since the latest Household Labour Force data was released on 6 May, there has been quite a lot of unfocussed chatter about NEETs; young people not in employment, education or training. The standard narrative about NEETs is that they are disengaged young people, especially teenagers, not sufficiently motivated to undertake tertiary education or vocational training in order to find a job.

The latest overall statistic is that 14.4% of New Zealand resident people aged 15-24 are NEETs. In addition, there is an even higher ‘underutilisation rate’. These data are published in an awkward way which makes it hard to mesh them together. And there is a further unmeshed measure; persons aged 15-24 – especially 20 to 24 – who have emigrated.

The real story this year is about young adults aged 20 to 24, not disengaged teenagers. “Women aged 20 to 24 continue to have the highest NEET rate, rising 1.9 percentage points to 20.3 percent in the March 2026 quarter”. This 20.3% is well above the overall rate of 14.4%. The female adult NEET rate has jumped significantly, whereas the male adult rate is lower and has not jumped much this year.

NEETs can be separated into four groups: teenage males and females, and young adult males and females (‘adult’ here being defined as aged over 20). Of these groups, we would expect adult females to be least disengaged. The story that appears to be true is that many if not most NEETS aged 20-24 are young adults who have completed their education or training; rather than being disengaged, these NEETs are educated, trained, often graduated, and raring to commence their careers.

The problem, then, is that we have created an economy which is barely interested in employing our educated youth. This is especially ironic when we keep hearing superannuation scare-stories about how this group of young people will be required to ‘support’ in retirement their huge parental (Gen-X) and grand-parental (Boomer) generations. The statistics clearly show that we are not nurturing this very special cohort, born in the early 2000s.

(Re the underutilisation rates, males aged 20-24 have gone from 11.6% in early 2023 to 18.7% in early 2024 to 19.0% in early 2025 to 21.8% in early 2026. Females aged 20-24 have gone from 17.0% in early 2023 to 23.0% in early 2024 to 22.2% in early 2025 to 25.0% in early 2026. These worsening statistics cannot be blamed on the Israel-USA-Iran war.)

Why Females?

The latest data suggests that tertiary-educated young women are having more difficulty gaining employment than their male peers. Employment outcomes for this age group are very much about employers’ hiring practices.

Economists understand that the perceived labour-cost associated with new hires is all important. This is an age group with minimal work experience, so it means that demographic and educational attributes will be particularly used when making hiring decisions. Statistical profiling – something all employers (including female employers) do, even if they do so with a degree of distaste – is particularly relevant to this age group.

Is the expected cost – a statistical concept meaning the average perceived cost – of hiring young females greater than the expected cost of hiring young males? Especially in the context of very tight business profit margins.

(Differences in expected cost played a huge role in hiring decisions during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Teenage females were cheapest, then teenage males, and then adult females. Adult male joblessness was particularly high in the early 1930s because adult males were the most costly demographic to hire.)

Reasons why young females might be perceived as more costly to employ

Such reasons arise from both statistics and politics.

Individual employers will have access to their own company data. If females in the past decade or so have had a record of leaving their jobs sooner than males, or if they have had a record of taking more sick leave than males, then those records would influence the perceived cost of employing any given female job applicant. Willingness to work overtime – including unpaid overtime – is also something that employers have records of; such willingness, on average, may be different for males than for females.

In the realm of politics, there may be areas of actual positive discrimination – for example, menstrual leave, which exists in a few countries. (See What working women really want: Paid menstrual leave? Stuff 15 August 2023. And of course there are definite examples around maternity leave.) Or perceived positive discrimination; perceived, for example, because pay equity is widely confused with equal pay.

In relation to options like maternity leave and menstrual leave, one way to politically manage these is to offer men similar discretionary leave provisions as those offered to women, to the point that employers perceive the likelihood that a man will take discretionary leave is the same as the likelihood that a woman will take such leave. This, I understand, is the Swedish way. In order to maximise employment of both sexes, the Swedish authorities offer discretionary leave provisions to females and males in equal measure.

Another issue is the sensitivity around the ‘gender pay gap’. (For society as a whole, the ‘pay equity’ argument is that gender-based pay inequity is between occupations, not within occupations or within workplaces.) Such sensitivity is heightened if employers are required to report to some government ministry their firms’ gender pay ratios.

There is one relatively quick way through which employers can make their gender pay ratios more equal. It is to hire fewer young females, giving preference to males. Given that new hires are towards the bottom of employers’ pay scales, having more junior males and fewer junior females will have a significant impact on a firm’s reported gender pay ratio.

Unintended Consequences

The hiring practices mentioned above can all have unintended consequences. Very few employers nowadays – whether male of female employers – believe that it is a good thing to have a gender pay gap. All employers practice ‘equal pay’, as they have been mandated to do since 1972. But employers – under the pressure of legal or moral compliance to achieve one or two key statistics – can end up achieving problematic outcomes for other important statistics.

Is it possible that an unintended consequence of moral compliance in relation to pay equity – of attempts to equalise pay by gender, within firms and other employing organisations – has been to create more young adult female NEETs? It’s a hypothesis that at least deserves to be investigated further.

Of course, there is a wider problem than this female-adverse NEET outcome. There are far too many adult NEETs of both sexes. Our recent governments, through stifling fiscal policies which undermine their own revenue base, have been playing an unnecessary and brutal game of musical chairs; a game in which the odds are stacked against New Zealand’s young adults.

About the writer:

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Keith Rankin, 13 May 2026 – On 7 May, Al Jazeera ran this alarmist programme about the ‘national debt’ of the United States: US borrowing exceeds GDP: What does it mean for the economy? (And here on YouTube.)

A topic surrounded by so much confusion. (Sigh!) The first problem is that what is commonly called the ‘national debt’ is actually the ‘government debt’. Second, we have the issue of which debt measure to use. By one measure the United States government debt has become equal to the United States gross domestic product (GDP). By another measure, that milestone or millstone was achieved long ago, and is now 123% of GDP. The Al Jazeera programme uses both measures interchangeably.

The programme host – Cryil Vanier, who I usually respect as one of the best news anchors in the world’s television media – commenced his contribution with an easily verified untruth; that is, untrue if using the usual measure of debt as a percent of GDP. He said: “The United States is the most indebted country in the world. Almost every year the United States Government has chosen to spend more than it collects. … The national debt now stands at $39 trillion dollars, exceeding the United States economy … for the first time since World War Two.”

($39 trillion dollars is 123% of the United States’ GDP! That 123% of GDP measure is exceeded by Venezuela, Japan [237%], Sudan, Singapore, Eritrea, Bahrain, Greece [146%], Lebanon and Italy [137%]. Government debt is not an indicator of a government’s economic performance, let alone a cause of poor ‘performance’; noting that the concept ‘performance’ itself is about optics – about theatre – rather than substance.)

Debt is owed by debtors, and owned by creditors. The Al Jazeera programme noted that ‘Japan’ is one of the big three foreign owners of the United States [government] debt. But note, above, that Japan is – among first-world countries – listed as the (proportionately) biggest ‘ower’ of debt. Indeed, Japan sees neither its large ownership of debt nor its large owership of debt as being a major problem; the Japanese economy is a sea of tranquillity compared to many other countries’ economies.

There is a problem though; the one trillion dollar interest bill. That’s unnecessarily large; indeed, that’s a much bigger problem for the United States’ government than for Japan’s government, due to very different monetary policies in the two countries.

The key question to ask about the interest is: ‘Where does the money go?’. It goes from the owers to the owners, of course; but who are the debt-owners who receive most of that interest, and to what extent do they represent the real problem (assuming there is a real problem)? For the most part, the interest-recipient owners – not exactly clamouring for repayment – are more than happy to return the interest to the owers, just so long as it is accounted for as additional debt.

The Al Jazeera programme, using one of the more egregious chart graphics that I’ve seen, shows that “debt has ballooned since the eighties”. Correct, though the chart (commencing around 1800) – not using the correct (logarithmic scale) fails to show earlier balloonings. The chart shows a tenfold increase in the dollar-debt – not the percent of GDP – from 1976 to 1996, and a just a 6½-fold increase from 2002 to 2026; yet the latter smaller jump looks dramatic. At the end of the chart-viewing, we are told that there’s “no plan to actively pay it back”.

Putting aside the one-third foreign ownership of the United States government debt, we can think of the remaining two-thirds – the domestically-held debt – as being owned by the ‘US banking system’ (the banks being a short-cut for what is a rather complex financial system). So, the United States domestic government debt – a liability of the Government – is an asset of the United States’ banking system. As is normal for asset-holders, the banks would rather retain and expand their assets; they would rather not liquidate their assets.

On the other side of the banking systems’ ledger lies the liabilities of the United States’ banks. These are the deposits of American households and businesses. The domestic debt is owned by Americans and owed by the American Government. Bank deposits are assets to depositors, and liabilities (ie debt) to banks. Banks hardly see this debt as ‘bad’ in any sense.

People would rather lend their governments than pay taxes, though most citizens realise that a substantial part of government spending should be funded by taxes rather than debt. A mix of taxes and debt works; it always has. Households and businesses prefer to own some government debt than to fund their governments entirely from taxes. It’s not a problem. Debt’s a solution.

The people own the debt that the government owes (albeit through the intermediation of the baking system). The people do not want the government to repay that debt. They just want the government to pay the interest. The people – the creditors, the debt owners – like it just as it is. The government debt is not a problem for them; rather it’s an income for them, and insurance for them.

What would ‘paying it back mean’?

So, if the government repaid its debt to the banks, the banks would either have to force the people to accept back their deposits, or would have to find other borrowers. In the latter case, some parts of the private sector would have to become substitute debtors, thereby adding much to the financial risk of the citizenry. In the former case, the people would have to accept banknotes – paper money – from the drastically shrinking banks; banknotes that could stand to become worthless.

In other words, if governments tried to pay back their debt, there would be a financial collapse on a scale which would make the global financial crisis seem like a non-event. (There was such a collapse in Romania in the 1980s.)

Looking at it from the point of view of the people, the banks’ creditors – especially consider the Mum and Dad savers. They, and ordinary people like them, are the government’s creditors. The government’s debt is an important part of their savings; indeed, of their retirement savings. Who would like their bank coming to them, saying that the bank’s main debtor (the government, as the banks’ biggest debtor) wants to ‘repay the debt’? So, they would have to take back their deposits; they would have to withdraw their funds; say, half their savings. And, at the same time, each other bank would be saying the same thing to its customers.

There is no clamour from the owners of the United States government debt to have that debt repaid. If anything, there is a clamour from would-be owners of United States government debt for the Government to take on more debt; not less. (In Japan, owning government debt is understood as ‘financial security’.)

Global Financial Balances

We can understand the world’s financial balance sheet, showing the net financial relationship between the two big sectors; the private sector (households and businesses), and the public sector (central and local governments).

Throughout the history of the world, the private sector has been the net creditor, and the public sector the net debtor. A financial balance sheet must add to zero; the net debt owed must be exactly equal to the net debt owned. It is not conceivable that the global balance sheet would have the worlds’ governments – taken together – owning the world’s debt, with the global private sector owing it; except possibly under a global soviet-style communist state, where we could imagine most people being in debt to the government.

The global balance sheet has two (net) components. The first component is financial stocks: assets (owning) set against liabilities (owing); these liabilities represent the global public debt. The second component is about financial flows: surpluses (credits) set against deficits (debits). Both components are, by definition, zero-sum games. Total assets minus total liabilities must equal zero. Total surpluses plus total deficits also must equal zero.

For the world as a whole, the public sector (the fisc) runs the deficits, and the private sector runs the surpluses. It is almost inconceivable that, in any year, there could be a global fiscal surplus, meaning a global private deficit. (In most years there are some countries’ governments which run fiscal surpluses.) This state of affairs is driven by the fundamental drive of private citizens to save parts of their income; if successful on balance, by definition a private sector surplus means a public sector deficit. Basic human nature dictates that there will be a global fiscal deficit, every year.

Public Debt management, in practice

The size of the global public debt, measured (appropriately) as a percent of the size of the global economy, goes up and down over time. This is because there are a numerator (the global fiscal deficit) and a denominator (nominal gross world product, the measure of the size of the world economy, the sum of all countries’ GDPs).

We note that the denominator is a nominal measure, meaning that we are referring to the monetary measure of the size of the world economy, not the production measure. Nominal GWP (gross world product) increases either if world production – global output – increases or if world prices increase. A major reason – but not the only possible reason – for increasing world prices is world inflation.

World public debt increases next year if the world’s fiscal deficit is greater than the increase in gross world product (GWP). Essentially, there are three possible reasons for an increase in world public debt: a big global fiscal deficit, a small (or negative) increase in global output, or low (or negative) world inflation. Commonly, then, rising public debt – as appropriately measured – is a result of slow economic growth and/or low inflation.

Conversely, world public debt decreases next year if the world’s fiscal deficit is smaller than the increase in GWP. Essentially, there are three possible reasons for a decrease in global public debt (expressed as a percentage of GWP): a smallish global fiscal deficit, a largish increase in global output, or highish world inflation. Commonly, then, falling public debt is a result of economic growth and/or inflation.

The most painless route to ‘acceptable’ public debt – what is acceptable is in the eye of each beholder – is through inflation. Far from being ‘economic public enemy number one’, inflation is the market’s method – capitalism’s method – of maintaining healthy and sustainable financial relationships within society. The more that financial relationships are ‘out of whack’, the more inflation is needed to put things right.

(We note that policies to raise the inflation rate are not easy to achieve; in the two decades most famous for such policies – the 1930s and the 2010s – it actually proved extraordinarily difficult to use monetary or fiscal policy to bring about reflation. Cutting interest rates did not achieve the inflation sought. Wars, on the other hand, did achieve inflation in the 1940s and 2020s.)

Of course, an ‘out of whack’ financial community is one with relative losers and perceived winners. A healthy correction restores over-indebted losers to a degree of financial health, and reduces the winners’ excessive winnings. That’s why we are in a battle today between the elite classes (including left [Bidenite/Starmerite] elites and right [Luxonite] elites) and the working classes (including most small and medium businesses).

Class conflict is real. Our political elites – left and right – have a policy bias towards high interest rates and low inflation. Our elites favour an ever-expanding flow of financial incomes from the poorer people to themselves. As debt-owners, they do not want inflation to make prevailing debt relationships more sustainable. (Smart elites might have more foresight than regular elites. Though ‘smart elites’ may be an oxymoron.)

Fiscal probity, its obsession and its distraction

Public debt is presented as a monster; public debt is posed as a fundamental cause of inflation. And inflation is posited as the problem which must be fixed before other problems are addressed.

When in the throes of (usually ineffective) inflation-fighting in the name of fiscal probity, the only thing that the established authorities allow as a distraction is the call to war. For some reason deep in the elite human psyche, financial probity has generally taken second place to the excitement of wars in which the elites become the generals and planners, and the working-classes become the planned.

We can easily see that the United States ‘national’ debt is on an upwards, not a downwards, trajectory; the Department of War can loosen Treasury’s guard-rails more easily than the Department of Health. (This is true in Germany too, with last-year’s partial removal of that country’s debt-brake.)

Wars have always been drivers of public debt; they are inevitably financed by huge fiscal deficits. Intractable wars have also been levelling events, wealth-collapsing events – accompanied by inflation – eventuating in relatively good times for working class survivors.

Elites start wars. Wars finish or diminish elites. Elites are poor learners.

About the writer:

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Keith Rankin, 12 May 2026 – The outbreak of (Andean) Hantavirus on board the Dutch eco-adventure ship Hondius clearly is a matter of concern; and is not being played well by the experts who tell us one rather soothing thing about it only being transmitted through intimate contact, but then show up in the highest grade of Hazmat suit when evacuating people from the ship.

See this story Where did the hantavirus outbreak start, and where has it spread? from Al Jazeera (11 May 2026) and this Inside Story episode: Should we be worried about the hantavirus outbreak? (Al Jazeera 9 May 2026, and here on YouTube).

We keep hearing about the established history of the virus in southern South America, whereas we need to get a handle on the possibly quite different future of the hantavirus. This zoonotic virus has probably already changed; or it may have found an environment in which it is possible (or even necessary) to behave differently from the way it behaves in its endemic South American setting.

Around 16 minutes into the program, interviewer James Bayes asks: “This particular ship … is not your typical cruise ship. They describe it as an ‘expedition ship, often with scientific, wildlife or geopolitics lecturers on board’. … I am told that the experience of previous passengers is that they have very strict safety protocols because of the places they visit, mainly for biodiversity reasons. Previous passengers have recalled sniffer dogs and having to wear sanitised boots. If it can happen on a ship like that, do you have concerns in general? … Are cruises incubators for disease? Would you go on a cruise holiday?”  (The subsequent answers, by experts, trivialised this important question.)

The Hondius was as sterile as any ship could possibly be. Could the human-human transmission on board that ship be because of that sterility, rather than despite the sterile shipboard environment? In a sterile environment, a virus which has already infected an embarking passenger has no soil or other muck that it can transmit to; rather, the least sterile life-forms available are the other people on board. Hence an unusually sterile environment may be the counterintuitive cause of human-human transmission of a virus which ‘prefers’ other options.

Evolutionary variation of any life-form can arise in three ways: because of selection in favour of one existing variant over another; because of a mutation creating a favourable new variant; or because of a hybridisation of two quite different variants creating a genuinely novel form. The first of these three mechanisms of variation may have been enough to create a humanly-transmissible form of the Andean hantavirus. (We note that Covid19 was significant because it was transmitted by a novel virus; transmission of coronaviruses has been widespread throughout our lifetimes.)

This would be a nightmare scenario. Such a new-variant virus – maybe a novel virus – would still be lethal, would still have a long incubation period, would have an unknown duration of infectiousness before symptoms emerge, and an unknown rate of transmission.

The Black Death in Europe: 1346 to 1353

This historically famous pandemic reduced the population of Europe by about forty percent. It is generally attributed to a disease called Plague (aka Yersinia pestis), which comes in several forms, the best known being bubonic plague. The Plague pathogen – Yersinia pestis bacteria – was identified by Alexandre Yersin and Kitasato Shibasaburō during a much more recent pandemic; a pandemic which impacted seaports all around the world in the decade after 1894 (including Sydney and Auckland in 1900).

This disease – linked to rats and fleas – looked like a good fit for the Black Death; the descriptions of the symptoms were a good match. So, the Black Death narrative came to incorporate Yersinia pestis as the culprit. This pathogen is endemic today in some parts of the world, including the southwest of the United States, but generally confines its lethal mayhem to rodents. People die of it most years. The good news for later twentieth century human populations was that bubonic plague is treatable with antibiotics.

However, especially around the early twenty-first century, the ‘Yersinia pestis as the culprit’ thesis was substantially questioned. (See A plague on all your houses, The Guardian, 14 Aug 2004; I have read Return of the Black Death: The World’s Greatest Serial Killer by Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan.) This questioning has subsided of late, because of the discovery of Yersinia pestis DNA in the bodies of known victims of the Black Death. James Belich, author in 2022 of The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe, argues that those sceptical narratives were an important part of the scientific process, but settles on Yersinia pestis, based on subsequent DNA evidence.

Nevertheless, I was persuaded by aspects of Susan Scott’s argument. She agrees that bubonic plague was significantly present in Europe – especially in Mediterranean ports – in the late 1340s. Essentially, her argument is that there was another disease present at that time in Europe, and that this other disease played a greater role than bubonic plague in the lived experience of pandemic plague in the period from the 1340s to the 1590s. Scott made her argument using village studies which suggested that the three main epidemic parameters – transmissibility (especially from humans to humans), incubation, and duration of infectiousness – were a poor fit for the known information about Yersinia pestis. (We may also note that there is a variation of bubonic plague known as pneumonic plague, which is human-human transmitted, looks a more plausible fit for the 1340s to the 1590s than rat-flea transmission. But the parameters of pneumonic plague don’t fit, either.)

In Scott’s thesis the principal agent of the Black Death was what she calls Haemorrhagic Plague. It is well known today that there is a family group of lethal zoonotic viruses which cause haemorrhagic fevers in humans; these include ebola and hantavirus. For the vast majority of human cases, they are transmitted to humans from animal incubators. Her argument is that the majority of Black Death deaths were caused by one of these viruses, not by Yersinia pestisbacteria. The parameters she calculated from the historical data match haemorrhagic fevers rather well.

The pneumonic symptoms of the two diseases could be similar (albeit more blue than black). Indeed the 1918 influenza pandemic was known, at least in New Zealand, as the Black Flu. Plague is bacterial, treatable by antibiotics. Haemorrhagic fever is not treatable, except at the margins; it’s a viral illness.

We may also note that it’s rare to have two simultaneous epidemics. One epidemic of a viral disease tends to pre-empt another viral pathogen. However, simultaneous epidemics – even pandemics – of bubonic plague and haemorrhagic fever seem entirely plausible. Because the pathogens are so different, even if the end states of both diseases are quite similar. And we note that the stresses arising from one lethal illness may create malnutrition and other states of being likely to make us more vulnerable to a second quite different pathogen doing the rounds.

We should also note that, after much trial and error, the Black Plague could be contained by quarantine; isolation for forty days. Quarantines are particularly effective for human-human transmissible diseases. Presumably less effective at containing burrowing rodents (or mosquito-borne diseases for that matter). Rats don’t carry passports.

Warning

Susan Scott was particularly concerned about modern complacency towards the Black Death. The widespread perception in modern infectious diseases studies is that bubonic plague is treatable, and that the rodent-flea transmission mechanism is less plausible in modern more-sterile environments, reflecting the perception that modern cleanliness and bubonic plage are incompatible. (And noting James Bayes’ presumption that if hantavirus can transmit human-to-human on a sterile ship, then it must be able to so transmit anywhere.)

There is no complacency towards haemorrhagic fevers such as ebola (hence the PPE); although it’s still widely understood to be – in a sense, dismissed as – a ‘third world’ disease. Susan Scott was concerned that complacent modern public health systems would leave us completely unprepared for a pandemic involving a haemorrhagic virus, such as hantavirus; indeed, I did not sense sufficient concern among the panel of interviewees on Inside Story.

Even if it can be proved that Scott’s thesis about the Black Death is completely wrong, then nevertheless her research still represented an important warning to the world about what the next really lethal pandemic might look like. At the very least, the present hantavirus scare should be understood as an important wake-up call.

If we had learned much more about the history of coronaviruses – viruses which were known to have been long-circulating as ‘common cold’ viruses – after the 2003 SARS1 panic, we might have been much more prepared for the SARS2 Covid19 pandemic in 2020. Scientists should not be too quick to dismiss Susan Scott’s hypothesis about the causes of the ‘great levelling’ event which came to be called the Black Death.

A lethal transmissible disease which is asymptomatic for six weeks, and which is infectious before symptoms occur, is one of our worst public health nightmares. The present scare should remind us of that.

How can we cooperate through pandemics when we are too busy waging hot and cold wars? The 1918 novel influenza virus was forged on the battlefields of France; a hybrid of influenza strains from Asia and America. In the end, it killed as least as many people as were killed on the 1918 battlefields.

We should learn to question prevailing narratives. Experts – whether epidemiologists, economists, or geopoliticians – don’t have all the answers; too often they pontificate from professional scripts while ignoring inconvenient evidence. People, especially those with a modicum of power, should exercise their influence with more humility and less sureness.

The world is becoming more vulnerable; too vulnerable for badheads and hotheads and sureheads (such as Christopher Luxon) and bombastic appeasers (such as Keir Starmer) who cannot broach alternative explanations or strategies. These people simply ‘double-down’ when the evidence is that what they are doing is harmful or counter to their stated objectives.

Pestilence follows deprivation, closed-mindedness, and stupidity. These qualities are not confined to the uncivilised. Our environments fight back, often in ways that we least expect, often in places where we do not look.

About the writer:

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Keith Rankin, 11 May 2026 – At the end of this month, the Russia-Ukraine War will have dragged out for as long as World War One, conventionally dated. It’s already much longer than World War One using Russian dating, given Russia’s early exit from that war.

World War One, especially in the East

Despite its minimal emphasis in the anglophile understanding of WWI, the central conflict of that war was between the German Second Reich (the Prussian Empire) and Russia (the Russian Empire). The war was started, with full intent, by the German military who were able to play the emotionally volatile Prussian Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Germany started the war because the Prussians had convinced themselves that Russia was becoming too strong and would inevitably – probably sooner rather than later – invade (and try to overrun) Germany and then the rest of Western Europe.

There was no evidence of such Russian intent. The German Prussians interpreted ‘could’ as ‘would’. So, they decided to attack Russia at a propitious moment, should such a moment arise. Germany had its opportunity in 1914 when Austria-Hungary deemed it necessary to start a Third Balkan War, against Serbia. The Germans adroitly manoeuvred the Austrians into pivoting away from the war the Austrians wanted, and to provide Eastern cover for the war against Russia which Germany wanted.

The reason Germany required Eastern cover was that they feared an attack from Russia’s ally, France. So, the Prussians decided to quickly deal to France, while Austria held back Russia to Germany’s east. Of course, the rest is history; the German army got bogged down in France and Flanders. Austria got exposed in the East. But Germany was able to fight on both fronts simultaneously, and eventually defeated Russia despite having to hold the Western Front.

Russia ratified its surrender in March 1918, when Leon Trotsky signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In that 1918 Treaty, Russia – having just become the Soviet Union – surrendered Ukraine (though not Crimea) to Germany.

Luckily for the new Soviet ‘Bolshevik’ regime – in 1918, while running a substantially reduced Russian Empire – the forces of France, United Kingdom, USA, and influenza prevailed over the forces of the German Second Reich. (By giving Lenin free passage from Switzerland – the German military indirectly plotted the Russian counter-revolution that brought Lenin and his Bolsheviks to power in October 1917, nine months after Tsar Nicholas II was deposed in a popular uprising. Russia experienced regime-change twice that year.)

In the first half of 1918, Germany broke through in the West, bolstered by soldiers transferring from the East. But Germany’s supply lines were too stretched, and soldiers on both sides of the Western Front got very sick from the influenza which was the Americans’ principal contribution. It was only in July 1918 that France gained the upper hand over Germany on the Western Front; Germany quickly folded after that.

The result was the Armistice of November 1918, and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. The 1919 Treaty stripped Germany of its March 1918 victory spoils; the principal of those spoils being Ukraine. The 1919 Treaty also humiliated Prussia, by separating Prussia’s eastern homeland (now Russia’s Kaliningrad) from the rest of Germany.

In 1919, Germany was not pleased about many things. Foremost among those things was the loss of its prize Eastern conquest. This humiliation formed a key part of reactionary Germany’s ‘stab in the back’ hypothesis; the hypothesis which galvanised the subsequent rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi (National Socialist) Party.

The Present War – which in an important sense is again Germany versus Russia

In normal ahistorical ‘rules-based’ discourse – the present war looks like an open and shut case. Bad Country A (Russia) invaded Good Country B (Ukraine). Naughty Vladimir. Solution: tell Vlad to take his war toys back home, and behave himself. (This narrative is hard to sustain now, though, given the 2020s’ behaviour of Israel and the subsequent suspension of the rules-based order.)

Seen through a geopolitical (and appropriately historical) lens, the Ukraine quagmire looks very different from the story that the anglophone world still clings to. A Nato/EU project of eastward expansionism – a ‘Greater Europe’, like a ‘Greater Israel’ but without the overt ethnic cleansing – threatens to return German troops to the heartland of what had been for centuries the economic core of the Russian Empire; namely the territory of Eastern Ukraine.

World War Two

From the Russian point of view, Germany has long coveted the entire territory of Ukraine; not just the bits of West Ukraine which once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire of Franz Josef of Hapsburg (who gifted Aotearoa New Zealand the name of a glacier).

Adolf Hitler’s principal aim was to reverse the humiliations of 1918 and 1919. Thus, once in power, and once Germany had restored its manpower and its gun-power, Hitler struck back into France, forcing the French to sign their surrender at the same place and in the same railway carriage which was used for the 1918 Armistice signing. This time, there was no Austrian Empire to attend to Russia in the meantime. So, Hitler, in 1939, did a deal with Stalin, so that Hitler could deal to France without too much simultaneous aggro in the East.

Once France had been pacified, Hitler turned back to what was really the whole purpose of World War Two in Europe; to win back the territories that had been won in 1918, but had been lost through alleged ‘backstabbing’ in late 1918 and early 1919. (For the 1920s’ ‘make Germany Great Again’ project, the events of late 1918 and early 1919 were the first ‘great steal’.)

The reason for Hitler’s war was lebensraum; it was Hitler’s expansionist project. The principal aim was to re-acquire Ukraine. Having done so – for example, in the First Battle of Kiev (1941) – Hitler’s main goal for the Third Reich was to match the ambition for the Second Reich in WWI, and proceed to take control of the Russian oilfields to the east of Eastern Ukraine.

The Reich held Ukraine for more than two years, until the second Battle of Kiev late in 1943. This time the Russians of the Soviet Union had to defeat Germany on the battlefield; which they did at a huge blood cost.

Just this last weekend, Russia commemorated its military defeat of Nazi Germany.

Finally

From Russia’s point of view, today, the Ukrainian battlefield represents a field in which Nato’s proxy – the Zelenskyy regime of Ukraine – is bringing a Fourth Reich (the European Union; understood to be German dominated, even if Germany’s strength in the European Union temporarily waned after Angela Merkel stepped down) to finally achieve the conquest of Ukraine; the conquest which, from a German perspective, twice in the twentieth century fell agonisingly short.

So, as I read it, no Russian regime – whether led by Putin or somebody else – will ever let Nato (meaning, from a Russian viewpoint, Germany) into Eastern Ukraine.

Militarily, after years of stalemate, Russia has had enough; it is now looking for an offramp by trying to do a deal brokered through former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Other than achieving an acceptable deal, Russia can only play for time; it cannot accept a ‘cease-fire’ involving ‘coalition of the willing’ ‘peacekeepers’. Western Europe – especially ‘Old Europe’ – is politically imploding at present; to sustain military ventures, it is dependent on an increasingly unwilling United States.

As I see it, the present war can end easily. But only under a Treaty which prevents Ukraine – or at least Ukraine east of the Dnieper River – from ever hosting German soldiers. The Russian history of World War One and World War Two is too recent for that. The American President, to his credit, has tried to broker a peace in Ukraine. But ‘Old Europe’ will not allow such a peace, as we have seen whenever such a peace deal seemed close.

The main reason Germany folded to the West in 1918 was the Royal Navy’s blockade of German ports; hence an important reason in the 1940s for Hitler’s emphasis on regaining Ukraine. Old Europe wanted, and still wants, Ukraine in its geopolitical orbit. Lebensraum, in the form of a greater western European geopolitical territory, is still at play.

This time Ukraine, Europe’s breadbasket, may be less required for the purposes of food security; though that may be changing with the protracted American and Iranian double-blockade of the Persian Gulf. My deeper sense is that the populist political right in Europe – which is slowly regaining ascendency – has demographic designs on Ukraine. Ukraine is a land with many white women; whereas Old Europe is much less white than it once was, and white women in Old Europe in the 2020s are having very few babies.

About the writer:

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Note the following from An Economic Model for Securing Hormuz, 30 April 2026 for Project Syndicate, by three British-based emeritus professors of economics. Or see The Strait of Hormuz, Towards a Long-Lasting Solution 18 April 2026, CESifo Working Papers.

The authors say: “The need for solutions that rely less on coercion and more on aligning economic incentives with America and Iran’s shared interest in keeping the Strait open. That may mean institutionalizing today’s emerging arrangement, by which Iran, in coordination with the Gulf states, guarantees safe transit for a fee. Such a system would resemble the agreement under the Montreux Convention that governs passage through the Turkish-controlled Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits. An Iranian toll based on Turkey’s current transit fee of $5.83 per net ton would be about $0.58 per oil barrel—small enough, relative to the value of the goods, that shipping firms would not balk at the expense or seek alternative routes. … such a toll would generate $4.3 billion annually, an amount large enough to create significant incentives for Iran to facilitate and ensure safe passage.”

Such an arrangement is described as a “service-based toll system”, and is arguably more efficient and stable than any alternative arrangements.

Clearly such ‘service-based’ systems are used in the Panama and Suez Canals. The service component of canal maintenance is obvious, and of course in the Panama case there is a substantial resource cost in terms of water required to run the locks. Yet in both cases the fees charged include substantial ‘rent’ or ‘royalty’ components. And for the Strait of Hormuz – along with the other examples – a significant service would be that of ‘protection’ or ‘security’.

Such a protection-fee may have the look of ‘extortion’ about it; but it also has the look of a regular ‘property right’; noting that property rights – and fees arising – form the centrepiece of liberal economics. Indeed, as it was, the world economy – and ecology – has been blighted by ‘cheap oil’. Every little bit to raise the price of oil – and oil-based products – towards their long-run opportunity costs can only be a good thing.

Under such a commercial regime, we could call the Iranians and Omanis (and whoever else becomes part of the service-consortium) Strait Lords or straitlords (like landlords). Indeed Egypt and Panama are – among other things – Canal Lords.

What would happen if the Strait of Hormuz was blocked by a giant earthquake? Then a pipe, tunnel, road or canal would have to be built. There would be no argument then about a portage fee being charged.

Indeed, there are many landlocked countries in the world. They expect to have to pay something to foreign authorities to access the international marketplace for goods. Ethiopia, with well over 100 million people, depends substantially on the port of Djibouti. Kazakhstan depends on China and Russia. Paraguay depends on access to the Paraná River. Switzerland depends on the Rhine and Rhone. Austria depends on the Danube. These passages all have associated commercial costs.

War and Sport

In the event of wars, Straits are typically the first passages to be blocked. Just think of the Strait of Dover, which connects the English Channel to the North Sea, in World War One and World War Two. The British used mines and submarine nets and guns to keep unauthorised traffic out. The best solution to wartime privations is to not start wars in the first place; and – if they happen anyway – to quickly find a pragmatic economic solution to end the war without creating ‘losers’; to end the war through negotiations rather than belligerent ‘demands’.

There is only one unreasonably belligerent nation-state in Southwest Asia, and it doesn’t have a coastline on the Persian Gulf. The rest of the states in a region – or in the world, especially when a Strait or a Gulf has global significance – can corral such a rogue state, if they choose to do so.

It is to the dismay of the vast majority of the world’s population that the rogue state of Israel has been allowed to operate uncorralled, and for so long; Israel with the thoughtless support – the uncritical loyalty – of its distant champion, its Goliath. Principles-based economic pragmatism can rule when rogues are constrained or reformed.

Iran is a proud nation that will play a fair game; it will, if allowed to, play fair and play hard. That’s the sporting mantra which reflects, for example, the New Zealand All Blacks.

Conclusion

The emeritus economists conclude: “The Strait of Hormuz is a cornerstone of the global energy system. For many years, the United States effectively managed its security; but this arrangement has become economically inefficient and politically asymmetrical in terms of responsibilities and burden-sharing. A cooperative regional security regime funded by transit charges [my emphasis] offers a promising alternative that would benefit oil exporters, shippers, and consumers.”

Yes, such a regime could contain a royalty component as well as a service component; ‘clipping the ticket’. Capitalism runs best with rents, but not excess rents, not Goliath rents.

About the writer:

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

7 May 2026 – In Aotearoa New Zealand, citizenship functions as an exit permit. An adult New Zealand citizen is free to choose to become a foreign denizen.

A denizen (of New Zealand) is a person living and working in New Zealand, but who doesn’t qualify for a New Zealand passport. New Zealand has three tiers of denizenship, although the first tier are actually citizens who are perceived as immigrants. Too many New Zealanders – probably increasing numbers of New Zealanders – tend to regard all New Zealand residents who don’t look or sound Pakeha, Māori, Pasifika, white South African, or Australian as non-citizens; as not real New Zealanders.

New Zealand is increasingly becoming a country with a high denizen-to-citizen ratio. New rules intended to make it more difficult for New Zealand permanent residents to become citizens of Aotearoa New Zealand can be expected to keep more immigrants here. That may be the intention.

Probably the countries with the world’s highest denizen to citizen ratios are the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

First-tier denizens don’t count as denizens, because they are actually citizens; they are just casually perceived by many to be denizens. Citizens of Indian or Chinese heritage whose presence in New Zealand dates back to the nineteenth century may be perceived as denizens now, whereas they were once perceived as citizens.

Second-tier denizens are those people living in New Zealand with ‘permanent residence’ status. Except that we would regard New Zealand resident Australians as citizens, even if most of them are not, technically.

Third-tier denizens are any ‘visa-holders’ living in New Zealand with some ‘right to paid work’ provision in their permits. This does include many international backpackers and many international students.

The denizen to citizen ratio is the number of resident adult second- and third-tier denizens divided by the number of resident adult citizens. I don’t know what it is, but am guessing that it is about one-to-three, and growing. (In the United Arab Emirates the denizen to citizen ratio is about nine-to-one.)

Is the new policy essentially an immigrant-retention scheme? We need our immigrants to stay, so in that sense it may be good policy. And, as the financial literati keep telling us, we are going to need many workers in the 2030s and 2040s to sell or otherwise provide services to our seniors. It’s just a shame that New Zealand has so many jobless young people, including many NEETs – over 20% of women aged 20 to 24 counted as NEETs in early 2026 – who have finished their tertiary education yet are not able to secure employment.

Young and Old

Just a note, if a decision is ever made to income-test New Zealand Superannuation, then many New Zealanders aged over 65 will choose retirement over employment, aggravating the pensioner to worker ratio. New Zealand has one of the world’s highest pensioner employment rates, thanks to its universal system of retirement income which enables people to delay retirement. Statistics New Zealand should keep more granular data about the employment attributes of people aged over 65.

And they should keep statistics of the numbers of qualifying people aged over 65 who choose to not opt-in to New Zealand Superannuation. The fiscal cost of qualifying older cash millionaires signing up for a superannuation income which they don’t need – all citizens and denizens with permanent residence – may be smaller than is widely presumed. We should find out.

The cost of income-testing seniors may be less than the actual savings. Further, given that the universal model works best for seniors, it most likely works best for juniors, too. Too many NEETs are trapped into the targeted benefit system. New Zealand is too poor to sideline its young citizens; too many respond by using their citizenship as an exit certificate; exit from Aotearoa New Zealand.

About the writer:

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

6 May 2026 – While I have been aware for some time about Sweden’s difficulty in adjusting to its large inflow of refugees in the 2010s – especially African and Muslim refugees – I was nevertheless shocked by what I saw in the 2025 alternative travel documentary series Scandinavia with Simon Reeve, broadcast in New Zealand by SkyGo. The particular episode which compares and contrasts refugee ‘integration’ in Sweden and Denmark is here on DailyMotion, with a full transcript.

Before mentioning crime, cocaine and apartheid, we should note that Sweden is a large-scale military systems exporter. For Sweden, the ‘big gun’ industry is equivalent to the dairy industry in New Zealand as a source of foreign exchange revenue. Reeve notes: “There is really no other country of comparable size, of comparable population that can produce its own fighter jets and submarines. … The Swedes make some of the most advanced weapon systems in the world.”

In still-mainly-white and privileged central Stockholm, a quasi-progressive economist who appears to have a Jesus-complex notes among other things that Sweden’s much vaunted (though targeted) tax-subsidy system is “ensuring that women not just continue to provide economically for the family, but also for the state as well.” He notes “they contribute so much to our economy and welfare”. Sweden is the archetypal liberal mercantilist state that insists on running huge current account surpluses, and interprets national success as making vast amounts of money; it’s a corporate society which engineers people into making choices which reflect the ‘rainy day’ values of its state system.

In six out of seven years, Sweden ran current account surpluses in excess of five percent of GDP. Sweden has always run such surpluses for more than thirty years; as a country, it keeps putting ‘money in the bank’ and not spending it. It could be said that its foreign ‘investments’ support New Zealand’s inflated standard of living. New Zealand hasn’t had a current account surplus since 1973, and typically has a current account balance of minus five percent of GDP; mirror image of Sweden.

Despite (or because of) its liberal and mercantilist credentials, Sweden is a failing state. Reeve visits the police bomb squad. We learn that: “Deadly shootings among drug gangs, largely run by people from immigrant backgrounds, have more than tripled. The gun murder rate in Stockholm is now roughly 30 times that of London. Sweden has the highest gun crime death rate in Europe, after Montenegro and Albania. And it’s not just guns. … Somewhere around 2018, [Sweden] experienced rapidly increasing numbers of homemade bombs, hand grenades and so on. … Most of the hand grenades being thrown are being thrown by very young boys and girls. … Bomb units can get four callouts a day.”

He goes on to note: “Gang warfare has exploded here, fuelled by the rise in cocaine use in Sweden and across Europe. Gangs have taken advantage of liberal policies that children shouldn’t be arrested and actively recruited them. … Most of the perpetrators, as well as the victims, come from immigrant communities. … In recent decades, Swedes welcomed refugees from world conflicts, more than 100,000 from the wars in the Balkans, and hundreds of thousands from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan. … Housing’s been provided, but often far from city centres, in estates where up to 90% of residents are now from immigrant backgrounds. … Two areas of suburban Stockholm … estates are cut off, hemmed in by motorways.”

The main problem growing up in those estates, mentioned by a Swedish-born woman of Somali descent, is “poverty”. “When I was 15 years old, I lost my best friend at this gang war that has been happening for 10 years, for decades. … The first thing is they need to see us as humans.” Yes, in Sweden, with its much-vaunted welfare state. (The Somali refugees came in the early 1990s, as a result of one of the United States’s failed foreign adventures.)

Reeve concludes: “We can debate whether there’s been a failure to integrate, but there has definitely been a failure of integration. The consequences are now being felt.”

The present government – in office since 2022 – is, more than most governments in Sweden’s history, heavily into New Zealand’s Luxon/Willis style of fiscal consolidation. Albeit with higher taxes and targeted subsidies.

We may note the following recent stories hosted by Al Jazeera: ‘Ready to murder?’ How criminal networks in Sweden are recruiting children to kill (15 Dec 2025), and Gangland wars killing dozens of bystanders, report Swedish police (4 May 2026). The former states that “What began as a utopian welfare project [of public housing in the 1960s and 1970s] gradually evolved into the physical framework of today’s segregated suburbs.” (Is this a portent of the fate which will befall the Unitec housing project, Te Kukūnga Waka, still very much in its early days? See my Carrington Precinct, Aka Unitec, 5 February 2026, Scoop) The latter story notes that “the minority right-wing government, propped up by the far-right Sweden Democrats, has been pushing through proposals to crack down on crime and immigration ahead of a general election on September 13.”

Sweden, reflecting its exceptionalist image as a warmly welcoming country, rejected any attempts to ‘assimilate’ its refugee immigrants; supposedly leaving them to retain their cultures of origin while being supported in deep poverty traps, in a suffocating welfare state of targeted housing and tightly means-tested hand-outs.

Denmark

Denmark, in recent years has gone the other way, heavily restricting refugee immigration and forcibly removing people from their immigrant silos into ‘mixed communities’. They have done much as what ACT in New Zealand wants to do here; mix them up, and sign them up to traditional national values.

Simon Reeve notes: “It would be wrong to think there are no problems in Denmark. All this social cohesion means outsiders can sometimes feel unwelcome. If you don’t conform here, it can feel uncomfortable.”

“The government even introduced what was called a ghetto law, aimed at preventing neighbourhoods being dominated by so-called non-Western immigrants. … One designated ghetto was the multicultural neighbourhood Mjolnaparkin. … Some families were actually forced to relocate. … It’s been described as the social experiment of the century. It’s also being described as social policy with a bulldozer. … Non-western parents in ghetto areas are now required to send their one-year-olds to preschools to ensure they learn Danish and traditions and values, or they lose government welfare benefits. Ghettos have since been renamed parallel societies …  an attempt to enforce and impose fundamental Danish values.”

Current policies; and multiculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand

“Sweden’s reduced overall net immigration to zero. Denmark has the same target … they’ll offer up to £26,000 for immigrants to return home.” And “even in liberal Sweden, I met indigenous people who feel forgotten and excluded.” Shame, shame, shame. Sweden functions now too much like an apartheid state. And Denmark too, in its own less violent and less overt way.

In my view, genuine multiculturalism – cultural fusion – works best. In Aotearoa New Zealand that’s an absolute requirement, given the extent of demographic turnover, losing so many New Zealand citizens as well as welcoming immigrants. New Zealand will progress best without particular immigrant cultures becoming too dominant in any suburbs.

The word I like is ‘fusion’. Certainly not ‘assimilation’! Think of it like a ‘fusion restaurant’. We like immigrants to become fully integrated New Zealanders. But, in that process, New Zealand and ‘New Zealand values’ change; they adapt in a progressive way. In New Zealand we are doing this so much better than in Scandinavia. Especially in my own community of West Auckland which is financially poor but culturally rich, and has no ethnic or cultural silos or ghettos.

New Zealand of course could do much better. But it’s so important that neither overt nor covert racism creep further into the mainstream political discourse here. In New Zealand, relatively recent immigrants and their descendants supply so many of the goods and services which sustain us. Thankyou.

About the writer:

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Not me personally; and, of course, all ethnicities are equal. A week or so ago, as I was casually doing something else, I saw being interviewed a gentleman who I understand was a Gazan intellectual.

When asked about antisemitism, on the presumption that many Gazan people are somehow ‘antisemitic’ (and that somehow that alleged attitude is how so many people of Gaza got to be slaughtered with minimal western sympathy), the gentleman paused (in a kind of déjà vu frustration at the question), and then said “I am a Semite”.

Our use of the word ‘Semite’ (and its derivative words) is reminiscent of the widespread usage – between around 1875 to 1945 – of the word ‘Aryan’. Both words have been used as racial tropes. The correct word to describe people who are ‘anti-Jew’ is Judeophobia.

In my estimation, people who favour the term ‘antisemitism’ over ‘Judeophobia’ are too lazy to resist time-worn tropes. Through that laziness they become perpetrators of casual racism. Language matters.

Something else. I have only just come to hear about Israel’s Dahiya doctrine, of terrorising populations through the practice of domicide. James Bayes on Inside Story (Al Jazeera, 1 May 2026) quoted Daniel Reisner, lawyer for the IDF in 2009, saying: “If you do something for long enough the world will accept it, international law progresses through violations.” Such pursuits of domicide are the same dehousing and famine doctrines as those prompted by Churchill’s bestie Friedrich Lindemann during World War Two. Repetitive justification of collective terror does not make wrong behaviour right. Cases of domicide are motivated by racism and supremacism.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Analysis by Keith Rankin, 1 May 2026.

New Zealand is almost completely dependent on four things for its survival in the contemporary world. Imported wheat, rice, and refined fuel. And ships.

Wheat

New Zealand grows wheat in the South Island, most of which becomes animal feed. Reliance on New Zealand grown wheat is forestalled by a lack of milling capacity, and a lack of inter-island shipping. Eighty percent of New Zealand residents live in the North Island.

In the last week I have seen stories of South and West Australian wheatfields being plagued by mice. It’s a recurring story in Australia. I have also seen a story about a coming ‘super El Niño’ weather event. Such an event would hit the Australian wheatfields hard; drought and fires in South Australia, and too much rain in Queensland’s Darling Downs. Further, coming constraints on fertiliser supply can be expected to hit Australia hard,

In most years, 100% of New Zealand’s imported wheat – on which the North Island is totally reliant – comes from Australia. Much of that comes in processed form, given the constraints on flour milling in northern New Zealand.

What if Australia get better offers for its possibly compromised wheat crop? New Zealand may find itself in a diminished bargaining position for its usual slice of the Australian wheat pie.

New Zealand could transition to an economy based on balanced farming, with crop-farming and horticulture taking an essential and strategic place. But that would take time. It could only happen in the medium or long term.

Rice

Rice is a second staple food in New Zealand; a grain food which is entirely imported. Reliable supplies may become hard to secure in the future; though New Zealand’s traditional reliance on Australian rice means that there may still be a degree of rice-supply security.

We note however that rice is a staple of Asia, and that East and South Asian countries are likely to be among the most adversely affected by the imminent blockade-induced global economic crisis. Rice is a Giffen good, meaning that, as its price increases, Asian consumers eat more rice, not less. (Such Asian consumers can be expected to respond to a severe economic crisis by cutting back on the kinds of foods New Zealand exports, and to eat more rice instead; this is because rice will remain cheaper in Asia than long-haul imported foods, even when the rice price increases markedly.)

New Zealand should, from next week if not last week, establish a store of rice to ensure food security during a coming crisis; a crisis which seems increasingly likely. Rice, available now, may not always be available. Rice, once cooked, can be eaten directly; it does not require milling.

Ancient Romans, at times, depended on a universal bread allowance (as well as on circuses!). A society under deep strain depends on food benefits. For New Zealand in a future crisis, rice could be the best option as a dominant emergency food staple.

Fuel and Ships

While a producer of crude oil, New Zealand imports practically all the oil-based refined fuel that it consumes. 43% of New Zealand’s diminishing oil exports went to Australia for refining in 2025, down from 99% of a much larger amount of oil in 2011. Most of the rest is now refined in South Korea and Singapore.

For fuel, New Zealand is almost completely dependent on long-haul imports on fuel-consuming ships. At least this is a two-way trade with Korea and Singapore, though imports far exceed exports. So oil tankers taking New Zealand’s oil can at least be guaranteed to return with oil. But there is no guarantee that the rest of New Zealand’s scheduled oil imports will not be redirected, in response to better offers.

On the matter of fuel, it’s very distressing to see Ukraine – now a NATO proxy – doing its best to exacerbate the global fuel crisis by destroying the oil-export capacity of Russia, the one country best placed to relieve the present global crisis. When shortages of Ukrainian wheat threatened Africa’s food supply in 2022, arrangements were made between the combatants to free-up wheat exports. I see no sign of Ukraine or NATO taking the responsible option re the global fuel supply. (Even worse, King Charles – in the King’s speech – tried to incite the United States’ president to escalate the Ukraine-Russia war; a war that can never be resolved by escalation, but which can be resolved by a neutrality deal which would ensure that German troops would never again occupy places like Kharkiv.)

Finally, there’s the issue of ships. What is happening in the world’s shipbuilding industries at present? Are aging and eroding oil tankers and container ships being replaced as they normally would be in peace times? Will there be too few ships next decade to sustain re-established global supply chains; chains which, if similar to those of recent years, almost disregarded shipping as a cost?

Conclusion

For its most basic living commodities, New Zealand is almost completely dependent on long-haul shipping; or, in the case of wheat and rice from Australia, medium-haul shipping. By sea, Adelaide is a long way from Auckland. And New Zealand has minimum short-haul (ie coastal) shipping, which could serve – in a crisis – as an efficient domestic distribution mechanism.

To avoid a food security catastrophe, New Zealand needs to store more food. Food stores facilitate any transition in land use. A substitution to the production of food staples which will feed New Zealanders will take many years.

Rice is the best staple food to store, as well as being a staple much more widely consumed in the existing new New Zealand than in the previous century.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

There is a narrative going around that the war in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman – Israel/USA versus Iran – is a training exercise for the big one, a war between the United States and China centred on the Taiwan Strait.

In Hormuz Today, Taiwan Tomorrow (Project Syndicate, 20 April 2026), Todd G Buchholz argues “By closing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has handed the Trump administration a practice test. To pass – and preserve deterrence against a Chinese invasion or blockade of Taiwan – the United States must reopen the Strait decisively and visibly with escorts, minesweepers, and strikes on launch sites.”

Also, from Project Syndicate (27 April 2026), we have The Hidden Chokepoints Threatening the Global Economy, by Diane Coyle. She says: “Most notably, Taiwan dominates advanced semiconductor production through TSMC, which accounts for more than 90% of the global supply.” Should military means be used to protect the Taiwanese monopoly of a strategic commodity? That’s not how capitalism is supposed to work.

What would be a geopolitical solution to the presumed – albeit poorly researched – allegation that China plans to exploit the Taiwan Strait chokepoint to bring down The West?

The Asian political territory called China – a mix of continent and islands – is claimed by two rival regimes; one in Beijing, one in Taipei. There is an obvious solution; that the territory presently controlled by Beijing becomes the Sovereign State of China and the territory presently controlled by Taipei becomes the Sovereign State of Taiwan.

Obvious to most people, because most people believe that the boundary between the two territories is the Taiwan Strait. A big miscomprehension, which the geopolitical agitators seem very keen to never discuss; because those agitators – for their own reasons – want to present the Taiwan Strait as the world’s most consequential and unresolved geopolitical boundary.

The principal boundary between the two territories is Xiamen Harbour. There is a second boundary off the coast of Fuzhou. Xiamen is a Chinese city of just over five million people, the population of New Zealand. Fuzhou is a Chinese city of over eight million people, the population of London. Both cities are in the Chinese province of Fujian. The Taiwanese counties of Kinmen and Lienchiang sit on the western (Chinese) side of the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan proper sits on the eastern side of the Taiwan Strait.

Solution

Taiwan could cede the two counties of Kinmen and Lienchiang to China; not necessarily as counties of China’s Fujian province, but as economic zones comparable to Macau and Hong Kong.

In return, China could drop its claim to Taiwan proper. China would drop its claim to the vast majority of Taiwan, which is on the eastern side of the Taiwan Strait.

The result would be two clearly distinct countries – China and Taiwan – internationally recognisable as such, separated by the wide-enough Taiwan Strait; much wider than the Strait of Hormuz.

Yes, both China and Taiwan would be making concessions. But each would be making gains in excess of those concessions; a win-win solution based on reciprocity. China already has substantial pragmatic trade relations with Taiwan; there need be no barriers to the continuance of those relations. Indeed, Taiwan’s relations with all nations could improve, with international recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign nation state.

The world could then heave a sigh of relief; the normalisation of a piece of geography deeply politicised by three small but powerful groups of people – cliques in Washington DC, Beijing, Taipei – cliques with narrow and potentially destructive nationalist and mercantilist agendas.

The people – and other species – of this world should never be held hostage to egos; to bigheads, some of whose natural inclinations are to resort to massive externalised violence if they cannot prevail upon their rivals by ‘peaceful’ means.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Inflation is a topic which has, for a long time now, been at the forefront of normative economics. Normative economics is the economics of mainstream ideology, not the economics informed by concept or science.

The latest New Zealand CPI-inflation data – released this week – have been called the ‘calm before the storm’. We know that the CPI is going to rise markedly in the June quarter. But will that be due to inflation? Or will it be due to the real costs of war; and in the context that the present war has all the elements of global cost, not just local or regional cost. If the latter, then the present ‘war of choice’ – a euphemism for a war of aggression waged by traditional allies – also becomes a ‘cost-of living crisis’ of choice.

Can we characterise other cost-of-living crises likewise, as crises of choice which have downside foreseeable consequences (though, like all crises, may have a mix of upside and downside unintended and unforeseeableconsequences)? Such choice-making would be clear instances of ‘functional stupidity’, as outlined in the 2016 book The Stupidity Paradox: the Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity at Work (by Mats Alvesson and André Spicer). We may note that the stupidity paradox applies to academic workplaces as well as to corporate workplaces.

With regards to ‘unforeseeable consequences’, there is also a category of ‘underforseeable consequences’, meaning plausible consequences only imaginable by people capable of genuine critical reflection. Such people appear in all walks of life; certainly not only in academia. It was Cassandra, in Troy, who foresaw downside consequences which others could not.

Inflation as a Concept: Inflation versus CPI-Inflation

Inflation, as a concept, is defined as a depreciation of the purchasing power of money. (It means that a dollar will buy less in the present than in the past.) Deflation, thereby, is defined as an appreciation of the purchasing power of money. Thus, a symptom of inflation is rising prices. This does not mean, however, that all cases of rising prices can be categorised as inflation.

(There may be cases of inflation where prices are not rising; where falling costs – that is, rising productivity – are offset by monetary depreciation. Indeed, a comparison of the twentieth century with the nineteenth century suggests that inflation may have been more ubiquitous in the twentieth century than is commonly realised. And that much of the hidden inflation of the twentieth century, rather than being a problem, was actually an unrecognised solution to the very real nineteenth century problem of CPI-deflation.)

A depreciation of money – inflation – may be a problem, may be a solution to a problem, or it may be neutral. For inflation to be a significant problem, economists normally understand it to be an ongoing process – like an out-of-control train – rather than a one-off or two-off event.

CPI-inflation has a separate definition. It is defined as an increase in the general – that is, average – level of consumer prices. Consumer prices are prices incurred by households of people within a defined territory; typically, we think of a territorial nation-state, though we could be interested in a province, or we could be interested in a geopolitical region, or the world as a whole.

There are essentially four quite separate versions of CPI-inflation. Only three of these meet the definition of inflation as monetary depreciation. The other version is increases in the cost-of-living, and has been a substantial problem in the world this decade; this version is about real supply, not about money supply. Further, this can become a process of ongoing real-supply cost-of-living increases, not just getting through a limited cost event such as a pandemic or short war; such a process is a significant problem, but it is not inflation. An appropriate policy response is to address the real supply costs, and to stop pretending that it’s a depreciation-of-money problem.

A cost-of-living crisis of choice is a politically imposed real-supply crisis. Conceptually, such crises may be the result of ‘evil’, but more likely they are the result of ‘stupidity’ (refer Bonhoeffer, Cipolla, and Alvesson/Spicer). ‘Stupidity’ can be a technical word; indeed, even words like ‘evil’ can be given a technical meaning, just as the word ‘genocide’ has both technical and popular meanings.

Understanding these conceptual differences is very important, because different kinds of CPI-inflation problems require different kinds of policy remediation. Sometimes the best policy is a political or administrative choice to do nothing; to watch and wait. And certainly a very important part of the policy response to processes of CPI-inflation is to work out which kind – or which kinds – of CPI-inflation are taking place. Getting this analysis wrong can mean the implementation of a policy which is worse – possibly much worse – than doing nothing.

The four kinds of CPI-inflation are these:

·         increases in the aggregate demand for commodities and services; this is primary inflation

·         increases in the supply costs of commodities and/or services; this, in itself, is not inflation

·         a corrective process facilitated, by increases in the supply of or the circulation velocity of money, and that may under certain circumstances go awry; this process is known as secondary inflation

·         a process arising from the presence of different denominations of money – for example, American dollars and New Zealand dollars – and changes in the exchange prices (ie exchange rates) of one such money vis-à-vis others such monies; a process of localised inflation

One: Primary Inflation; exceptional increases in aggregate demand

This is the demand-pull inflation which dominates Economics 101 textbooks. It is commonly understood as ‘too much money chasing too few goods’; though that pithy maxim needs some unpacking.

The best way to understand demand-inflation is through the concept of a demand shock (an acute event) or a demand-stress (a chronic event). An example of a demand-shock is an unfunded increase in the demand, say, for medical services. By ‘unfunded’ we mean that it’s not offset by a decrease in demand for other goods or services. (Though there is an adjustment issue that arises from demand ‘switches’.) Demand ‘events’ or ‘boosts’ can be characterised as shocks, stresses, or switches.

An unfunded increase in spending means, essentially, a withdrawal of money from bank accounts; such withdrawals increase the circulation velocity of money. More generally, a reduction in savings is a sell-off of financial assets, noting that a bank deposit is a financial asset. Alternatively, an unfunded increase in spending means an increase in borrowing – especially borrowing from banks – that is not offset by someone else’s increase in saving; this is new money. This can be called an increase in credit. A demand shock can also arise externally, by money being sent to or brought into a country.

Demand shocks can, potentially, bid up the prices of goods and services. ‘Potentially’, because if there have been ongoing productivity increases, then more spending should be accompanied by more output, and not by higher prices. (If productivity is increasing and there are insufficient demand-boost events, then prices should be falling; that would result in CPI-deflation. Such deflation indeed was the norm in the capitalist world in the nineteenth century; including New Zealand.)

Going back to my example of increased spending on medical services, a demand shock is strictly an increase in demand because people have increased wants; that is, more purchases of ‘nice-to-have’ items. Or it could mean more people moving into older age groups, spending their savings. Or it could arise from more babies being born; as in the New Zealand ‘baby blip’ at the end of the 1980s. It does not mean more purchases of medical services arising from a general deterioration of the health of the population; this example is an increase in real costs, and comes under the label of ‘supply stress’, not ‘demand shock’.

Primary inflation is not a problem in itself. Rather, it’s a feature of the market economy working as it should do; in particular it’s a source of information that production systems are tight, and that new investment would be helpful to deal with the ‘too few goods’ part of the demand-inflation experience. In this last circumstance, higher interest rates are appropriate; they result from increased market demand for production capacity, not from policymakers raising interest rates to discourage the very productive investment that’s required.

There is a special case of demand-inflation, whereby the government sector outcompetes the private sector for new credit. This may or may not be capricious – ‘evil’ as Peter Thiel might say – on the part of government; more often it’s the government borrowing for more essential purposes than the purposes of private borrowers. The capricious case is called ‘crowding out’. In this special case, there is a role for interest rate increases; essentially to ration credit.

It is to the capricious version of this special case that monetary policy as we have come to know it may apply. But this policy – an engineered recession – arguably harms the private sector most. To achieve more private spending and less government spending, it is fiscal austerity rather than monetary austerity which is most pertinent. But even that budgetary policy of ‘fiscal consolidation’ tends to backfire, because so much private income arises from businesses supplying goods and services to government sector organisations; much private investment arises to satisfy governmental demands. Indeed, Air New Zealand always did well supplying air travel to government-connected personnel.

Primary inflation is a mix of rationing and incentive. The more rationing that is required when the economy is responding to increased demands, the more primary inflation there will be. Rising wages, at least in some production sectors, is a part of the resource reallocation process; and is also appropriate to an economy which is experiencing rising productivity.

An important coming example of primary inflation will be the increased spending of accumulated retirement savings; ie from KiwiSaver and other managed funds. Those spending from the biggest funds will be queue-jumpers at a time of inflation-facilitated rationing.

Demand-pull inflation is rationing goods and services by market price, rather than rationing by need or by equity. Most economists will say that ‘rationing by price’ is the most efficient method of rationing. So, the inflation is not really the problem; rather the problem is the unresponsiveness (strictly the ‘under-responsiveness’) of the economy that creates the requirement for rationing. The biggest potential problem is that of inequitable rationing.

Of course, unanticable demand-shocks and demand-stresses are a problem. But they are rare; most demand-events that are heading our way are fully visible, so long as we choose to look. Failure to anticipate the future market demands arising from an aging population (eg healthcare expenditures) and from maturing retirement-savings funds represents a primary-inflation crisis of choice.

Second Case: ‘Cost-plus’ CPI-inflation which is not actually inflation

It costs more to pick, from a tree, high-hanging fruit compared to low-hanging fruit. The process of moving from the easy-to-pick fruit to the hard-to-pick fruit is not a process of inflation. It is a ‘cost event’, however.

The most problematic form of CPI-inflation is the one known in the textbooks as ‘cost-plus inflation’. The only thing is that primary ‘cost-plus’ inflation is not inflation at all. Although cost-plus inflation can under certain circumstances facilitate a process of secondary inflation; secondary inflation definitely is inflation, and may or may not be an important economic threat.

Supply-cost price increases most certainly are a threat; they are a cost-of-living threat, but not an inflation threat. They relate to supply shocks (acute) and supply stresses (chronic). Supply switches may also occur; for example, as certain resources run out or become too scarce.

Examples of supply shocks are disruptions to supply chains arising from a pandemic. Such disruptions may arise from the disease process itself, or from measures taken to address the disease process; or from a mix of the disease and the prescribed cure.

Supply shocks are especially relevant today, because our globalised supply chains are technically efficient – at least in the short- and medium-term – yet vulnerable. They mean that a country like New Zealand can suffer severely if the boats stop coming; if those supply-ships are reprioritised. This century, New Zealand has become dependent on imported food.

Another form of supply shock is war. War can also be a supply stress; for example, some forever wars. The Ukraine-Russia forever war has proved so far to have been a supply-shock. Workarounds came into effect after a few months. The Israel-Iran War – which threatens to be another forever war – may prove to be more of a global supply stress. The stalemate over the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint may never return to its prewar state.

Climate change is another supply stress; as are many other environmental costs. The real costs arising from climate change keep outpacing the workarounds; and some of the workarounds – for example, air conditioning – aggravate the root causes of these costs.

Another possible supply stress is rising labour costs. Labour costs are ambiguous. Higher wages granted to keep up with supply-cost price increases are a feature that sustains secondary inflation. But higher wages arising from shortages of skilled labour – from structural labour supply issues, including demographics and impediments to migration – are supply shocks if easily remediated, or supply stresses if largely irremediable.

Supply stresses set off a process of ongoing CPI-increases; for example, as pickable or minable low-hanging-fruitgive way to ‘higher-hanging fruit’.

A fourth important supply cost – again a shock if acute, and a stress if chronic – is the use of interest rate intervention to raise capital costs; to raise the cost of borrowing and therefore of economic investment, and also to squeeze existing debtors.

Raised interest rates, as a policy measure, may generate primary deflation; the problem of falling aggregate demand. Policymakers may juxtapose a non-inflation cost-of-living crisis with a primary deflation; making it look (superficially) as if neither problem is taking place when in reality there are two separate and serious problems being brushed under the carpet.

With one ‘policy lever’, we both create a cost-of-living mess and sweep away the more obvious evidence. Hidden ooze is even more problematic than its visible form.

A fifth important supply stress is the use of restrictive fiscal policy to delay or forever postpone vital works of public infrastructure. Inadequate civilian infrastructure – and this includes education as well as engineering projects – represents one of the most potent chokepoints in the supply chain; indeed, that’s why such infrastructure is so often targeted in a war of aggression.

Restrictive fiscal policies – ironically often implemented in the name of intergenerational equity, not saddling younger generations with public debt – are a clear example of a cost-of-living crisis of choice, with the crisis being most imposed upon the very population generation for whom that public-austerity policy was claimed to benefit. The classic case here remains Ruthanasia. New Zealand’s current water-supply woes are a direct result of 1990s’ fiscal austerity. (See The $49 billion cost of fixing water infrastructure woes laid bare, RNZ, 23 April 2026.)

(A topical example – see Australian company plans $3b lignite-to-fertiliser plant in Southland, RNZ 22 April 2026 – is that if there had been public support [adequate funding, not just talk] for investment in urea-fertiliser production in Southland ten years ago, when New Zealand had been moving further in the direction of complete dependence on Persian Gulf supplies, then New Zealand’s present accelerating cost-of-living crisis might have been preempted. Investing is borrowing and spending money, not hoarding it in Sovereign Wealth Funds which play the global markets and facilitate the very wars which are a large part of the cost-of-living problem.)

Third CPI-Inflation Case: Secondary Inflation

This is the adjustment case; the situation where inflation is a natural and probably necessary part of any post-shock economic correction. (That is not to say that all secondary inflations are OK.)

This is the one that the theory of anti-inflation monetary policy focuses on; fixing a problem which is often (but not always) a part of the most efficient (and market-led) corrective solution.

Secondary inflation is one of two options for a restoration of normality once a demand-shock or a supply-shock event is over. The most obvious – though least likely – option is a simple restoration of the pre-shock status quo. Thus, in the case of a primary event connected to rising petrol prices, in this option petrol and other prices would return to what they were before the shock. A primary CPI-inflation would be followed by an equal-and-opposite primary CPI-deflation.

An in-between case would be that the higher shock-related price increases are not reversed but the CPI-inflation rate quickly returns to something like normal. (Noting that normal inflation of two percent per year is generally regarded by policymakers as better, as more efficient, than zero inflation. Normal inflation is forever providing a bit of readjustment and a bit of demand stimulus.)

Another case would be that general prices rise further, beyond the shock phase of inflation, as relative prices re-adjust, meaning that the adjustment process itself has an inflationary component; albeit a decelerating inflation as the new-normal arises. This is a process of market-led disinflation. It is not at all clear that this market solution could be regarded in any way as a problem.

The fourth variant of the post-shock economy is the extreme case. In this case, there is a surge in ‘inflation expectations’, and secondary inflation accelerates, taking on a ‘mind of its own’, supposedly leading, if unchecked by authoritarian power, to a state of hyperinflation. This is the hypothesis of accelerating secondary inflation, and real-world examples are extremely scarce. (There have been historical examples of hyperinflation in particular countries in particular circumstances; these generally come into the localised inflation case; see below.) I know of no examples of either global hyperinflation or of hyperinflation in an economically unweakened country.

Nevertheless, the Great Inflation of the 1970s has often been presented as such an example. A careful unpacking of the inflations of that era tell a different story; a story of multiple shocks of different types. The evidence is that, globally, those events represented overlapping cases of primary inflation, supply-cost CPI-inflation, and slowly decelerating secondary inflation; despite instances of many countries implementing policies that amounted to ‘cost-of-living crises of choice’. The slow pace of the decelerations were most probably due to ‘anti-inflation’ monetary policies which raised interest rates to cause stagflation. Stagflation is most-commonly a contrived mix of high-interest-rate cost-of-living crises and suppressed secondary inflation. Suppressed secondary inflation eventually leads to a primary deflation; the result is apparent CPI stabilisation, but in reality two serious problems with opposing consumer-price symptoms that cancel each other out.

As well as ‘cost-of-living crises of choice’, the adjustment process of secondary inflation is extended by misinterpretations between inflationary and non-inflationary price increases. An important example is wage-setting, whereby trade unions seek to negotiate inflation adjustments to hourly wage rates based on overall CPI-inflation and not just on the monetary depreciation. This process is called price-indexing; it is partly necessary and partly misguided, depending on the actual diagnosis of the cost-of-living event.

For countries mired in private debt denominated in local currency, the only way out, really, is secondary inflation – initially, double-digit inflation. (For small countries with a weak presence in the financial world, government debt looks to international creditors very much the same as private debt.) Mass bankruptcies (on generous terms) are another form of reset. Other options which help with private debt are expansionary fiscal policy (as in Japan in the 1990s), universal incomes, charity, and forgiveness. Fiscal accommodation (opposite of ‘fiscal consolidation’) and inflation are generally the most efficient market – or marketish – mechanisms for accomplishing a restorative reset.

For countries mired in foreign-denominated debt, then international inflation is required. (Or default and forgiveness.) Under these conditions, global interest rates should be generally lower than inflation rates. Interest rates can be negative; indeed should be, if money generally is being transmitted from many ‘have-nots’ to relatively few ‘haves’. From 2014 until the early 2020s, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and Japan all had negative wholesale interest rates; and it worked, low inflation and fewer other problems.

Türkiye in the 2010s has been an example of a country with high inflation and high but often lower interest rates. Türkiye is a significant global economic player; arguably unweakened, maybe even strengthened, by its inflation experience and its refusal to yield to the ‘slam-on-the-brakes’ narrative which constitutes western monetary-policy orthodoxy. Türkiye’s average annual economic growth in the last two decades has been five percent.

When necessary inflation is suppressed, capitalist economies just grind to a halt, which is a form of collapse. New warlords – eg druglord types – fill the vacuum. Capitalism as we know it cannot continue if the indebted many have to keep paying more and more interest to the privileged few.

Fourth Case: localised Exchange-Rate driven inflation

The previous three cases of CPI-inflation apply to the world as a whole, as well as to individual countries. In today’s world, each nation-state has a currency which is ‘legal tender’; for most countries it is their own national currency.

When one national currency depreciates against a ‘basket’ of other currencies, that cheaper money can be expected to buy less; hence inflation has occurred, money has depreciated. Likewise, many of the other currencies in the basket will have appreciated, on average, so they will experience monetary deflation.

Such inflation or deflation may or may not show up in CPI statistics; it all depends on what other CPI-inflationary events or processes are taking place at the same time.

Very high national rates of inflation – indeed most hyperinflations are of this type – driven by devaluations or depreciations of countries’ domestic currencies. They represent fundamental weaknesses of such countries’ economies; although such countries’ weaknesses may well be hidden from global market scrutiny for a long time (eg for several decades).

This kind of inflation is often presented as a kind of bogeyman; presented to naïve politicians as a possible consequence of not following ‘orthodox’ monetary policy. So, such politicians find themselves facing a binary choice: to have a cost-of-living crisis of choice (but to pretend its something else), or to risk an exchange-rate collapse leading to the kind of hyperinflation which Zimbabwe experienced in the 2000s. So the politicians devolve the policy to unelected central bankers; they can blame someone else while suggesting that the ‘fix-up’ will be next year, always next year.

War Inflation

Finally, a note on war inflation. Inflation has always been associated with war. War circumstances require fiscal and monetary policies that redirect resources from ‘guns’ to ‘butter’, as the postWW2 economics’ textbooks used to say. Inflation gets forever worse during a war, though the measurable symptoms of wartime inflation are typically suppressed through other forms of rationing and the deprioritisation of data collection. So, it’s commonly immediately after wars that countries’ inflation rates explode, though often that inflation subsides as debts are reset.

The USA can be different, because it alone has the privilege of printing money without consequence; generally, the rest of the world responds to an American demand-shock by producing more and exporting those surpluses to the United States. In most of our lifetimes, capitalist economies have been responsive to demand shocks and stresses. Wars, though, create supply shocks and stresses. Generally, though, it has been surprising to what extent countries at war have been able to overcome those deprivations.

War experiences show that the inflation bogey has been generally overstated; with the few cases of genuine postwar hyperinflation – like Hungary in 1946 – proving to be the exception rather than the rule.

Conclusion

Inflation is much less of a problem than it is commonly presented as. As often as it’s a problem, it’s a solution.

The biggest problem of inflation is the contrived fear of inflation. Fear of inflation – combined with popular ignorance about it – becomes an important reason why we have cost-of-living crises of choice.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Are we witnessing, for the first time, a British King appeasing a foreign emperor? And on the quarter-millennial anniversary of Britain’s greatest ever geopolitical humiliation. Could King Charles be enacting one of the final straws in the deathknell of the Monarchy?

To Mr Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: Man-up. Grow a spine. Otherwise, you too may fall. Call an election if you must to re-establish your mandate, and the mandate of the King.

According to the ABC’s Brad Ryan: “The king was clearly keen to communicate that not only was the UK a friend to the US, it was also actively supporting the Trump administration in its efforts to project military might around the world.” (Takeaways from King Charles’ speech to the US Congress, on RNZ News, 29 April 2026.) Not even a capital ‘k’ for King.

In the light of Trump says his mother had a crush on young Prince Charles (The Independent on YouTube, 28 April 2026), I can envisage the expiration of the Monarchy being marked by a tabloid broadcast of an AI fake mashup of the late Mary Anne MacLeod Trump singing Charlie is my Darling. It would be an ignominious end to a line of English Kings and Queens dating back to 1066.

My reading of British politics at the moment is that there are many angry men (and women) in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere); The Educated Miserables, as Victor Hugo might have called them. The ruling classes on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are just so out-of-touch with the demos; the people who work, live and die under their semi-democratic jurisdictions. (Refer UK healthy life expectancy falls by two years in past decade, BBC 27 April 2026.)

The election of the barely mentioned never debunked President of Iran in 2024 today looks much more like a transparent exercise in people power than the elections that same year in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France. To eyes foreign to the above-mentioned countries, Iran may not be the only nation for which regime change is being sought. To the western Emperors, Presidents, Kings, Prime Ministers and counsels: “first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (Gospel of Matthew).

In the meantime – beams and motes notwithstanding – just stop holding the world to ransom. And resign, if you cannot at least try to act in the interest of the world.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

It’s commonplace, especially in The West, to think of wars in binary terms. In those terms, wars are either won or lost, like a sports match. And the symbol of victory is a trophy. In a match-up, the symbol of defeat is the loss of a trophy.

In the days of the Roman Empire, the trophy might be a ‘barbarian’ leader being paraded in chains; or maybe his head in a box. ‘Decapitation’ is a crude trophy word, still very much in vogue.

In the present Iran War, the trophy of victory might have been the ‘head’ of the 86-year-old ‘Supreme Leader’; Iran’s former equivalent of the United Kingdom’s late Queen Elizabeth II. But in reality, the Iranians were waiting for Ali Khamenei to die; and all the signs were, so long as Iran was left in relative peace, that a liberalisation process was already in place.

Further the assassination of Khamanei could never have been an adequate trophy for the United States. Because it was actually done by Israel, another country, another nuclear power, indeed a highly secretive nuclear power, a genocidal power which terrorises its part of the world. And we note that it has always been in Israel’s interest to keep Iran on a war-footing; to keep it from being anything other than an enemy. A progressive Iran would have very much stymied the Greater Israel project. Hence the need to assassinate Khamanei before he died of natural causes.

For the United States, another trophy had to be found. Having co-started the present war, the United States needs to end it, and with a victory trophy.

It would seem that the trophy being demanded is Iran’s enriched uranium. Apparently, the United States wants to be allowed to go into Iran, excavate the enriched uranium, and then to truck it and ship it to some undisclosed destination. To facilitate this, the United States is trying to make its victory arrangements with ‘negotiations’ brokered by an actual pro-China nuclear power in Southwest Asia; namely Pakistan, a country over which the United States has intruded upon its political sovereignty on a number of occasions, a country with no popular love for the United States and its proxies.

We need to note that, for Iran to allow the United States to acquire its trophy would represent a military defeat; a capitulation in the eyes of the world in general, the Iranian population (both those in favour of the present Pezeshkian regime, and those opposed to it) in particular, and to the global community of Shia Muslims. (The total Shia population is estimated to be 350 million, 250 million of whom are faithful, and 90 million of whom are resident in Iran.)

Japan

On the matter of understanding the shortcomings of binary victory and binary defeat, we may turn to the matter of Japan in 1945. The trophy at stake was Emperor Hirihito. And, on the basis of this binary, it was Japan, not the United States, which was victorious. Japan retained its trophy.

On 9 March 1945, the United States embarked on its campaign for unconditional victory; meaning that Japan had to unconditionally surrender, which in turn would mean that Hirohito would be Japan’s last emperor, and that his reign would end in 1945.

For starters, the United States slaughtered 100,000 residents of Tokyo in four hours of one night; the wee hours of 10 March. Total Japanese deaths from that spring and summer bombing campaign – including the nuclear deaths – was between 500,000 and one million people.

None of these bombings came close to resulting in Japan conceding its Emperor. The United States was preparing to drop three more atomic bombs on Japan that year – production criteria meant that these bombs were scheduled for November and December 1945. If Japan still refused to give up its trophy, the city of Kyoto was scheduled for removal from the United States’s non-hit list. Also, to note, the United States kept up its non-nuclear aerial assault on Japan until the day before the deal was signed.

In August 1945, communications were not good in Japan. The leadership in Tokyo had heard that there was an unusually large explosion at Hiroshima, and then another in Nagasaki, but they didn’t really have time to process their limited information. They had already been hit by plenty of other big bombs. Meanwhile, the people on the ground in Hiroshima were able to restore electrical power within three days of that explosion; locals did what locals do everywhere, pick themselves up if they can, and try to keep living.

What happened to finish the war was the threat from the Soviet Union. After the end of the war in Europe, the Soviet Union returned its attention to the East. There had been longstanding territorial disputes – and cold dispute still continues in the Kuril Islands – between Japan and Russia. Russia, having been embarrassed in the 1904/05 Russia-Japan War, potentially had a score to settle; Manchuria, for much of the first half of the twentieth century, had been territory contested between Russia, China and Japan.

But it was the United States which most feared the Soviet Union’s advance into Northeast Asia. In Europe, the United States was pushing the narrative that the Soviet Union, which had ‘liberated’ Eastern Europe from the German Nazi regime, was intent on pushing Communism onto Western Europe, and would use military means to do that. The hoary trope in Paris and London, that the Russians would soon be at their front-doors if they could not be held behind an iron curtain within Germany, was a narrative very much adhered to by the Americans with regard to the Far East as well as to the Far West. Indeed, by the time of the end of hostilities in August 1945, Soviet Russia had already ‘liberated’ half of the Korean Peninsula; Korea was a mirror image of the emergent East-West faultline within Europe.

So, the Americans caved in. They agreed that Japan could keep its Emperor. Japan saved face. Hostilities in the Pacific War ended the next day.

Iran again

2026 hostilities could end as soon as the United States removes its demand for a trophy which the Americans know the Iranians cannot accept. The barrier to ending the war is that the American regime would lose face without a compelling victory trophy. In the earlier Japan situation, by contrast, the American occupation after August 1945 meant that the United States could easily obscure the fact that it had had to make a major concession to secure the end of that war.

Enemies of Convenience: On the matter of Non-Binary War

At one level there is the matter of stated and unstated goals, criteria for ‘success’ (which is not necessarily ‘winning’), and knowing how and when to ‘vacate the arena’. Re the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, they contributed very little to ending World War Two, but were successful examples of ‘live testing’, and had the huge impact on the new Cold War arena in Europe as ‘demonstration devices”. With the Cold War setting in, Japan proved to be a World War Two enemy of convenience.

Of particular interest is Is war more profitable than peace? David Keen explains, Talk to Al Jazeera, 5 April 2026 (and on YouTube).

Introduction: “What if ‘who is winning’ is the wrong question? Because in many modern conflicts victory is not the only or even the main objective. … It opens streams of profit, and, for many, it creates a constant state of threat that justifies its own continuation. … Wars evolve, adapt, and sometimes sustain the very actors fighting them. … To understand why some wars don’t end, we turn to a leading voice in the political economy of conflict, Professor of Conflict Studies at the London School of Economics, David Keen.”

Keen suggests that some of the benefits of war include “making money”, “suppressing dissent under the cover of war”, “divide and rule”, “painting dissent as disloyalty”, “turning your enemy into the image that you’ve put about in your propaganda”, … “taking actions that are predictably counterproductive”. For certain aims “the enemy can be surprisingly useful”.

David Keen (unassuming, quiet, thoughtful): “This division of people into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ is incredibly simplistic, and goes back as far as the Vietnam War.” (And further, of course!)

The Soviet Union had proved so useful to the West, that from 1991, after the Cold War, a new bogeyman – convenient enemy – had to be invented. (Note Samuel Huntingdon’s influential 1992 thesis, The Clash of Civilizations, which facilitated the multi-decade employment of many people in high-paid jobs in Washington DC, and no doubt other federal capital cities with otherwise underemployed think tanks.) Iran had already become the enemy-in-waiting in the 1980s, albeit with a degree of secrecy, when a proxy leader for American interests (called Saddam Hussein) was called upon to deal to Iran. Saddam obliged; indeed, he over-obliged, taking his cut in the form of Kuwait.

In the midst of that Iraq-Iran War, in 1987, there was the Irangate scandal.

‘”Soon after taking office in 1981, the Reagan Administration secretly and abruptly changed United States policy.” Secret Israeli arms sales and shipments to Iran began in that year, even as, in public, the Reagan administration presented a different face, and “aggressively promoted a public campaign […] to stop worldwide transfers of military goods to Iran”. … After a leak by Mehdi Hashemi, a senior official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa exposed the arrangement on 3 November 1986″.’ From Wikipedia.

Revolutionary Iran (the new Islamic Republic of Iran, under Ayatollah Khomeini) was becoming an enemy of convenience. It was, in the 1980s, being armed by Israel and the United States. Some of those arms will have gone to Hezbollah, established as a Shia resistance movement in 1982, in response to an Israel-led genocide in Lebanon. We note that, today, Hezbollah is a critical and convenient element justifying Israel’s grand expansionist venture.

Today, Russia and Iran – even China – are enemies of convenience to a few; and of great inconvenience to the many. Indeed, re Russia and China, there is talk of the New Cold War. See, for example, The New Cold War: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, Fred Saberi, The Times of Israel, 19 April 2026.

Re Russia, the Cold War of the twentyfirst century represents the Third Cold War. In The First Cold War, historian Barbara Emerson discusses the ‘war’ against Russia that led to New Zealand’s fortifications on North Head and other places in 1885. (I also draw attention to this 2016 extended critique of President Obama’s ‘weakness’: War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft, by Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris, and its unsavoury ‘adversaries of convenience’ premise.)

Modern history (which includes 1885) matters very much; Biblical history (or even the slightly more recent Koranic history) matters less. But ancient history can still matter; it tells us some pithy stories about war trophies.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

My first paragraphs here feature Steve Keen, Australian economist, who was a panellist on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story 12 April 2026 (Could the Iran war pose lasting risks to global food security?, or here on YouTube):

Interviewer: “You’ve warned that the world could face famine within months … an extraordinarily stark prediction.”

Keen: “Thirty percent of the world’s fertiliser passes through the Strait, which has now been disrupted for over a month. There’s no sign of this war stopping any time. … There’s not going to be enough fertiliser available. Without fertiliser the carrying capacity of the world is about two billion people. Six billion of us are alive because fertiliser flows freely. … This could have catastrophic effects in all sorts of countries which could not ever imagine that they might face a famine. … That could apply to places like England. … The usual bias we have is that it’s always going to be a problem for brown people; let’s be frank, we’ve got masses of racism in the way we think about the world, and the West doesn’t worry when brown people die; well, what will happen when white people start dying; people might pay more attention.”

While Keen overstates the case, given that seventy percent of the world’s fertiliser flows through other pathways or is used near to where it is produced (though high transport costs, more generally, impede fertiliser flows; not just the blockade of the Hormuz Strait). Thirty percent of six billion is potentially 1,800,000,000 people at risk. And of course there is much food wastage at present. And many people, indeed most people in ‘England’, could survive eating less than half of what they do eat; they may even be less malnourished, by eating better food. Keen later acknowledged the issue of first world food wastage.

Nevertheless, when there are food shortages, ‘rational’ market behaviour – as understood by ‘game theory’ – means that much food would be bought up by speculators and hoarded; profiteering, in other words, a not uncommon feature of famines. (This is similar to the issue of ‘ticket scalping’.) Keen is correct to point out the problem of Euro-supremacism. One feature of the new world food order, noted by the Indian panellist on the program – Avinash Kishore – will be export bans. India, for example, is an important exporter of wheat and rice.

Keen: “Because it has such a market-oriented non-government approach to virtually everything, the United Kingdom has insufficient stocks of fertiliser, diesel fuel, and it imports about forty percent or more of its food. It’s very vulnerable to being told ‘we cannot supply you’. And it doesn’t really have any bargaining ploy in the opposite direction [unlike Australia].”

People assume that, whatever happens, Aotearoa could always feed itself; after all it’s a ‘specialist’ food producer, isn’t it? I’ll come back to that. But we note that the United Kingdom could survive foodwise with a reduction of 40% of its food supply, given that its domestic food production is in better domestic-international balance than is New Zealand’s. The fertiliser question becomes the bigger issue for the United Kingdom, and I’m guessing that it has nearly enough fertiliser stocks for 2026 spring planting, and could redirect some food exports to the domestic market. 2027 though? Incidentally, in the later 1980s, under pressure from Rogernomics, New Zealand got by for a few years with substantially reduced fertiliser usage.

Interviewer: “Just how vulnerable are modern food systems to international shocks like this?’

Keen: “The Trump administration [ie regime] had no idea what it was blundering into when it started this war. … We have a mindset of ‘perfect competition’ which implies numerous different sources, if one supplier gets knocked out then others can [immediately] take its place [as in the case of the New Zealand apple crop after Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023]; there’s no sense of urgency for the physical imports to production. … [Most] economists are completely naïve about the production systems. … There is such a thing as a critical input, and four of them pass through the Strait of Hormuz. … Yes, it’s too late to fix it, you cannot make up for missing ships.”

Keen: “I’m not overstating the potential. It might not happen, we might be lucky, shipments might arrive just in time. … The other possibility is still there. Now what happens if you don’t talk about it. … I would rather have people be too alarmed than too ignorant.”

Keen: “We think we eat green stuff. Ever since we invented fertiliser, we’ve been eating brown stuff. The green wrapping on the outside is basically us turning fossil fuels into food. … We think we have enormous resilience, but in fact we have enormous fragility. This was going to be exposed by global warming, but Donald Trump is like a Force Six cyclone coming in before the natural ones start turning up. … Our production systems are very dependent on specific inputs from specific locations. They cannot be easily replaced once damaged, and at the moment the supply is shut down completely.

Avinash Kishore, from the Indian ‘Food Policy Research Institute’: “The worst outcome would be if production itself suffers and then trade also suffers; [for example] with export bans. … China is the largest producer of fertilisers. If it restricts exports of both urea and phosphate … that makes the situation [much] worse. If trade keeps flowing, we’ll have less vulnerability, as we saw after the Ukraine crisis.”

Interviewer: “If the Strait of Hormuz were somehow to open tomorrow, and calm somehow holds, does this crisis end quickly, or has lasting damage already been done?”

Keen: “Lasting damage. One of the urea plants has already been damaged, and is not producing urea. We have to replace that facility, and these things take time. … This is showing the danger of the ‘just in time’ efficiency versus robustness [business model].’

I would note that ‘just-in-time’ can be robust, given the prevalence of the specific conditions which Keen mentioned; the conditions that most economists presume to be almost always true.

But geography can be capricious, and so can concentration of production reflecting the giant international economies of scale we see in production and transport; economies which minimise cost when disruptive forces are not at play. I would also note that many components of supply chains come as complements; thus, air freight remains largely a complement of passenger movements, fertiliser is a complement of fuel, and shipping works best when ships can carry a return load or an onward load.

New Zealand’s food security depends on its exports continuing to justify high two-way shipping capacity. What if, due to consumer prioritisation, demand in say China for New Zealand’s exports falls away; the reverse of the recent booms? This is the capriciousness of ‘income elasticity of demand’.

Some sobering statistics about New Zealand’s food and fertiliser imports

These ‘harmonised trade’ data (from Statistics New Zealand’s soon-to-be discontinued Infoshare database) cover, for us, in particular the period from 2000 to 2025. Inflation for imported food has been low for that period, given that the exchange rate for the $NZ was at an all-time low in 2000, and that not-so-high New Zealand inflation has been consistently dominated by non-tradable items. We also note that New Zealand’s population has grown by 40% since 2000.

These data are ‘value-for-duty’, meaning for our purposes (and given that New Zealand is a free-trading nation) that they are exclusive of transport and insurance costs. Of course, we now know that transport and insurance costs are going to increase dramatically; especially for a geographically marooned population.

New Zealand’s spending on imported staples has increased from 3½-fold to five-fold since 2000. Annual increases in spending on food imports were even more dramatic in the 1990s, though tradable CPI-inflation will have been higher then. (New Zealand’s data on tradable inflation only commences in the late 1990s.)

New Zealand is dependent on Australian wheat. For other staple food items, the huge increases in food imports have come from other countries. Rice, the best staple food of all, soon will become much harder to get from the non-Australian sources we now prevail upon. Pasta, rice, and pre-prepared vegetables have become dinner-staples of student flats and other income-poor or time-poor households. Further, firms which process New Zealand grown vegetables – Watties and McCain – are planning to scale back their domestic operations. (See my Frozen Vegetables, Food Security, and the New Zealand Dollar, Scoop, 312 March 2026.)

Three other points are noteworthy.

First, spending on imported fodder – imported animal food – has increased dramatically, nearly fourteen-fold, since the three years centred on 2000.

Second, most imports of fertiliser, which have increased more than threefold since 2000, are not from our neighbour across the ditch. (They – the unassembled food matter which underpins the supermarket food we eat – are byproducts of the petroleum industry; hence they come to us from Singapore and South Korea.)

Third, total imported food is now 12% of all imports, up from 6% in 1990 and from 7% in 2001; and now less than 30% of it comes from Australia. ‘Total food’ includes a huge category of imported food simply labelled ‘miscellaneous’. (We also note that little more than ten percent of New Zealand’s total goods’ imports now come from Australia.)

New Zealand’s ‘Perfect Storm’ of food vulnerability

New Zealand’s worst – or at least most immediate – problem might not be fertiliser. Rather, it might be dependence on imports of both human food staples and animal feed. New Zealand’s food production system is now so specialised re the international marketplace, that the short-run and even medium-run supply costs of pivoting to a robust more domestically-oriented model are probably prohibitive.

New Zealand’s main source of staple food is still Australia, but to a much lesser extent than in the 1990s. (Before the 1980s, New Zealand produced most of its own starch-carbohydrates.) How well will we be able to persuade Australia to keep sending us food when there will be many more other mouths to feed in the Indo-Pacific region? And how much will Australia’s food production be curtailed by restricted fertiliser and other supplies?

In terms of the Indo-Pacific food and fuel supply chain, we already see most other (indeed much bigger) nations facing major impacts from the supply-chain crisis, and putting their domestic interests ahead of international considerations; they are effectively queue-jumping, undermining the rationing process by reducing fuel taxes and by increasing food subsidies and export barriers. (Note RNZ today about Asia.)

Not all governments are as complacent as New Zealand’s. The reduced fuel taxes do not only lead to queue-jumping; they also constitute a fiscal stimulus which may help in the process of a reorientation towards more secure staple food supplies. The New Zealand government is obsessively and irrationally opposed to any kind of fiscal stimulus.

Since 2000, New Zealand has enjoyed an export windfall and rising terms of trade, thanks to the high income elasticity of demand for dairy and other protein-rich foods. That’s due in particular to high per capita growth in East and South Asia. The problem for New Zealand is that when those economies stop growing – indeed when they recess – the fall in demand for luxury foods can be equally dramatic.

On RNZ’s Business News this morning, Corran Dann noted: “For a country like New Zealand, we’re a trading nation, we need to see growth in our trading partners because they buy our goods. That is how we make our way in the world. And likewise, for them.”

Reciprocal trade – ie multilateral exchange – is economics’ foremost example of a win-win ‘game’. But humans can be capricious, narcissist, supremacist. ‘Win-win’ competitive games can be disrupted by stupid players, or even by advocates of disruption as a greater good; giving way to rivalrous zero-sum, negative-sum, or ‘lose-lose’ games. (On ‘stupid players’, we may note, in passing, Carlo Cipolla’s 1976 essay – recently republished – The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.)

New Zealand’s highly specialised export-oriented food production system can be expected to face sudden and simultaneous supply and demand shocks. Supply shock because New Zealand farming is now so dependent on imported fuel, fertiliser, and fodder. Demand shock because New Zealand specialises in the production of luxury foods, not staples, and faces a steep fall in the demand for luxury foods.

So, in terms of Steve Keen’s comments, New Zealand is arguably much more food-vulnerable than the United Kingdom, which Keen cites. And note Avinash Kishore’s comment about the food consequences of a general breakdown in international trade. (Unlike Keen, Kishore is an optimist!)

A crisis on top of a crisis

On present food insecurity in New Zealand, this from Google’s AI overview (search: ‘NZ food insecurity’): “Food insecurity is a widespread issue in New Zealand, affecting 1 in 3 households (33%) in 2025, with 18% facing severe insecurity.” See One in Three New Zealand Households Faced Food Insecurity in 2025, IPSOS, published by Scoop15 April 2026.

It can only be regarded as disgraceful that when, under the most favourable of circumstances in the food-supply system, a food-specialising country such as New Zealand has such record-high levels of food insecurity before the coming food crisis. This ‘insecurity despite abundance’ reality is not helped by Australia also having higher levels of food insecurity than most so-called developed nations. Continued access to Australian-produced staples is New Zealand’s main means to famine-avoidance.

Another part of the possible perfect storm is New Zealand’s lack of inclination and ability to queue-jump. When staples are scarce, ‘game theory’ comes into play. The staples of game theory are scarce-product-hoarding, joining queues to gain access to these staples, and a willingness to pay a bounty for such scarce essentials. New Zealand – marooned in the South Pacific – can expect to be at the end of the queues this country finds itself having to join.

(Other concepts of game theory include: ‘arms race’, ‘race to the bottom’, ‘prisoners dilemma’, ‘tragedy of the commons’, ‘survival of the fittest’, and Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’. Game theory assumes that individuals and nations adopt ‘economic man’ postures of ‘rational self-interest’; meaning selfish strategies. Other thought perspectives suggest that such strategies are ‘stupid’ rather than ‘rational’, and that they miss out the widely-held concept of enlightened self-interest which incorporates visions of the public good and the public interest. Adherents of rationalism usually dismiss their academic adversaries as ‘altruist’; whereas they are really public-minded, not the same thing.)

Historical Points of Reference

New Zealand faced a similar trading and shipping crisis almost exactly 100 years ago. Though it was not a food crisis then; New Zealand was not then reliant on imported food staples, though it was reliant on other imports.

The issue was the 1926 British General Strike, which focussed minds in New Zealand then on how dependent New Zealand had become in its crucial trading relationship with the far-side if not the dark-side of the world. The New Zealand economy started to tank in late-1926. 1927 then became New Zealand’s own particular annus horribilus.

New Zealand already faced very high levels of private debt, falling export prices, and a tightwad government. With the shipping constraints tipping the country over the edge, farmers walked off their farms in greater numbers than during the later Great Depression, rural New Zealand depopulated, bank balances plummeted, and the country went into a sharp recession.

The Reform (think National) government had been elected in 1925 with 47% of the votes and 69% of the seats. In the 1928 election, that government was unceremoniously turfed out of power, falling to 34% of the vote and 34% of the seats. The faded Liberal Party – under the new name of United – formed a government with the support of the new Labour Party. The economy recovered. Though the new governing arrangements didn’t last; Reform came back into government as the junior coalition partner. Eventually – in 1936 – United and Reform joined forces to create the National Party.

Another historical story of relevance is about how Germany lost World War One, through hunger. That war, in full, lasted 4¼ years; an amount of time the present Russia-Ukraine War will soon surpass. Essentially, Germany – on the battlefield, and with its lethal submarines – won the first four years (including a comprehensive defeat of its main adversary, the Russian Empire) but lost the last three months.

The critical factors in the end were the British Royal Navy blockade on German shipping, a staunch French fightbackin July 1918, and an influenza pandemic arising from an existing battlefield flu strain combining with a new strain brought over by greenhorn the American latecomers. The shipping blockade induced severe famine in Germany. That famine was so severe that it was later used to justify carpet bombing (aka area bombing) in World War Two, on the basis that no amount of RAF bombing could be as bad for German civilians as that blockade-induced famine.

Finally

The supply chokepoints around the Arabian Peninsula – the southwest of Southwest Asia – might ease sooner rather than later. Though I, unlike New Zealand’s Prime Minister, wouldn’t bet on it. New Zealand has engaged in a slow game of Russian roulette; there is now an extra bullet in the revolver’s chambers, and the pace of the game has quickened.

Will New Zealand, having played its game of chance, become collateral damage? New Zealand almost certainly was not Binyamin Netanyahu’s target.

Steve Keen focussed on the fertiliser chokehold; the core of the world’s food supply which is in fact a byproduct of the petroleum industry (and of the discussion about refined oil supplies). New Zealand’s plight is actually significantly worse than that; it’s a potential and dramatic shortfall of imported human and animal feed – a shortfall that would precede a fertiliser shortage.

What happens if or when the food ships are redirected elsewhere? Those ships burn a lot of fuel coming to and going from New Zealand. Would the world prioritise five million whitish lives, marooned in the South Seas, over ten million brown lives more easily saved? Should it? I guess not. Will future historians refer to the Great Aotearoa Famine of 2027?

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

On 14 April, TV3 News ran an item (15 minutes in, not in the sports section) about how the Crusaders rugby team will, with the new Christchurch stadium, no longer be able to parade its horses and knights circuiting the sportsfield. Many of the fans, despite now having a more spectator-friendly stadium, were quite upset about this; they loved the pageantry of medieval knights heading off to invade the Levantine lands occupied by the infidel (meaning Arabic people whose ancestors had converted to Islam).

At the end of the story, the reporter said: “The horses’ symbolism has created controversy. The sword-wielding knights represent the Crusades, a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims dating back to the 11th and 13th centuries. In 2019 the Crusaders dropped the horses following the Christchurch Mosque attacks, but reinstated them later that year minus the knights.”

So, from 2011 to 2026 they have been cowboy knight-lookalikes brandishing flags rather than swords. It was never enough to cleanse Canterbury rugby of its imagery of religious imperialism. At the very least, the Crusaders needed to change their name – and image – immediately after the 2011 terror attack. The new stadium has given them another opportunity to remove the crassness from the Crusader brand, by no longer using the ‘Crusader’ moniker.

In the twentyfirst century, the crusader-problem continues to be more real than ever to the Muslim populations of the ‘Middle East’; of Southwest Asia. And those present populations continue to understand the occupiers and interferers of their lands as Crusaders. The Crusader issue is far from being an issue confined to the Middle Ages.

We can think of there being three series of Crusades: in the Middle Ages, the Modern Age, and the Current Age.

Crusader History: Medieval Era

The first series of Crusades were the Catholic Crusades of the late Middle Ages.

The first of these – which was largely a French crusade – ran from 1096 to 1099, and resulted in the conquest and brutal genocide of Jerusalem; and the establishment of a Crusader-state – Outremer – which lasted in its full form for 88 years.

The next crusade – ‘Second’ Crusade (1147 to 1149) – was a major failure, led by the French King and the Holy Roman Emperor, in response to the Crusader State’s loss of some of its northern territory. It was a major failure.

The ‘Third’ Crusade was waged in the time of Robin Hood (1189 to 1192), by the French king of England Richard Coeur de Lion. It was an attempt to resuscitate the Crusader State, and was partially successful, though failed to recapture Jerusalem.

The ‘Fourth’ Crusade of 1202 to 1204, waged largely by the Doge of Venice, was the most historically consequential of all the Medieval Crusades. It was effectively diverted to the one city which had been the beacon for western civilisation for over 1,000 years; Constantinople, formerly Byzantium – only half the way from Venice to Jerusalem – now Istanbul.

Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, and the religious centre of Orthodox Christianity, the dominant branch of the Christian Church before 1204. Constantinople was comprehensively sacked by the Crusaders in that year. So, from 1204, the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity became dominant within Christendom. And the now latinised Christian ‘Middle East’ became so weakened that it was only a matter of time before the Ottoman or some other Muslim warlord conquered the lands of the Eastern Roman Empire; creating – in 1453 – the Ottoman Empire. The 1204 inter-Christian ‘event’ became Christianity’s eastern suicide debacle.

From 1453 to 1915, the Muslim Ottomans reigned in that part of the world; a Turkic Muslim caliphate.

Crusader History: the modern British Era

The next epoch of Western Crusading was the Anglo-French era of 1915 to 1948. It started with the Dardanelles Campaign (Gallipoli); meaning that the ANZAC soldiers had effectively become mercenary Crusaders, enlisted by Winston Churchill. Gallipoli was a failed Anglo-French operation, whose aim was the reconquest of Constantinople/Istanbul. New Zealand soldiers fighting for Britain’s crusade fought alongside, among others, Senegalese solders (fighting under the banner of France) in the bloody Second Battle of Krithia (6 May to 8 May, 1915).

There was much British Empire action in the whole of the ‘Middle East’ during World War One. This included Kiwi troops (who were heavily involved in at least one massacre of Muslims; at Surafend in 1918), Australian ‘Light Horsemen’, and Britain’s successful invasion of Iraq in 1917.

After WW1, Britain – the United Kingdom – formally occupied the lands that are now Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. Iraq was occupied by Britain, in various guises, from 1917 to 1947, with a brief intermission from 1 April to 2 May 1941. And Iran from 1941 (with the Soviet Union) and, among other things, creating the conditions for a famine in 1943 which killed perhaps 300,000 Iranians.

France’s interests were particularly in the lands that are now Lebanon and Syria; the Northern Levant; including the early bronze and iron age Phoenician ports of antiquity, Tyre and Sidon, which are now being battered to a pulp by Israel.

This series of Crusades was a less overt religious conflict than the earlier and the more recent series. The major ‘religions’ were Empire and Oil; with the whole of Southwest Asia being of strategic significance to the United Kingdom in the context of India being the Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire.

Crusader History: the current Israeli-American Era

In 1948, the British/French crusader imperium gave way to the creation – with massive impetus from the United States – the new Crusader State of Israel. In many ways, 1948 was a repeat of 1099.

Like its Christian forebear (1099-1187) the present Crusader State has never considered itself to be secure; and once again the main reason for its insecurity is its overt belligerence towards both its indigenous population and its neighbours; a belligerence which precedes the formation of the stroppy United States’ client state. As in the 1099 to 1187 case, the present Crusader State has tenuous trumped-up historical claims to exclusive ownership of the site it occupies, and has deep financial and technical support from the furthest reaches of the (then and now) West.

In the case of the present Judeo-Christian Crusader Empire, the Americans have deep presence beyond the periphery of the formal Crusader State; as the British did from 1915 to 1948 re Mandatory Palestine. In particular the countries of the Arabian Peninsula have been deeply penetrated by the United States and/or Israel; most particularly the Gulf States, and noting that the United Arab Emirates presently acts very much as an under-the-radar proxy of Israel. These states –  ‘beyond the periphery’ of Lebanon and Jordan – now constitute the present American Crusader Empire. They are the most significant Eastern Hemisphere components of the United States’ contemporary geopolitical empire, a Southwest Asian empire that it’s currently trying to expand.

The events of this decade constitute the most momentous events since 1948 in the history of the current Crusader State and Crusader Empire.

Property Rights

The Crusader meme is far from a nostalgic looking back to the times of Robin Hood. It’s today’s very consequential conflict of religion, theft, unipolar ideology, and naked technological power. For the city whose mosques featured New Zealand’s worst ever terrorist attack, direct association with crusader Judeo-Christendom is not a good look. That association is illiberal, insensitive, disrespectful, and Euro-supremacist.

Western crusaders – including religious and secular imperialists – have been a major source of trouble for West Asia and West Asians, through the ages. The DNA of present-day Palestinians is remarkably close to the ancient DNA of people who died in the Levant thousands of years ago.

Indigenous Southwest Asians deserve better today, including freedom of choice of religion; and the established political right to resist, and defend themselves. Today, almost all New Zealanders respect the Ottoman (Turkish and Syrian) forces (and their leaders, such as Ataturk) which, in 1915, resisted ANZAC attempts to conquer them.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.