Today Michael Cullen tried to imply that John Key’s employment in Merrill-Lynch meant that, because that company failed 8 years after he left, he was unfit to be PM.
Frankly, when Key called this for what it was – pitiful – I don’t think I’ve ever seen the guy with a wider grin. Key normally has a good grin, but he was laughing so hard at this bizare and desperate attack I was worried that he would require medical treatment.
In other news, several students failed an Otago chemistry* paper this year, meaning that Cullen must now resign as finance minister if he expects to maintain his personal integrity.
Something should go here, maybe later. 
Oh come on, are you trying to tell me that short-term money manipulations, particularly in currency exchanges, those which were personally conducted by Mr Key and hundreds of his cronies thousands of times per day during his time of employment at Merril Lynch, which ‘earned’ him an estimated NZ$50million fortune individually (not to mention the tens of millions of dollars ‘earned’ by other Merrill Lynch employees and the billions of dollars collectively gotten by Merrill Lynch shareholders) have had no impact on the global economy both short and long term, and no impact on the now inevitable demise of Merrill Lynch itself?
It seems to me that we have now gotten back to the argument of exactly how money is earned and exactly who does the earning. You see, when you have, say, a farmer who buys a certain amount of land, livestock, vehicles, machinery, hires employees, etc, and they raise the livestock and then kill it and it sell it off, that’s called earning money, plain and simple. The farmer gets money for the meat, let’s say pork (just because I quite like pork, especially when it’s sweet and sour) and if he’s a good, astute farmer, he usually ends up with a profit. On the other hand, when you get, say, a futures contract brokerage, the owners, although they pay for their capital expenses, aren’t actually earning their money pure and simple. They may use funds to artificially raise the futures contract price of prok, and this could therefore have adverse effects for the farmer, his family, and their employees, although all they are trying to do is earn an honest living.
Now if the owners of the brokerage were to quit, and then start their own pig farm, they could perhaps try to earn more of a profit than the original farmer by selling their produce at reduced prices, which would be a fair way of conducting their business affairs. However, when we as a society, knowingly allow people to start companies and corporations and so forth with the primary aim to make profits pretty much solely from manipulating people’s finances from afar, we know that something is definitely wrong.
It was one thing when most of us were ignorant a couple of decades ago and thought that things such as currency exchange, commodities exchanges, forward contracts, share trading, underwriting, credit derivatives, complex insurance arrangements, etc, were imperative to the well-being of society. But now that we know that it’s corrosive and corruptive, we’re no better than those who perpetuate these moral atrocies if we just turn a blind eye to it and let it continue without even saying anything about how bad it is.