Christoph Schumacher

price or start a new venture so you do need to have some resources otherwise you're forced to just watch but yeah absolutely more chaos always presents some opportunities and the people who have gotten really rich were exactly those people who could see these opportunities and act on it right

It's a mix of things.

First of all, a small isolated economy always struggles a bit more because just by transaction costs, everything needs to arrive here.

We import a lot of goods.

So there's always a challenge for smaller economies.

And they're often hit harder by these external shocks.

However, New Zealand overall...

is doing okay.

We've seen slow recovery, very slow, and it's a scary thought that if interest rates go up, this growth might disappear again.

But we have seen some recovery, and as a nation, as a whole, our debt level is

compared to other countries.

We're sitting, I think, around 60% of GDP.

Other countries have 100, 120%.

And like all of us, countries need to pay interest on the money they've borrowed.

So, New Zealand is sort of doing okay on that front as well and has a bit of buffer, if need be.

So, that's a good thing.

But another thing I would like to sort of bring in that we haven't touched on is that higher interest rates normally strengthen our Kiwi.

Because if you can save more, for example, in a country that pays 5% and you come from a country with 1%, it pays for you to use your currency, buy New Zealand dollars, invest here, and then convert it back.

So that makes our currency stronger.

now a stronger kiwi hits our exporters our primary sector it's a big part of the economy who suddenly loses business through no fault of their own simply because the new zealand dollar has gotten stronger the last time was in germany kiwi apples have disappeared from the supermarket i actually asked someone why can't i see some kiwi apples and they said they're just too expensive because the kiwi dollar is too strong so what we see is that