The successive waves of LVR controls that the Reserve Bank Governor has imposed on banks’ housing lending in recent years are back in the headlines, with comments from both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition (here and here).

As readers know, I’m no defender of LVR restrictions.  The other day I summarised my position this way

I never favoured putting the successive waves of LVR restrictions on in the first place.  They are discrimatory –  across classes of borrowers, classes of borrowing, and classes of lending institutions –  they aren’t based on any robust analysis, as a tool to protect the financial system they are inferior to higher capital requirements, they penalise the marginal in favour of the established (or lucky), and generally undermine an efficient and well-functioning housing finance market, for little evident end.  Oh, and among types of housing lending, they deliberately carve-out an unrestricted space for the most risky class of housing lending –  that on new builds.

You’d never know, from listening to the Governor or reading the Bank’s material, that New Zealand banks – like those in most other floating exchange rate countries –  appear to have done quite a good job over the decades in providing housing finance and managing the associated credit risks.   We had a huge credit boom last decade, followed by a nasty recession, and our banks’ housing loan book –  and those in other similar countries –  came through just fine.

The Bank’s statutory mandate is to promote the soundness and efficiency of the financial system.  On soundness, successive (very demanding) stress tests suggest that there is no credible threat to soundness, while the efficiency of the system is compromised at almost every turn by these controls.

At a more micro level, this comment (from my post yesterday) about the Bank’s debt to income limit proposals is just as relevant to the actual LVR controls they’ve put on in successive waves.

Much of the case the Reserve Bank seeks to make for having the ability to use a debt to income limit rests on the assumption that banks don’t do risk management and credit assessment well and that, inevitably crude, central bank interventions will do better.  The Bank’s consultation paper makes little or no effort to engage on that point at all.  It provides no evidence, for example, that the Reserve Bank has looked carefully at banks’ loan origination and management standards, and identified specific –  empirically validated –  failings in those standards.  Neither has it attempted to demonstrate that over time it and its staff have an –  empirically validated –  superior ability to identify and manage risks appropriately.

For all that, in partial defence of the LVR controls right now, many of those who are calling for the controls to be lifted or eased seem to be giving all the credit (or blame) for the current pause in housing market activity to the LVR controls.   That seems unlikely.  Other factors that are probably relevant include rising interest rates, self-chosen tightening in banks’ credit standards, pressure from Australian regulators on the Australian banking groups’ housing lending, a marked slowdown in Chinese capital outflows, and perhaps some election uncertainty (Labour is proposing various tax changes affecting housing).  I don’t know how much of the current slowdown is explained by each factor, but then neither do those focusing on the LVR controls.   Neither does the Reserve Bank.

And the backdrop remains one in which house price problems haven’t been caused mostly by credit conditions, but by the toxic brew of continuing tight land use restrictions (and associated infrastructure issues) and continuing rapid population growth.     Those two factors haven’t changed, so neither has the medium-term outlook for house and land prices.  Political parties talk about improving affordability, but neither main party leader will openly commit to a goal of falling house prices, and neither main party’s policies will make much sustained difference to the population pressures.   A brave person might bet on  some combination of (a) a recovering Australian economy easing population pressure, and (b) talk of abolishing limits around Auckland actually translating into action and much more readily useable land.  It’s a possibility, but so is the alternative –  continued cyclical swings around a persistently uptrend in the price of an artificially scarce asset.

And thus, in a sense, the Reserve Bank has a tiger by the tail.  House prices are primarily a reflection of serious structural and regulatory failures, and the problem won’t just be fixed by cutting off access to credit for some, or even by just buying a few months breathing space until a few more houses are built (before even more people need even more houses).   This isn’t a “bubble”, it is a regulatorily-induced severely distorted market.

So I strongly agree with the Prime Minister that, having repeatedly sold the LVR controls as temporary, the Reserve Bank Governor really needs to lay down clear and explicit markers that would see the controls be wound back and, eventually, removed completely.     And yet how can the Governor do that in any sensible way?   After all, the underlying problem wasn’t credit standards, or even overall credit growth.  It appeared to be simply that the Governor thought that he should “do something” to try and have some influence on house prices, even though he (a) had no good model of house prices in the first place, and (b) his tool didn’t address causes at all, and bore no relationship to those causes –  it was simply a rather arbitrary symptom-suppression tool.  And the Reserve Bank knew that all along –  they never claimed LVR controls would do much to house prices for long.

Because the interventions weren’t well-designed, any easing or removal of the controls will inevitably be rather arbitrary, with a considerable element of luck around how the removal would go.   What sort of criteria might they lay out?

• a pause in house prices for a couple of years?  Well, perhaps, but as everyone knows no one is good at forecasting cyclical fluctuations in immigration.  Take off the LVR controls and, for unrelated reasons, house price pressures could still return very quickly,
• housing credit growth down to, say, the rate of growth of nominal GDP for a couple of years.  But there isn’t much information in such a measure, as the stock of housing credit is mostly endogenous to house prices (high house prices require a higher stock of credit).

The latest set of restrictions seemed to be motivated as much by a distaste for investor buyers as by any sort of credit or systemic risk analysis, so it isn’t clear what indicators they could use to provide markers for winding back the investor-lending controls.  And since the Bank has never documented the specific concerns about banks’ lending standards that might have motivated the controls in the first place, it isn’t obvious that they could easily lay out markers in that area either.  Since the controls were never well-aligned with the underlying issues or risks, it seems likely that any easing won’t be able to be much better grounded –  almost inevitably it will be as much about “whim” and “taste” as anything robust.  Unless, that is, the incoming Governor simply decides they are the wrong tool for the job, and decides to (gradually) lift them as a matter of policy.   Doing so would put the responsibility for the house price debacle where it belongs: with politicians and bureaucrats who keep land artificially scarce, and at the same time keep driving up the population.

Some have also taken the Prime Minister’s comments as ruling out any chance of the Reserve Bank’s debt to income tool getting approval from the government.  I didn’t read it that way at all.

But he [English] explicitly ruled out giving the bank the added tool of DTIs, which it had requested earlier in the year.

“We don’t see the need for the further tools, Those are being examined. If there was a need for it then we’re open to it, but we don’t see the need at the moment. We won’t be looking at it before the election.”

As even the Governor isn’t seeking to use a DTI limit at present (only add it to the approved tool kit), and as submissions on the Bank’s proposal haven’t yet closed, of course the government won’t be looking at it before the election (little more than a month away).  It will take at least that long for the Reserve Bank to review submissions and go through its own internal processes.  In fact, at his press conference last week Graeme Wheeler was explicitly asked about the DTI proposal, and responded that it would be a matter for his (acting) successor and the new Minister of Finance to look at after the election.    Perhaps the Prime Minister isn’t keen, but his actual comments yesterday were much less clear cut on the DTI proposal than they might have looked.

In many ways, the thing that interested me most in yesterday’s comments was the way both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition seemed to treat decisions on direct interventions like LVR or DTI controls as naturally a matter for the Reserve Bank to decide.

The Prime Minister’s stance was described by interest.co.nz as

However, he again reiterated that relaxing LVR restrictions was a matter for the Reserve Bank. “I’m not here to tell them what to do.” English said government was not going to make the decision for them and that he did not want to give the public the impression that politicians could decide to remove them. “The Reserve Bank decides that.”

The Leader of Opposition similarly

“But we’ve not proposed removing their ability to set those…use those tools,” Ardern said. “We’re not taking away their discretion and independence.”

Both of them accurately describe the law as it stands.  The Reserve Bank –  well, the Governor personally –  has the power to impose such controls.    But there isn’t any particularly good reason why the Reserve Bank Act should be written that way.

The case for central bank independence mostly relates to monetary policy.  In monetary policy, there is a pretty clearly specified objective set by the politicians, for which (at least in principle) the Governor can be held to account.  In our legislation, the Governor can only use indirect instruments (eg the OCR) to influence things –  he has not direct regulatory powers that he is able to use.

Banking regulation and supervision are quite different matters.  I think there is a clear-cut argument for keeping politicians out of banking supervision as it relates to any individual bank –  we don’t want politicians favouring one bank over another, and we want whatever rules are in place applied without fear and favour.  In the same way, we don’t want politicians making decisions that person x gets a welfare benefit and person y doesn’t.  But the rules of the welfare system itself are rightly a matter for Parliamant and for ministers.

There isn’t compelling reason why things should be different for banking controls (and, in fact, things aren’t different for non-bank controls, where the Governor does not have the same freedom).  As my former colleague Kirdan Lees pointed out on Morning Report this morning, when it comes to financial stability and efficiency, there are no well-articulated specific statutory goals the Reserve Bank Governor is charged with pursuing.  That gives the holder of that office a huge amount of policy discretion –  a lot more so than is typical for public sector agencies and their chief executives – and very little effective accountability.    So when Ms Ardern says that she doesn’t propose to take away the Bank’s discretion or independence, the appropriate response really should be “why not?”.

We need expert advisers in these areas, and we need expert people implementing the controls and ensuring that different banks are treated equitably, but policy is (or should be) a matter for politicians.  It is why we have elections.  We get to choose, and toss out, those who make the rules.  It is how the system is supposed to work –  just not, apparently, when it comes to the housing finance market.

I’ve welcomed the broad direction of the Labour Party’s proposal to shift to a committee-based decisionmaking model for monetary policy.   But, as I noted at the time of the release, their proposals were too timid, involved too much deference to the Governor (whoever he or she may be), and simply didn’t even address this financial stability and regulatory aspects of the Bank’s powers.      There is a useful place for experts but –  especially where the goals are vague, and the associated controls bear heavily on ordinary citizens –  it should be in advising and implementing, not in making policy.   Decisions to impose, or lift, LVR controls or DTI controls should –  if we must have them at all – be made by politicians whom we’ve elected, not by a single official who faces almost no effective accountability.