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Thread ID: 96060	2008-12-27 21:11:00	Hey Guys Dick Smith Sale From 29/12/08 to 5/1/09	Trev (427)	PC World Chat

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
732894	2008-12-27 21:11:00	Toshiba 42" LCD TV $1199. Buy a game any platform get one free to same or lesser value. Just to name a couple of things in the sale. :)	Trev (427)
732895	2008-12-27 21:13:00	I was impressed by HN advertising the Xbox360 at $260.....	Metla (12)
732896	2008-12-27 21:44:00	Yeah thats a pretty good price. :)	Trev (427)
732897	2008-12-27 21:47:00	Mrs Metla went to the trouble of digging out the receipt and showing me I paid $649 for our one..... Lovely woman.:rolleyes:	Metla (12)
732898	2008-12-27 21:55:00	Went to Dick Smiths both before and after Christmas and I swear the prices were higher after Christmas even with the sale on. The same thing happened last year with a phone I wanted to buy. It seems like reduce the price of a few noticeable things and jack up the price of everything else.	joshjnz (7844)
732899	2008-12-27 22:02:00	Mrs Metla went to the trouble of digging out the receipt and showing me I paid $649 for our one..... Lovely woman.:rolleyes: :)	Trev (427)
732900	2008-12-27 22:04:00	Went to Dick Smiths both before and after Christmas and I swear the prices were higher after Christmas even with the sale on. The same thing happened last year with a phone I wanted to buy. It seems like reduce the price of a few noticeable things and jack up the price of everything else. Thats buisiness. That what most places do when they have a sale reduce prices on some items and put it up on others to cover costs etc. :)	Trev (427)
732901	2008-12-28 00:40:00	For all you happy people: In todays paper: The Grinch was right: Christmas should be banned Bernard Hickey in Show Me The Money | 9:45 am 28 December 2008 Well not really… But I do think this orgy of consumption around Christmas is a pointless and painful waste of time. It simply stores up even more foreign debt that will have to be serviced and eventually repaid. We simply can’t afford to keep spending the way we have. The charts below show why. We need to reduce our consumer spending to reduce our imports and drag that current account deficit back closer to 4-5% than the 8-10% range it is in now. I was simply stunned to see the pictures of shoppers thronging to the malls on Boxing Day, as Stuff reports. There is an illusion of a deal which means people spend just as much as they would have without the sales, but get more things they don’t really need. It’s still stuff we don’t need. I watched another report on TVNZ which made me want to yell at the telly: “Go home and lock up your wallets!!” Here was what one hapless shopper had to say. “We tried to avoid them (the Boxing Day sales) because we didn’t want to spend any more money, but we came and ended up spending it anyway,” she said. New Zealanders seem to have no idea about the scale and danger of our foreign debts and how their shopping is increasing those debts. There’s a simple chain of events. We buy stuff we don’t need in the shopping malls. Most of it is imported. We earn less from our exports than we spend on these imports. We get the money to make up the difference from foreigners. They either buy our assets or lend us money to do it. The other option is to sell our assets overseas (yes we have some). Three days before Christmas we all got some news that should have made us all abandon the malls and avoid these Boxing Day monstrosities. Our current account deficit actually worsened to 8.6% of GDP at a time when the economy was in recession, our currency had slumped and export commodity prices were high. This was extraordinary. The currency acts as an automatic stabiliser when we spend more than we earn. When it falls, it increases our export returns and increases the cost of our imports. Instead our import growth remained even stronger than our export growth. This is partly due to the higher cost of petrol in the quarter, but it still shows we haven’t got the message. Our current account deficit is heading back towards 9% again. This is plainly unsustainable, particularly now that our government is set to start borrowing overseas as well. The early signs are that foreigners won’t lend us any more. The September quarter deficit was actually paid for by the government running down its reserve assets in foreign currency,. Currently New Zealand’s sovereign credit rating is AA+. We’ve managed to keep that rating despite our worsening current account situation over the last 5 years. That’s because our government has run surpluses and has been doing some of the saving we needed to do to offset the borrowing by households via the banks. Now that those surpluses are set to reverse into big deficits our goverment will have to borrow overseas at the same time as other governments will be borrowing heavily to finance their own massive deficits. There is a significant risk now that our credit rating could be downgraded for the first time since December 1994. Yet many still believe that we need to spend our way out of the recession. The new Government has put its hope in consumers with another wave of tax cuts legislated to take effect in April. Further cuts are due in April of each of the two following years. The programme will represent a substantial transfer of wealth from the public sector to individuals, households and companies and makes private decisions to spend or save even more crucial to the country’s future. The last thing we need right now is more spending on flat screen tvs (30% off!!), lounge suites (40% off!!) and other useless trinkets. Most of these are imports. What we need is more saving and more investing in infrastructure and other productive assets. The government will rightly try to do this. The rest of us should do it too. A good chunk of this spending will be on imported machinery and services such as hospital equipment or optic fibre cable. That’s fine. It will keep producing goods and services for decades to come. A new plasma will be out of date by next Christmas. There is something to the “paradox of thrift” idea, which says that less spending turns into a vicious cycle of lower spending, lower employment, lower spending, lower prices, lower spending etc. It was something that created the depression. But that is not our problem this time around. We spend too much. We don’t produce enough. Let’s stop spending and start producing. Let’s have a spending-free Christmas in 2009. If we don’t, that cancellation may be forced on us. If we want a hint of what that forced cessation of spending looks like, take a look at a nation closer to Santa’s workshops near the Pole than most: Iceland. It too ran a unsustainable current account deficit funded by foreign borrowing. S&P downgraded the outlook for Iceland’s A+ foreign currency rating to negative in November 2007 as its current account deficit rose to 16%. Christmas 2007 was the high water mark for Iceland. House prices were booming thanks to borrowed foreign money. Consumer spending was rampant because shoppers with houses felt wealthier. Within a year Iceland was effectively bankrupt after its banks collapsed under a mountain of foreign debt. Inflation and interest rates are now at 18%. Unemployment will triple next year and GDP will fall 10%. In November S&P cut Iceland’s sovereign credit rating by 4 notches to BBB- from A-. It had been downgraded to A- from A+ in early October as the banks collapsed. BBB- is the lowest possible investment grade rating. Anything lower is considered junk. New Zealand’s situation is not nearly as bad as Iceland’s, but we need to tread warily. We are completely reliant on the goodwill of foreigners. Think about that before spending on things that aren’t really necessary. The grinch has spoken…	pctek (84)
732902	2008-12-28 00:44:00	I'm not reading all that, But the author is welcome to do as he or she pleases,be it Christmas or any other time of the year.	Metla (12)
732903	2008-12-28 03:10:00	I saw at EB in Sylvia Park had the original XBox consoles for I think it was $66 while stocks last. XBMC anyone?	bob_doe_nz (92)
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