The cost of the pandemic: the financial winners and losers

Analysis by a financial journalist has found the Government's Covid-19 policies have made the wealthy hundreds of billions of dollars richer, while the poor sunk $400 million further into debt to the Government itself. Bernard Hickey says the explosion in inequality has been driven by government and Reserve Bank interventions, including quantitative easing - effectively the printing of money - which has been blamed in part for fuelling the surge in house prices over the past two years. Bernard Hickey, formerly of interest.co.nz, now writing the political and economic blog The Kaka, says the Labour Government, supported by the Green Party, has presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from current and future renters, to asset owners, in the history of New Zealand. He goes through the numbers with Kathryn.