Table of Contents
Arthur
Banks. We love to loathe them and loathe having them, but they are a necessary evil. After all, they are safer than putting our cash under the mattress. Well we hope that, but there are no guarantees.
We must get one thing straight in our minds though. No matter how much they witter about providing a good service for customers and how much they matter, banks operate on self-interest and little else.
Customers are there to be farmed as much as possible and the banks hope customers will be compliant and non-complaining.
We know that we should be suspicious when banks and their armies of shills (usually economists both directly and indirectly employed by them) attempt to influence government policy and public perceptions on various financial issues.
Every few years banks like to trot out various pet subjects such as the cashless society, which is of very little benefit to us but of vast benefit to them. They get to do away with branches, multiplicities of vaults and safes and pesky staff, as they store our money as data in centralised server farms all the while tracking our every purchase and selling our data to aligned vested interests and of course, making truckloads of lovely profit.
These issues come back from them as regularly as Herpes simplex, AKA cold sores, and with a suitable level of enthusiasm from us.
Superannuation is one of these cyclical issues which they trot out to soften us up for whatever agenda is current.
Banks would like the government out of superannuation — plain and simple. Because that would mean the average Joe and Jane would have to save more for retirement and of course, guess where the savings would have to go?
The finance industry of which banks are a core part.
Just think, banks having everyone’s or almost everyone’s savings to play with for 45 years plus with little chance of withdrawal. You can imagine bank management and owners getting hot and bothered as the cash piles up along with obscene profits.
Part of the softening up is them lobbying for the pension age to rise, then years later they’ll do it all over again. More and more will turn to the banks and their savings schemes.
So after Bernard Hickey recently raved about generational wealth disparity, costs of the climate con and other pet obsessions, we ‘coincidentally’ have the ANZ, via a house economist, doing similar.
The following is from the RNZ website. The ANZ economist, a Miles Workman is the source of this:
Intergenerational inequality is growing larger by the day and things will only get worse unless action is taken, an ANZ Bank report says.
ANZ senior economist and report author Miles Workman said the government could narrow the gap, but it would require transformational change.
There it is again: The mighty trope of “intergenerational inequality”.
Now let’s be clear. Virtually all the young start with a clean financial slate, barring children of the rich and older people who will most likely have accumulated some wealth during a lifetime of work.
There has always been intergenerational inequality; that is life. This is not new or unexpected, except now it’s used as a propaganda tool.
We also have a dash of the latest weasel words of the left: “transformational change” to justify all sorts of nonsense.
Among the suggestions were to build more houses, take steps to encourage investment, broaden the tax system to include a wealth tax and apply more scrutiny to government spending.
In addition, the report said New Zealand’s pension plan needed attention.
“We urgently need to take a good hard look at superannuation settings to make them fairer,” he said.
“It’s more complicated than just increasing the eligibility age and/or means testing.”
There it is, just like Hickey. Broadening the tax system, wealth tax and eventually getting to the pension, which I suspect was the point all along. What is the ‘complicated’ bit you may wonder? Convincing everyone including the Government to accept banks as the de facto superannuation vehicle perhaps? What does the nebulous “make them fairer” mean? Be deeply suspicious of these nebulous weasel words.
We also have this:
It says young people are disadvantaged by a trifecta of labour market conditions that favour older skilled workers, unaffordable housing and an ageing population, in addition to a climate change crisis, which would cost future generations in more ways than one.
rnz.co.nz
Really? Let’s think about this. Retirement Commissioner Diane Maxwell waxed lyrical long and hard about employment age discrimination against older people two or three years ago and difficulties those over 50 found getting a job, even the skilled.
Which is it you may ask?
It seems the story has changed to suit the agenda being promoted: In this case nasty older people are supposedly locking poor youth out of jobs.
Naturally these economist dolts don’t think things through because if the pension age is raised, nasty old selfish people will, oddly, just stay in jobs longer and lock youth out for longer and the same will happen with means testing if these economists get their way.
Then again economists couldn’t predict nudity in a strip club and even if they could they would be surprised that stripping resulted in nudity.
We didn’t have to wait long for them to wheel out the “climate change crisis” as it is the current and trendy “raison du jour” inserted into every bit of tripe and propaganda being put forward by vested interests these days.
Call me suspicious, cynical or paranoid if you like. Two people from that dubious job group of economists stating virtually the same thing within ten days is unlikely to be a coincidence.
Like Herpes simplex, the banking industry, their shills and that perennial evil socialists and socialism, always keep coming back. The faces change, the weasel words change but the song remains the same.
It’s called self-interest.
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