Articles and updates

It now seems we have a label for the condition we are facing as an economy. It is not a new label – the recession. Don’t kid yourself that this is somehow different to the last four years; it isn’t. It started in March 2020, with the Covid scare and global reaction. Now we are […]

The heading of this article is not original to me; it came from Stuart Nattrass, probably during those conversations around the board table. As a long-term board member of South Canterbury Finance, he would know about debt on both the upside and the downside. The dynamics of debt Detail Purchase/hard money Plus 20% growth in […]

I think we all look for signals that guide us to what might happen next. And in business and investment, we look out for changes that deliver opportunity or risk. One of my investments went into liquidation recently. The liquidators’ report made me laugh, but also gave me a couple of lessons and an insight […]

As I am prone to do customarily, I comment on politics – one of the three things one should never comment on because you will always piss someone off. So here goes! New Zealand is set to vote on two key issues: The political landscape, MMP and the confusion of quite basic choices Nothing much […]

The adage is that the value in all transactions is a trade-off between price, timeliness, and quality. A customer wants cheap, fast, and good. But a supplier who attempts to deliver all three will struggle to sustain their operations and are more likely to fail eventually, and usually in the quality component because that is […]