Economics, public policy, monetary policy, financial regulation, with a New Zealand perspective
A month or so ago the Reserve Bank announced the appointment of a new Assistant Governor (a deputy chief executive) responsible for its financial stability functions. That must have prompted a Bloomberg journalist to ask what was happening to the vacant position on the Monetary Policy Committee (given that, previously, Geoff Bascand and then Christian Continue reading Yet more pretty (il)legal…
Various media last weekend (I think this was the first) latched onto a chart in the OECD s latest Employment Outlook publication which appeared to show that over the last five years New Zealand real wages had not only fallen sharply (down 6.4 per cent) but by more than any other OECD country. Since then the Continue reading Real wages haven t fallen 6.4 per cent (or at all)
No, this is nothing to do with (say) Neil Quigley s months-long spin and obfuscation from last year (eg here or here). Decades ago, when the Commonwealth counted for more, the regular Finance Ministers meetings seemed to usually be held in some of the more exotic and picturesque of the member countries (these days, barely attracting Continue reading A central banker s fiction
I didn t have too much problem with either the Reserve Bank Governor s speech a couple of weeks ago on a framework for how monetary policy might deal with the oil shock, or with this week s OCR review release from the Monetary Policy Committee. It was really all very orthodox stuff, much as any of the Continue reading Oil and monetary policy
When I stopped regular blogging in December I wrote This is one of those issues that has really got my goat. (There won t be any other return to blogging, although if I make a submission to the government s belated independent review of Covid-era monetary policy I might put a link to that in a post.) Continue reading A very poor start by the Governor
About 15 years ago (partly thanks to a couple of years at Treasury, partly to the financial crises in the US and Europe) I started to get much more systematically interested in New Zealand s disappointing and underwhelming economic performance, and in economic and financial history more generally. And as our kids were growing I was Continue reading And that is that
Back in the far flung days well, really only just more than two years ago the National Party went to the election with a fiscal plan under which the government s operating deficit would have been more or less closed by now. This was the table from that plan. And in case you are Continue reading Fiscal failure
That was, more or less, the title of two events I attended at the University of Auckland last Thursday. With the help of generous funding from the Sir Douglas Myers Foundation (in particular), the university had been able to bring in a bunch of well-regarded overseas academics and prominent public intellectuals for several events focused Continue reading Geoeconomics: fragmentation the future of…
In a post last week I included this chart of the latest annual OECD data on labour productivity, expressed in PPP terms. It was grim, in a familiar sort of way. New Zealand s overall economic performance has long been poor (the halcyon days when New Zealand was in the top 3 in the world relegated Continue reading Productivity growth (or lack of it)
Over the life of this blog there have been a few charts I ve kept coming back to. There have been some of the obvious ones, for example around the persistent underperformance of the New Zealand economy on labour productivity. It takes a while for a fairly annual data to turn up on the OECD database, Continue reading A few charts updated