Keith Rankin, 21 May 2026 – In 2026, a number of countries desperately need one or two circuit-breakers to trigger an increase in aggregate demand; an increase in spending which can induce both consumer spending and business confidence.

Keynesian economics tells us that the most reliable circuit-breakers are exports and government spending. New Zealand’s exports are booming, and have been for a while. But for New Zealand that’s still far from enough; New Zealand needs a government spending circuit breaker as well.

The United States last year sought to bully the world into buying more American goods. But that hasn’t been a circuit breaker for the United States (but it really boosted China’s trade with other countries), just as Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ of the mid-late-1930s was not enough. In that era, the final and successful circuit-breaker was American armament, in 1940 and 1941; armament in support of the United Kingdom in its war against Nazi Germany and also to prepare itself for a possible entry into war against Germany and/or Japan.

From 2023 to 2026, the United States economy is back into a growth phase, dramatically so this year; it’s Keynesian circuit-breaker has – once again – been armament for war. War production in support of others – including Ukraine and Israel – and war production in support of its own foreign adventures. Further, war has proved, literally, to be the killer application which makes AI (artificial intelligence) profitable.

The New Zealand Government this week, seemingly far from producing a circuit-breaking stimulus, has just announced a policy to retrench the public service. (Refer Scoop, Government plans to cut 8700 public service jobs over three years, 19 May 2026.) At first sight, it looks like Déjà vu, all over again; a quick exit to political ignominy for a failed government determined to not learn from the past.

Retrenchment in New Zealand’s past

What in the past was generally called ‘retrenchment’ is today, euphemistically, called ‘fiscal consolidation’. The worst two retrenching Ministers of Finance have been William Downie Stewart Jr., and Ruth Richardson. (Roger Douglas converted to that doctrine, but didn’t practice it to anything like the extent that Ruth Richardson did. Douglas and Richardson subsequently became principals of the ACT Party.)

During the second half of the twentieth century, it was well understood by most bureaucrats and relevant academics that the core political misdemeanour which converted the 1929 global financial crisis into a global Great Depression was government retrenchment.

Retrenchment was a ‘race-to-the-bottom’ policy whereby governments would undermine their own revenue bases in a misframed and impossible quest to ‘balance the Budget’. Undermining the revenue base through spending reductions at a time of already-low consumer and business confidence and already-growing unemployment could only be the height of fiscal folly. In the years from 1926 to 1933, New Zealand had a Minister of Finance who twice brought New Zealand to its economic knees through his ardent and ideological commitment to retrenchment; to a policy supposedly about reducing the size of government, but which actually achieved bigger size reductions to the private sector.

The global crisis around 1931 and 1932 was particularly bad, because the simultaneous retrenchment of almost all capitalist governments had the particularly discouraging effect of collapsing world trade. Government retrenchments and reduced spending on traded goods reinforced each other, creating a particularly problematic downward spiral.

William Downie Stewart Jr was Finance Minister from 24 May 1926 to 10 December 1928, and again from 22 September 1931 to 28 January 1933. During both of those comparatively short tenures, Stewart effectively waged fiscal war on the country. His first tenure as finance minister ended with an ignominious ousting of the Government which indulged his constipatory policies. The second stint ended with an internal putsch of sorts in January 1933 (a dispute around the issue of currency devaluation); a coup driven, ironically, by the man (Gordon Coates) who had been Prime Minister in the 1925 to 1928 government. (In both cases, the economy ‘turned the corner’ after the riddance of Stewart; though it took several years after 1933 to fully recover, meaning that the then proto-National government – led by the hapless George Forbes – was unceremoniously dumped in the 1935 election.)

In like vein, I think we can say that Ruth Richardson was the deserved victim of an internal putsch – a removal that was too slow, though, given that she was still able to do damage in 1994 – instigated by Bill Birch and Jim Bolger. In terms of the popular vote, in the 1993 election, the Left (deservedly trounced in 1990) thumped the Right. If that election had been held under MMP, the result would have been a landslide defeat for a one-term National Government.

Back to the Future

2026 is the future, as seen from 1933 and 1993. Indeed, the framed retrenchment undertaken this week by Willis and Luxon has optics similar to those of 1927, 1932, and 1991. But the then ‘future’ – ie today’s present – is different; subtly but importantly different.

Politically, Ms Willis and Mr Luxon are under pressure from the Treasury, from the New York credit-rating agencies, from David Seymour of the coalition’s Act Party, and from the whiney (but economically sub-literate) journalists whose first question is inevitably “where’s the money coming from?”.

Sending public servants down the road – and replacing them with bots – may be good optics for this kind of staunch masculine fiscal politics. But, to get re-elected, the government needs the circuit-breaker mentioned above. In economies, as in prostate science, flow works better than constriction.

So, what has the Government announced? Ahead of next week’s Budget, they have committed to more than a billion dollars of extra spending. That may be the circuit breaker. Here’s the crux of Nicola Willis’ announcement: “Over the next four years these initiatives will deliver savings of $2.4b which will be re-deployed“. Re-deployed when? In 2026, of course! (That is, predeployed rather than redeployed.)

Where will the money come from? From the public service retrenchment promised for 2027 to 2029. The promised retrenchment is in effect collateral for a loan to be drawn down this year, indeed this month. Based upon my reading, the announced public service disemployment probably won’t even happen; it’s like unmined gold used as collateral – alleged gold that will probably remain in the ground.

Labour, if returned to power in November, will almost certainly cancel National’s public servant retrenchment ‘plan’. And National, if returned to power, may simply move on to other policies and conjuring tricks; journalists are so easily distracted by political sleight-of-hand. Money, as always, is an illusion; a set of circulating promises.

Here’s hoping I’m correct; that this fiscal predeployment does represent a long-awaited expenditure stimulus.

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, 20 May 2026 – Recently, the New Zealand First Party released its KiwiSaver policy, promising to make this retirement savings scheme compulsory for New Zealand born citizens, and setting them up with a $1,000 startup deposit at birth. (See Winston Peters unveils KiwiSaver-from-birth NZ First policy, bank takeover plan, Scoop, 18 May 2016.)

The New Zealand First Party also promised that no government which they are a part of will be allowed to raise (from 65) the age of entitlement to New Zealand Superannuation, which is New Zealand’s universal pension. The National Party, on the other hand, plans to campaign on a promise to raise that age of entitlement. What National did not confirm or deny, is whether it will raise the age of entitlement for KiwiSaver.

I cannot imagine the age for KiwiSaver entitlement staying at 65 – what today is loosely called the ‘retirement age’ – while the age of pension entitlement is raised to 67 or higher. Requiring people to wait until they are 67 before they can access their retirement savings may prove to be even more unpopular than raising the pension-entitlement age.

But, back to Peters’ KiwiSaver startup plan.

In the last 24 hours I have heard references on RNZ (publicity excerpt from The Panel) and on Stuff News (TV3) to such start-up retirement savings. And how we can all become retirement millionaires on the basis of ‘the miracle of compound interest’.

The RNZ item considered a savings plan – at five percent interest – commencing at age 18, which would result in a lump-sum at 65 of well over a million dollars.

The TV3 item (This KiwiSaver change could give Kiwis a $53,000 retirement boost. It’s gaining high-profile support across the political divide, Damien Venuto, 19 May 2026) goes like this: “If $1000 was invested into an aggressive account for a New Zealander from birth that would compound to $53,000 by the age of 65 even if nothing else was invested. The one disclaimer here is that inflation will eat into that over time, making the buying power of that $53,000 far lower than what it would be in today’s terms.”

Two Examples of ‘Miracle’ KiwiSaver savings

In my first example, I start with $1,000, and put that aside in a ‘conservative account’ which we expect to yield five percent interest per annum. The result, after 65 years (daily compounding), is $20,081. That’s assuming tax-free interest. To get to $20,000 while paying withholding taxes, a gross interest rate – gross yield – of about seven percent would be required.

In the second example, I go for Damien Venuto’s target: $53,000. You would need a net annual yield of 6.62 percent. Venuto claims that this is possible in an “aggressive account”. We note Venuto’s inflation proviso, though clearly Venuto presumes that average inflation over the next 65 years will be well under 6.62 percent.

(Given that inflation compounds in the same way as savings’ deposits do, we can say that, if inflation averages five percent over those 65 years, our savers at birth would end up multiplying their birth ‘investments’ by a factor of 2.65; meaning that, after correcting for inflation, their $1,000 seed deposit becomes $2,650. However, if inflation averages 2.95 percent, the $1,000 starter rises to $9,000 after adjusting for inflation. My best guess is that inflation over the next 65 years will average over ten percent, given both the present state of the world and the demands on goods and services which will arise from baby boomers and Gen-Xers eventually cashing in their private pensions. At ten percent average inflation, the initial $1,000 would be worth just $132 in 65 years’ time.)

Risk and Uncertainty.

If you are looking for a risk-free Saver account, you should be expecting a gross interest rate of about the rate of inflation; that means a net interest rate below the rate of inflation. Otherwise, you have to accept risk (estimable) and uncertainty (unknown unknowns can be predicted, at best, with intelligent guesswork).

If you transport yourself back to 1961 (New Zealand’s year of maximum births, 65 years ago) and try to guess your way to the year 2026, what inflation, yields, and risks would you have predicted?

(Inflation has compounded since then at an annual average rate of 5.3%. $1000 saved in 1961 would have to have compounded to $29,400 in 2026 just to break even. Money passively – yet ‘aggressively’, in Damien Venuto’s sense – ‘invested’ in shares or property would have achieved an excellent long-run return, however. Money in a savings account would have fallen well short of break-even. It’s highly unlikely that the next 65 years will be as favourable as the last 65 years were. What actually happened in the last 65 years was not necessarily the best prediction; you might win a game of roulette, but the best prediction is that you will lose. In 1961, most people would have predicted some kind of nuclear war by 2026; indeed, with hindsight, the chances of such a war in 1962 may have been as high as 50:50.)

In an ‘aggressive account’, there are many associated risks. The essential difficulty relates to the fact that the returns are principally capital gains, which may or may not occur, and may or may not be taxed.

Capital gains are largely self-fulfilling in economies with a high degree of inequality, because those people with lots of money tend to use it to buy and sell financial assets from and to each other, boosting the prices of those assets in a financial merry-go-round. This situation can go on for a long time, though never forever. The break happens when more than a few people want to cash in their inflated financial assets at the same time; and such ‘corrections’ are almost certain to happen with rapidly aging (‘first world’) populations in the ‘global north’. After all, much of this money is in pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, which are both going to come under extreme pressure when those older persons seek to spend their savings (and require more services); savings which individual savers cannot take to the grave. And, while sovereign nations may not have an imminent grave, their Treasuries have certain expenditure obligations towards their aging populations, and towards the younger people struggling to support the older people.

While investment yields can be real, capital gains by their very nature are largely illusory, dependent on most of the ‘invested’ funds not being withdrawn. These financial assets will largely disappear in the event of another ‘levelling event’, such as the Great World War of 1914 to 1945; noting that that event included the Great Depression, part of the levelling process.

Who Pays the Interest?

Whenever we hear about the magic of compound interest, we hear very little about who pays that interest. Let’s start with a static, non-growing economy. This may be called the ‘zero-sum’ case.

In such an economy, interest (unless the interest rate is negative) represents an unrequited flow of money from debtors to creditors. In the twentieth century world, when it wasn’t at war, that largely meant from private businesses investing in growth to private savers ‘investing’ in financial assets. Governments tended towards balanced budgets from 1950 to 2000, so were more on the financial sidelines than they are today.

In the twenty-first century world, the debtors are mainly small businesses, relatively poor households, and governments. (In some but not all cases, the same governments which have trillion-dollar sovereign wealth funds.) There are other situations, especially around large leveraged ‘investments’, where interest is paid by the very rich to the very rich; these situations ‘net out’, so can be ignored when looking for the big picture around systemic interest flows.

Once netted out, the main flows of interest today are from small and medium size businesses and relatively poor households to the richest ten to fifteen percent of households. Interest flows from poorer households to richer households. And from younger households to older households. Further, dwelling rents constitute a form of interest; they represent a yield paid to landlords by tenants. The words ‘interest’ and ‘yield’ are close synonyms.

What this tells us is that it’s impossible for all of us to benefit from the ‘miracle of compound interest’. Every dollar of interest received must be paid by someone. It also tells us that one of the risks associated with the miracle is the possible default – or bankruptcy – of a smaller or larger proportion of interest payers.

An interesting finding in New Zealand in the late-2000s, when finance companies were going broke, was that there were actually two types of finance company. One was mainly financing property investments, and the interest payers were relatively affluent people. This type of finance company – eg Hanover – failed during or prior to the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008 to 2009. The second type of finance company were funding distress loans to the poor; they continued to thrive through the GFC. The poor struggle on, conscientiously.

Looking at this second type of finance company, we can see the emergence of a new ‘lower working class’ – many of them denizens rather than citizens of the countries they live and work in – who may be considered to be ‘debt slaves’ or something close to it. In that sense, the lucky Kiwi Savers are enjoying their credit miracle (in the cases when that miracle is not a mirage) at the expense of a global proletariat of debt slaves.

Now consider economic growth, real and nominal. Real economic growth is the ‘positive-sum’ case.

The standard growth story about ‘who pays the interest’, is that the savings are’invested’ in businesses that are creating economic growth. In this story the creditor ‘passive investors’ – the Kiwi Savers – and the debtor ‘active investors’ (small, medium and large businesses) are both receiving the yields arising from the societal process of economic growth. The yields are the increased amounts of goods and services made available through the growth process.

That’s real growth; indeed, exponential real growth. However, high-paced real growth can never go on forever. Eventually – later or sooner – it must crush the planet through depletion, waste, and (probably) the ‘laying waste’ of warfare.

If we don’t have indefinite real growth, we return to the ‘zero-sum’ case discussed above.

Now consider the forms of the nominal economic growth case. This is when apparent economic growth turns out to be inflation. This is benign compared to the zero-sum case outlined above, because inflation erodes both debts and savings. So, it means that the flows of interest from the poorer debtor community to the richer creditor community become sustainable, because these flows are always being ameliorated by inflation.

In the extreme form, the nominal economic growth case is a zero-sum case, because there is no real economic growth. In a less extreme form, there is a mix of some real growth and some inflation. This is probably the optimum. Modest real economic growth is sustainable if it does not intensely use non-renewable resources. And some inflation addresses the debtor-creditor inequity that the miracle of compound interest is predicated on.

In this relatively optimal case, interest rates will on average be approximately equal to the inflation rate. So the miracle of compound interest disappears. If interest approximately equals inflation, then $1,000 today will buy approximately the same amount of stuff in 65 years’ time. And that’s what should happen; we should save when we have a relatively high income, and withdraw our savings when we have a relatively low income. No interest, on balance. We should not kid ourselves that simply sitting on a nest-egg of magic money is going to make us fabulously rich!

Finally

There is another case where the debtor-creditor relationship becomes too exploitative, and when that broken relationship induces socio-economic breakdown. The result is a negative-sum game, whereby everyone – or just about everyone – loses.

Anyone trying to play the compound interest miracle game should understand that they are trying to get something for nothing; that they are playing the role of ‘exploiter’. Capitalism as we know it is a game of exploitation; indeed, low levels of ongoing exploitation can be sustainable.

Under our present order, of liberal private capitalism, the best possible option is a mix of low inflation and low sustainable growth based on renewable resources and accumulation of benign knowledge. Keeping this balance is a bit of a tight-rope walk. Today too many of us have slipped on the rope, and are hanging by our fingers. The more people who slip, the more the tight-rope wobbles, leading ever more people to slip in their wake.

There is a better capitalist order; a more democratic more sustainable form of capitalism which fully incorporates public equity – public property rights alongside private property rights – with appropriate public equity dividends to stem the growth of income inequality. This is consistent with a balanced mix of sustainable growth and sustainable inflation. It is not consistent with interest-rate exploitation.

In the meantime, why do we look kindly upon compound interest alchemists while lampooning conspiracy theorists? The worst offenders in both groups are equally bogus.

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, 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.