Shambles is a self-employed economist, frequently quoted in the press stating what we already know. With his latest utterance headed “food prices up”, Shambles then astutely pointed out “…the same basket of food might take a bigger share of your weekly budget”. By God, who’d have worked that out? The man’s a genius.
But Shambles should do himself a favour and never mention house prices. Why?
Because he will be forever remembered in the annals of wrong economic forecasting (in fairness it’s a crowded field) for advising the media a decade or so back that he’d sold his Auckland home and was shifting to Wellington as Auckland house prices were about to collapse. As we know, Auckland house prices then underwent the greatest price boom in history.
A week ago Shambles was quoted saying only about half of New Zealanders own their own home. Fact; 65% do. Stay away from housing Shambles.
All of that said, he comes across as quite a nice chap. Who else would confess to laziness, as he does on his web-site.
Shambles is one of a booming field of self-described consultants whose output essentially amounts to stating the obvious. It’s a burgeoning industry throughout the western world, its market being local and central government agencies covering their backs by saying they’ve had a consultant’s report.
The cost is enormous and the only winners are the so-called consultants, plus, I confess me, many being lessees in my buildings.
6 Comments
Devolution.
reset required
With main stream media on a death spiral, these economists days are numbered..
Aside from the fact money printing and unsustainable debt creation has created smoke and mirrors for an extended period, you can only tell lies for a finite period, before they catch up with you…
Its going to be a great day when people have to live within their means, and without credit..
The whole consultant thing in NZ seems to have started with the Govt. privatisations of the 80’s and 90’s. I used to hear stories of public employees made redundant from Govt. departments, collecting their redundancy cheques on the way out, then getting re-employed as consultants to do their old jobs at multiples of previous earnings…
Nowadays we have the created jobs, doing cultural reports at $5K a pop stating the obvious, offender comes from disfunctional background, solo parent upbringing, drugs and crime since age of 13.. easy money for some.
I am glad someone said something about him. He is always saying the housing market is going to crash & how the Stockmarket is better etc. If he just did the exact opposite of his advice he would be a lot wealthier.
I concur. Shambles said a few years ago that Wanganui would be a zombie town soon as the place was emptying out of people except the unemployed and pensioners.
The place is booming with new citizens.
And if my memory is correct, sold in Auckland and rented in Wellington due to the predicted house price collapse