> A savings account pays below the real inflation rate here in New Zealand.
That's a market force designed to disincentivize that investment. Nobody's guaranteed a risk-free return, or even retention of value in what's not a long-term store of value. Pick something else to invest it in.
For what it's worth, NZ's inflation rate is tracking at 1.5% per annum and Rabobank offers a 2.4% online savings account.
> The cost of housing has increased hundreds of percent over the last 20 years thanks to central bank monetary policy that artificially manipulate interest rates. A shoebox apartment is now ridiculously unaffordable.
Cost of housing is a total red herring and largely unrelated to this conversation. Cost of housing is overwhelmingly supply-side driven. If you want cheaper houses demand municipalities permit new construction. You can always build up, there's no limit on that. Build enough, the cost will drop substantially. There's plenty of markets that exemplify this effect, like Houston and Tokyo. SF on the other hand routinely forbids totally reasonable construction and the pricing speaks for itself.
The cost of housing roughly boils down to this: the narrative is that housing "should be an investment" and that it "should go up over time" so the directionality is accepted. Homeowners tend to be older, wealthier, have deeper ties to the community and vote. Renters tend to be younger, less affluent, transient and don't vote. As such policies are enacted that benefit homeowners. This includes zoning restrictions, building restrictions and tax deductions benefiting homeowners. Too few new units are built relative to influx of population, and price goes up. It's simple market economics.
Want to solve the problem? Get people to vote to allow more housing.
For what it's worth in the US housing prices on average tend to track inflation. It's certain municipalities like SF and NYC that far exceed due to asinine policy. The monetary policy was the same in all regions of the US so why then would pricing changes be uncorrelated across markets?
> I can put money into savings that loses money after inflation, and funds a system that is fundamentally corrupt, which leaves me worse off overall than if we had a real free market without centralized manipulation of currency and interest rates.
New Zealand ranks routinely as the world's least corrupt government. A system that maintains stability of money and debases it over time slowly and predictably helps keep wealth inequality down, and benefits the less well off by inflating away debts and encourages productive allocation of capital.
> This centralized artificial interference has caused major imbalances in the economy here. It didn't work for the Soviet Union and it's not working in the "capitalist" world either.
This doesn't make sense. The Soviet Union fell for all sorts of reasons that weren't inflation related or even central planning related. Authoritarian states tend to do so in time.
I'd say it's working just fine, inflation is roughly 1-2% per annum and incredibly well controlled. We've got plenty of actual problems (like the cost of housing), though, this isn't one of them.