In an address at Victoria University at lunchtime, Labour’s finance spokesperson Grant Robertson launched his party’s monetary policy reform programme.   In an interesting move, the incoming Acting Governor, Grant Spencer, who would have to manage (for the Bank) the early stages of Robertson’s reform process if Labour leads the new government, attended, sitting very visibly in the front row.

The two main aspects of Labour’s proposal are:

• broadening the objective from just price stability “to also include a commitment to full employment”
• changing the decision-making structure for monetary policy, so that a committee would have legislated responsibility.  That committee would comprise four internals (including the Governor) and three external experts who would be appointed by the Governor (but in consultation with the Minister of Finance).

Labour would also require the Bank to release the minutes of the Monetary Policy Committee, including the results of any votes, within three weeks of the relevant OCR decision being announced.

I was interested to note a press release from the Greens in which they state

Labour plans to change the way we do monetary policy in New Zealand and the Green Party supports them fully. We’re now of a single mind on this.

The Greens have previously favoured the Reserve Bank Board –  whose members are mostly non-experts –  making OCR decisions, so I’m not clear if the “single mind” James Shaw refers to extends to that level of detail, or just to a shared commitment to (a) reform, and (b) a decision-making committee that would involve non-executive outsiders.

Bill Rosenberg of the CTU and I were discussants following Robertson’s address.   I wrote this morning a fuller version than I could use of my thoughts on the Labour proposal.

Reflections on Grant Robertson on the RB VUW 10 April 2017

I opened observing that when I got an outline late last week of what Robertson was going to say, I had blurted out that “Grant Robertson has just made my day”.  I’ve been arguing for governance reform for at least 15 years, and between the report the Minister of Finance has commissioned, and the shared commitment to reform of the Greens and now Labour, it looks as though change might finally happen.   There was a certain logic to the current single decision-maker system in 1989, but if it had a logic then –  in how we understood monetary policy, and the nature of the Bank’s functions –  it simply looks wrong today.  Other countries don’t do things that way.  We don’t either in other areas of public life.

What I’m most encouraged by is the commitment to involve outsiders, not just to cement-in a position for insiders.  Having said that,  I raised two main areas of concern:

• the first is the Robertson proposal that the Governor should continue to be (in effect) appointed by the Board (in turn appointed by the current government), and that all the other voting members (inside and out) would be appointed by the Governor.  He qualifies this by noting that these appointments would be made in consultation with the Minister of Finance.    But that is a recipe that risks the Governor surrounding him or herself, deliberately or unconsciously, with people who think like the Governor, and will be reluctant to challenge the Governor too much.   The Minister might raise a few questions about a proposed appointee, but will be reluctant to second guess the Governor, and cannnot overrule him in this model.   Frankly, it is a model with a yawning democratic chasm and not a model I’m aware of being used in any other country.  It is one thing to delegate operational decisions to independent boards, but the members of those Boards should be appointed by those whom we elect –  ministers –  and whom we can toss out.
• the second concern is that under the proposed model there would be four insiders and three outsiders.  That is the wrong way round, and most likely would be a recipe for the marginalisation of the outsiders (since the insiders have no independent status, and all work for, and have their pay etc set by the Governor, they can easily caucus and out-vote the externals).   I’d prefer two internals and three externals, all directly appointed by the Minister of Finance.

In response, Robertson noted that he was open to looking again at the ministerial appointment option.  He noted that it was awkward as putative Minister to be talking of giving himself such extensive appointment powers.  Perhaps, but that is the way most public sector boards work.  If he wants Labour precedent, Gordon Brown introduced the Bank of England statutory Monetary Policy Committee, to which the Chancellor appoints most of the members directly, and has to be consulted on the remaining two.

Robertson explained that he preferred to keep a majority of insiders because one of his priorities was to preserve the operational independence of the Bank. I was, and am, puzzled by that response. I noted to him that the RBA has a substantial majority of outsiders on its decision-making Board, and that they had operational independence.  The same goes for Sweden’s Riksbank.  I’m less optimistic about a re-think there, as Robertson also stated that he did not envisage allowing MPC members to make speeches or comments on monetary policy without the explicit prior consent of the Governor.  It seems he still has in mind an excessively Governor-dominated institution, and one in which it would be hard to ensure transparecny and the regular injection of fresh perspectives and alternative views.  If so, that would be unfortunate.

I noted some unease about his proposal that all the external appointees would be “expert”, and perhaps had that concern somewhat allayed when he stressed that in this context he did not intend “expert” to mean simply a narrow expert in specific aspects of monetary economics or the like.

My other main observation in this area is that the Labour proposal (deliberately and consciously) does not yet address the governance and decisionmaking for the Bank’s extensive financial regulatory functions.

But the most important omission seems to me to be the governance provisions for the Reserve Bank’s extensive financial stability and regulatory functions, under various different pieces of legislation.   There is no precedent anywhere for so much regulatory power to be in one person’s hands.  It wasn’t even an outcome that was consciously deliberated on by Parliament –  rather it grew up with a succession of amendments to the Act, and changes in regulatory philosophy over the years. And whereas a regulating Cabinet minister can be reshuffled or dumped whenever the Prime Minister chooses, a Governor of the Reserve Bank is secure for five years.

If individuals matter in monetary policy, even with something like the PTA, they are likely to matter hugely in the financial regulatory area, where there is nothing like the PTA to constrain or guide the Bank/Governor.  The economic impact of regulatory choices can be as large –  if less visible –  than those around monetary policy.  I really hope that Labour will be thinking hard about how to extend their governance reform ideas into the financial regulatory field.  Personally I think there should be three strands to that:

• Removing some of the high level policy-setting power back to the Minister of Finance (so that the RB applies the rules etc and mostly doesn’t make the high level rules),
• Move responsibility for the various pieces of legislation out of the Reserve Bank, probably to Treasury. This matter is already being touched in the Rennie review commissioned by the current Minister of Finance, and
• Establishing a Financial Policy Committee, paralleling the Monetary Policy Committee, as the entity empowered to exercise whatever policymaking powers reside with the Reserve Bank. Again, a five-person committee (Governor, Deputy Governor, and three externals seems like a feasible solution).  The FPC would also be responsible for Financial Stability Reports.

Robertson acknowledged the deliberate omission and talked of it being “part of the conversation” moving forward.  I hope so.    This is the opportunity for a full overhaul of the governance model, not just tacking on an MPC to a model that doesn’t work that well in other areas either.

The other half of the address was about the idea of adding full employment to the goals for monetary policy.  I was (and am) much more sceptical, and nothing that was said in response to questions really clarified things much.    I get that full employment is an historical aspiration of the labour movement, and one that the Labour Party wants to make quite a lot of this year.  In many respects I applaud that.  I’m often surprised by how little outrage there is that one in 20 of our labour force, ready to start work straight away, is unemployed.  That is about two years per person over a 45 year working life.  Two years……     How many readers of this blog envisage anything like that for themselves or their kids?

But still the question is one of what the role of monetary policy is in all this, over and above what is already implied by inflation targeting (ie when core inflation is persistently  below target then even on its own current terms monetary policy hasn’t been well run, and a looser monetary policy would have brought the unemployment rate closer to the NAIRU (probably now not much above 4 per cent)).

I noted that I’m sceptical that the wording of section 8 of the RB Act is much to blame.  After all, for several years prior to the recession, our unemployment rate was not just one of the lowest in the OECD, it was also below any NAIRU estimates.  And when I checked this morning, I found that our unemployment rate this century has averaged lower than those of Australia, Canada, the US and the UK, and our legislation hasn’t changed in that times.  Robertson often cites Australia and the US.

The last few years haven’t been so good relatively speaking.  But if the legislation hasn’t changed and the (relative) outcomes have, that suggests it is the people in the institution who made a mistake –  they used the wrong mental model and were slow to recognise their error and respond to it.  Getting the right people, and a well-functioning organisation, is probably more important than tweaking section 8.

Robertson disputed my past characterisation (as “virtue signalling”) of his talk of adding a full employment objective.  But I still don’t see in what way I am wrong in that description.  It would send a single to key constituencies that Labour “feels the pain” and has an integrated commitment to advancing full employment, but what difference would it make to the Governor and his committee?  There wouldn’t be a numerical definition of full employment in the PTA, and since Robertson remains committed to the accountability framework of the Act, it is very hard to see how or why any given Governor would react much differently given a specific inflation target and a vague injunction to promote “full employment”.  A different Governor might make a difference –  hence, choose carefully –  but that sort of wording is unlikely to.

If they form a government later in the year, Labour (and the Greens) clearly will need to add some words to the PTA.  I drew the attention of those present to the 1950 amendment to the Reserve Bank Act, under which

[The Bank] shall do all such things within the limits of its powers as it deems necessary or desirable to promote and safeguard a stable internal price level and the highest degree of production, trade, and employment that can be achieved by monetary action.

I quite like it (and not just because a relative of mine was the responsible Minister of Finance).  It recognises that monetary policy doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and that people (voters and politicians) care about other stuff.  In fact we don’t pursue price stability simply for its own sake, but for a better life for New Zealanders. But note the key phrase  “the highest degree of…employment that can be achieved by monetary action”.  That might not be much, at least once the unemployment rate is back near the NAIRU.

As today’s chair –  economic historian Gary Hawke –  noted the 1950 change was largely about signalling too, and it isn’t obvous it made an awfully large difference to actual monetary policy.  But that was my point.  If you want words –  or signals – it is easy enough to craft elegant formulations that express those aspirations, and even articulate a place for monetary policy in overall economic management. It is a quite different thing to expect a central bank, however governed, with a single instrument capable only of affecting nominal variables in the longer-run, to make much material difference over time in achieving the wider –  and laudable –  government goal of full employment.

Politically, it doesn’t help at all to make that distinction.  But analytically it looks pretty clear.  Well-crafted words –  a modern version of that 1950 formulation –  would do no harm, and I’d have no real problem  with them, but they won’t make much substantive difference either. But sometimes, I guess, symbols matter quite a lot.