Journal Day 43 - To New Zealand....!

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To New Zealand....!

Got bus pick-up from Kanga hostel in Sydney to the airport for my 14:45 flight to Auckland.

Comfy 3 hour flight. Watched a movie called the inside job, a documentary film about the financial crises of 2008. Explaining how the financial bubble grew to the point where it imploded.... through the banks use of unregulated gambling with derivatives for high-risk CDO's using the publics' money to make themselves billions in bonuses on a wholly unstable business structure that worked on a concept of incentives that rewarded high risk-taking immediately with no regard to whether the gambling paid off or not... Phew. Or something like that..!?!
It spoke of credit raters who profited millions by giving thousands upon thousands of subprime investments credit ratings of AAA when in fact they were known by the banks to be crap, allowing the greedy skitters to profit off the back of them by also betting on their inevitable subsequent failure.

it was a damning insight into how Lehman brothers, Goldman Sachs and the other scheming little weasels went down a little road of fantasy where they encountered derivatives, and had a gun-ho adventure with incentives, bonuses, subprime loans, the complete deregulation of derivatives and unregulated credit default swaps, CDOs, unrealistic bonus structures, unsustainable lifestyles, private jets, mansions, widespread cocaine abuse, strippers, billing the use of prostitution on their slimy company accounts, markets crashing, bubbles bursting, massive bailouts, global recession, house prices and sales plummeting, thousands of peoples' life-savings nicked and lost by bankers to fund their high-risk gambling addiction, unemployment souring, suicides, armageddon, blah, blah, blah, blah...... Etc.

The documentary was scary viewing. But (like pretty much everyone else on the planet) my life has been affected by all this.
As a architect I had to leave my job in N. Ireland because of the initial down-turn in 2008 to look for what seemed like more security in London. Off i went to the gold paved streets of London but when I got there I found out the job I moved there for had fallen through because the economic situation had worsened. So after spending a couple of months door-knocking (begging) for a job I was fortunate enough to land myself a permanent position in a great office, bang in the middle of the city near London Bridge. As far as I was concerned i'd beaten the recession. My time in London started at the beginning of 2010 and I loved it. But at the end of 2010 things the recession took it's double-dip and the office had no choice but to make a number of redundancies. As the last into the office I knew I was a gonner. In this situation it was pretty irrelevant how many weekends you work or how much overtime you do for free. But at least I'd gotten great on-site experience on a very complicated london project on my time there.

Looking back on all this while watching the documentary I realised that I have one thing to thank for the mess made by those greedy bastards like Lehman. And I might as well be optimistic. If they hadn't made such a complete and utter F@+k-up I'm pretty sure I'd still be sitting on a desk in N.ireland dreaming about sitting on a plane to New Zealand.

.....So just as my plane was about to land in New Zealand I got talking to the couple sitting beside me. They were from Hamilton who'd been on holiday in Sydney for a long weekend. They'd met in Dublin a few years back while on a working holiday. And after they'd picked up their luggage at the baggage reclaim after we landed they came over to me and Mike handed me a bit of paper where he'd written his phone number and said to me 'when you're in Hamilton give me a call and we'll show you around the place!'
Hadn't been in New Zealand 5 minutes....! Nice.

Got the bus from the airport into the city.
Picked out the City lodge hotel.
Nice, clean rooms. Luxury compared to my little pit in Sydney.

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