Housing

Arbitrary Lines

Michael Reddell Housing

Ever since I’ve been writing about house prices – more or less the life of this blog – one of the things that has struck (and sobered) me is that I do not know of (and no one has ever been able to point me to) an example of a country or even a region that having once messed up its housing and urban land regulation, generating absurdly high house price to income ratios has undone things and returned to sustainably low price to income ratios (perhaps fluctuating around three times). There are, of course, many places in the United States where price to income ratios never went crazy. But never having dug a deep hole is a different matter than getting out of one once dug. One reads occasionally – even briefly on this blog – of how easy it is to build in Tokyo (and a culture of frequent demolition and rebuild), but no one ever suggests that Tokyo price to income ratios are low (just much lower than they were a few decades ago at the peak of the 1980s boom).

A month or two back I saw reference somewhere to Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, a new book by an American “professional city planner” Nolan Gray. Last week it turned up in the mail, and being neither very long nor very technical I’ve now read it.

Gray offers a pretty useful introduction to how zoning came to be in the United States (complete, as usual, with various Supreme Court cases), and if much of that isn’t very directly relevant to New Zealand I found it interesting nonetheless. And, of course, some of the best-known restrictions in many areas of the United States – single family dwelling zoning, to the complete exclusion of any other uses for the land (whether two single-storey townhouses, or a corner dairy, or a hairdresser’s), isn’t (and hasn’t really been) a widespread thing in urban New Zealand.

And there is some useful material on some of the potential wider costs to restrictive land use, although on my reading of the relevant papers Grey often jumps too readily to assert causal relationships. But then his background is planning (and is currently studying for a PhD in urban planning) and in some respects the book is best seen as an evangelistic tract (they have their place). No doubt it would appeal quite strongly to that small but vocal group of New Zealand reformers who dream of demolishing whole suburbs, long for light rail systems, and really dislike the idea of backyards (and increasing physical footprints of cities). They often dislike cars too. And often don’t seem too keen on – quite derisive of – people not like them.

And thus as the book went on I was finding it more than a little annoying in places. Gray makes many good points about the inadequacies (and worse) of US zoning systems. But it was pretty clear that he had one particular urban form in mind, and whole agenda of other issues he (and his publisher – explicitly focused on “solving environmental problems”) cared about. And, perhaps reflecting that, there was very little in the book about house prices themselves or the likelihood that his solutions would materially lower them. But there was quite a lot on emissions and energy use (which could simply be priced, as they now largely are in New Zealand), and a dislike of turning farmland (or any other undeveloped land) into suburbs (where, again, any externalities can and should be priced). He seems to have been living in Washington DC when he wrote the book, and enjoying that: we enjoyed our time living in a DC apartment too.

It was also getting frustrating that despite writing about a country that has quite diverse systems, for a long time there was almost no mention of the vast swathes of the United States with (a) population growth, and (b) low and fairly stable house prices.

Until, three-quarters of the way through the book, I came to the chapter headed “The Great Unzoned City”, about Houston. I wouldn’t be bothering with this post if Gray had simply been making the point that real house prices are pretty low, and fluctuate around a fairly stable trend, in Houston. There are, after all, many cities in the annual Demographia tables that are cheaper still. There isn’t that much zoning in Houston, and people have written previously about Municipal Urban Districts (MUDs) which enable land – outside established urban local government boundaries – to be readily developed by private developers, including dealing directly with (internalising) the associated infrastructure costs of development. It was nice to see his, perhaps grudging, recognition that (a) everyone drives in Houston, and b) people are moving to places such as it with cheaper housing. It works. And there has been considerable intensification in Houston over the years.

But the real thing I learned about – and the point of the post – was about the Houston system of Deed Restrictions.

Again, as long as I’ve been writing about housing and possible reform options for New Zealand, I have been intrigued (starting here I think) by the idea of allowing small groups of landowners in existing urban areas (perhaps at the scale of a city block or a small neighbourhood) to set collectively their own land-use rules for their own group of properties. They are an established market mechanisms in new developments in New Zealand, in the form of private covenants, and one could mount an argument that zoning was really an attempt to do much the same thing (collectively manage shared interests, where there are real externalities).

In a report some years ago, the Productivity Commission took a very dim view of private covenants, even suggesting that the government should legislate to restrict their use. But they’ve always seemed to me to be a way through the endless battles (eg the Christchurch City Council stories this morning) around land use, at least among those willing to operate in good faith (and it is never clear how many are). Why not, for example, remove all government restrictions on land use for housing (height, setback, site coverage, “character”, parking or whatever) in existing urban areas AND on undeveloped land, while allowing neighbourhoods/blocks (groups of existing property owners) to adopt by super-majority (and be able to amend by the same super-majority) previous restrictions as applicable to their land, and their land only?

Over the years, I’ve seen a few other people make similar suggestions (eg there was a UK think tank piece a year or two back) but it had about it perhaps an obscure textbook-y feel. It wasn’t clear that anyone had tried it ever, and I myself am inclined to invoke revealed preference arguments at times (if something doesn’t exist anywhere, it is worth at least thinking about whether there is a good – well-grounded, not just political – reason for that).

But it seems that in Houston they have done something very like what I’ve suggested, and it has been in place long enough to see how it works. It is a big, growing, city with pretty-affordable house prices (I’ve been looking recently at small modern units in Christchurch recently – NZ’s least unaffordable city of any size – and it is simply depressing (although also a reminder of what we could do) to check in from time to time and see what one gets for the same money, in a higher wage country, in Houston).

There have been attempts over the years to put in place more extensive zoning systems in Houston. They have failed, at several referenda. But here is Grey:

It is easy to develop on the margins of Houston, it is fairly easy to develop in much of the existing city, but those individual groups of landowners who want to have collective rules for their own properties can do so, and the local authority will enforce those rules on those properties. Deed restrictions are not set in stone for ever, but appear to be often time-limited and requiring a further (super-majority) vote of the then owners (a different group than 25 years earlier typically) at expiry to renew them.

It seems like a model that has a lot to offer here, and which should be looked at more closely by (a) officials, and (b) political parties exploring the best durable way ahead for New Zealand.

Those not operating in good faith – or at least much more interested in other agendas than a) widely affordable housing, and b) property rights (individual and collective) – would no doubt hate it. And, for the moment, they have the momentum – National and Labour last year rushed through legislation that stripped away many existing restrictions, and as a technical matter the government can if it likes force individual city councils to do as it insists. But governments can lose elections too, and if we are serious about much lower sustainable real house prices – and it isn’t clear how many central or local government figures are – we need durable models. The Houston model has proved to work, both in managing the politics and in delivering a city with widely affordable housing, and a wide range of available housing types. And if greenfields development is once again made easy – as distinct from say Wellington where the regional council is currently trying to make it even harder – urban and suburban land prices would fall a lot, and stay down.

One of the arguments some mount for over-riding local community preferences is that “people have to live somewhere”, suggesting that it is unacceptable (even “selfish”) for existing landowners (acting collectively) to protect their own interests and preferences for their own land. But that argument rests only on then unspoken earlier clause “because we will make it increasingly difficult to increase the physical footprint on cities”. Allow easy development, of all types (internalising relevant costs), and there is just no reason to ride roughshod over the collective interests of existing groups of landowners, providing they can restrict things only for their own group of properties.

Some might push back and argue that there is nothing to stop groups of landowners forming private covenants now on existing properties, and I gather that is legally so. But coordination issues and transactions costs are likely to be very high, and people seek to use political channels instead. How much better if we provided a tailor-made readily enforceable collective action model, and then got politicians right out of the business of deciding what sort of houses can be built where.

And, to be clear, as someone living at the end of a hillside cul-de-sac I would have no interest in a Deed Restriction for our property. My interest is ending the evil that is Wellington price to income ratios of 8x or more, and enabling ready affordability for the next generation.

Price/income ratios

Michael Reddell Housing

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had another round of politicians (so-called “leaders”) doing their utmost to deny any interest in seeing house prices much lower. At 60 per cent below current levels – which would be readily achievable with open and competitive land markets, and a genuinely open and competitive building products sector – we’d be looking at something a lot more reasonable. Real rents would probably then be lower than ever before. But our politicians are terrified of the very idea.

The new Leader of the Opposition made clear his opposition to any suggestion of a sustained fall in house prices (while noting that inevitably there would be some ups and downs). HIs new deputy – and National’s housing spokesperson – did suggest that much lower house price/income ratios might be desirable, with something like flat nominal house prices. And while the Prime Minister at the weekend was quoting as suggesting that she wanted lower house prices – quite a change of tone from her, perhaps just getting ahead of what may already be beginning to happen – she too was at pains to deny any interest in much lower house prices.

Of course, in principle, house price/income ratios could be steadily whittled away by some combination of flat nominal house prices and rising wage rate. But when one starts from such an unbalanced situation as New Zealand now does it would be the project of decades, even if anyone took it seriously. The great and good seem to rather like the idea of this “painless” whittling away, presumably as it enables them to sound serious, and not scary to the already-indebted.

Here is a chart of three scenarios, in each of which nominal house prices hold flat from here. In each scenario I’ve assumed 3 per cent annual growth in wage rates (basically inflation at target on average and something like 1 per cent per annum productivity growth). What differentiates the three scenarios is the starting point – a range from 8 times income to 10 times income.

price to income dec 21

At best, it takes 33 years for price/income ratios to get back to three – the sort of ratio seen in large chunks of the US, in cities large and small. At best, it would take almost a quarter of a century to get back to a price/income ratio of four.

In the next chart I’ve assumed a starting point of 10 times income and shown the implications for a range of wage growth assumptions. On these scenarios, my kids would my age before house price to income ratios were again what they were when I was their age.

price to income 2 dec 21

If your idea of political leadership is along the lines of “I must find where the people are going and get out in front of them”, I suppose I understand the apparent political terror at the prospect of much lower house prices, but what a pathetically weak approach, that abdicates any responsibility towards the next generation. These people – “leaders” of our political parties – appear content to get a whole other generation (or two) load up on debt based on house prices they know not to be based on any long-term fundamentals, rather than get to the heart of the issue now.

Of course, some in the media don’t help. I saw last night one journalist suggesting that even getting house prices 25 per cent lower would be reckless, irresponsible, and deeply economically damaging. But politicians put themselves forward, at least notionally, as leaders, people (allegedly) with the best interests of the country at heart. They are supposed to be the communicators, the coalition builders, the persuaders, the people who make things happen…..not those content to sit to the sidelines, idly hoping that well beyond their time in politics things might finally be sorted out.

Take the idea of a 25 per cent fall in house prices. That might take prices back to around where they were at the start of last year. No one who bought before then is put in any particular difficulty. And neither are most of those who bought more recently, as bank lending standards have not been loose, and LVR restrictions have become increasingly onerous. Some would be left temporarily with negative equity, but (a) typically not a large amount, and (b) in a fully-employed economy, modest negative equity isn’t typically a major problem (and to anyone going “easy for you to say”, it was exactly the situation I found myself in a couple of years after buying my first house). But our “leaders” can’t even enthusiastically embrace unwinding the last couple of years’ house price rises.

Of course, the major parties sometimes like to talk about the things they’ve done, up to and including the current amendment to the RMA being rushed through Parliament. But the proof of the pudding is in the prices, and expectations of future prices. Actually, in the political rhetoric as well. Not only have expectations of future house price inflation not gone negative – or even slowed noticeably after the latest “accord” – but the politicians’ own rhetoric reinforces the point: they themselves are scared of embracing lower prices.

Were they actually serious about fixing things, in their own terms of office, some creative thinking (and coalition building) might be required. Big changes in relative prices involve big shifts in wealth. Sharp rises in house prices have skewed the playing field away from the young and the poor. Sharp falls in house prices would skew things sharply away from the very highly-indebted. Of the latter, some don’t (and shouldn’t) command much sympathy at all. If you run a residential rentals business and took on huge amounts of debt to finance your business, well tough. It is a business, in this case built on systematically rigged markets (all that central and local government land-use regulation), and sometimes businesses fail. New entrants will emerge to replace you.

But first home buyers (in particular) command a lot more sympathy, and rightly so in my view. Young families didn’t ask the government to rig the market, or probably even support them doing so. They just want a secure home and backyard to raise their kids, and the only option governments left them for doing so was to pay these absurd price/income ratios, made barely feasible by the sustained decline in neutral interest rates (which in a functioning market should have made purchasing a home easier than ever). For them, some sort of partial compensation scheme might be a fair and necessary path to breaking through the political resistance to much-lower house and land prices. Not a first-best solution perhaps, but a great deal than putting another generation through this quite-unnecessary drama of rigged housing markets. When market prices are miles from the structural fundamentals, there is no merit in trying to foreshadow some very slow and allegedly “painless” adjustment. Better to get the prices (and market regulatory frameworks) sorted out now.

(Oh, and don’t be fooled if prices do fall back a bit over the next 12-18 months. Cyclical fluctuations happen. Falls happen (as over 2008/09). But without fixing the land-use restrictions – and the current RMA amendment does not even come close – the fundamental distortions remain. House prices did fall quite a bit in 2008/09 (even with much lower interest rates), until they rebounded to levels (and price/income ratios) higher than ever.

House and land prices

Michael Reddell Housing, Uncategorized

The local Wellington magazine, Capital, which seems to be a curious mix of the serious and the lifestyle, earlier in the year asked if I would write a piece on house prices. That article outlined the story I’ve run here repeatedly, that durable and very large reductions in house and land prices are quite possible – we see everyday examples in perfectly pleasant urban areas in the United States – but are only likely to happen if there is genuine aggressive competition among owners of land beyond existing urban areas. It is that sort of competition, from land whose best other use is probably for something agricultural in nature, that would durably lower land (and house) prices in existing urban areas.

That article ran in April. In late September the editor got in touch and asked if I was interested in doing another piece. Since there had been numerous policy announcements around housing this year – from the government, from the Reserve Bank, sometimes from the government to the Reserve Bank – I suggested that a piece along the lines of “sound and fury, signifying not much at all other than some new inefficiencies and distortions” might be in order. That article is in the issue on sale in Wellington now, and the text is here. I will include the full text at the bottom of this post.

I wrote the article four weeks ago. It isn’t quite the article I would write today because since then we’ve had the joint Labour-National announcement on new legislation that is being rushed through which will allow more intensive (but still relatively low-rise) development in existing urban areas of our larger cities, but appears to do nothing of substance to free up land-use beyond existing urban areas (and, as I noted in both articles, there is lots of undeveloped land in greater Wellington, much of it with little economic value in alternative uses). But if I’d write a slightly different article today, the bottom line does not change: there is no sign (from ministers, Opposition spokespeople, city councillors or whoever) that those who hold power have any interest at all in delivering much lower house prices on a durable basis. They refuse to express any such interest, and nothing they have done or are now doing seems likely to bring about such an outcome. Urban density may be all very well and good, for those who like that sort of lifestyle (and good luck to them), but the international evidence offers no example I’m aware of in which allowing much-greater density in cities has been followed by move towards house/land prices dropping back towards what we see in (typically quite low-density) cities in much of the US.

In the article I suggested that much of what had been announced this year was little more than “performative display” – doing stuff for the sake of being seen to act, seen to care. That seems right for most of the initiatives, since typically the supporting advice that has been published doesn’t suggest any likelihood of a sustained impact on prices. It is possible that the parties to the latest deal actually believe that this initiative might actually make a difference – partly because they have been cheered on by some people from the genuinely pro-liberalisation side of things. But even if they do believe that – and refuse to openly say so for fear of scaring some heavily-indebted voters – they are almost certainly wrong.

The second reason for scepticism I included in the article was this

The second clue is that prices have kept on rising, and at best are perhaps expected to fall back just a few percentage points over the period ahead (despite the huge increases we’ve seen). If people – smart people with lots of money at stake – really thought that the policy changes already made (tax rules, access to finance) or those in the works (such as the replacement for the RMA, or the National Policy Statement on urban development) were going to make an enduring difference, we’d see to
see it in the prices of the assets already. That is how asset markets work, whether stock markets, foreign exchange markets, or (a little more murkily) land markets. But there are no signs or reports of substantial falls, whether for existing properties or potentially-developable land

I still reckon that is basically right, but were I writing today I might put more emphasis on the possibility of quite a shakeout over the next year or two, even while the structural problems are unchanged. In a way, this is just the sort of point the Reserve Bank has been making in its discussion around “sustainable” house prices. “Sustainable” in their terms does not mean affordable, or US-style normal. It really just means where a market might be expected to settle given all the policy-settings and distortions in the system (that underpin land prices well above best alternative use price). One can see material, even significant, falls in house prices in such markets without the longer-term structural fundamentals being fixed at all. Such falls aren’t likely to last (and in New Zealand aren’t likely to pose a financial stability threat) but they could get the headlines for a time. Many of the falls in house prices that happened around 2008/09 were of that sort – whether those in San Francisco (now incredibly expensive), New Zealand (now incredibly expensive), or even Dublin.

Building activity in and of itself does not solve the underlying problem – land prices – but it can still lead to shorter-term overhangs in the market. There has been quite a lot of housebuilding going on.

Interest rates have risen and seem likely to rise further. A return to rapid population growth, from immigration, still seems some way off. The fiscal stimulus which has helped boost economic activity will be fading, and there are all those tax and access-to-credit restrictions. None of these address the longer-term problem of a rigged market that renders peripheral (developable) land incredibly expensive in a land-abundant country, but in combination they could be a recipe for a non-trivial fall at some point soon. Of course, prices ran up so much in the last year or so that even such a fall is unlikely to take prices back to real levels even two years ago, but…..falls of that sort would grab the headlines, and would probably lead some politicians to want to claim credit for having solved a problem they haven’t really even begun to address.

Without further indenting or block-quoting here is the full text of that article.

Lots of action, but none that will fix the housing market

Michael Reddell

(Published in Capital magazine, November 2021)

October 2021

Even before Covid, house prices in much of New Zealand were very high.  Over the last year or so they’ve again risen sharply almost everywhere, putting home ownership further beyond the reach of most, and underpinning rising rents.  This dreadful situation, transferring resources (wealth) from the relatively poor and young to the relatively rich and the risk-takers, is utterly unnecessary and deeply unjust. 

In a well-functioning market, times like these should be a renter’s dream.  Purchasing a house should never have been cheaper, and rents should be lower (in real terms) than ever.

That’s because interest rates are at record lows.  The New Zealand government’s 20-year inflation-indexed bond currently trades at about 0.8 per cent.  25 years ago the comparable rate was about 5 per cent.  Basic finance theory suggests that when rates of returns on one long-term asset fall so will those on other long-term assets. And in a well-functioning market, rents are the main source of return to the owner of the rental property.

But a well-functioning market is one in which it is easy to bring to market and develop new land and new houses. In that sort of market, developing the new land (building the new houses) would now be easier and cheaper than ever.   It takes time to develop a subdivision and build houses, and finance costs are one of the major costs those in that business face.   New Zealand has abundant land, that could readily be converted to urban uses. So, of course, does Wellington, and much of the land surrounding Wellington isn’t worth much in alternative uses.   But if regulations make land artificially scarce, then lower interest rates (or other sources of higher demand) can translate quite quickly into higher house/land prices.

The alternative isn’t just some theoretician’s dream.  When I wrote here six months ago, I highlighted Little Rock, Arkansas, as one example of the many growing, pleasant and highly-affordable US cities.  Real house prices in Little Rock hadn’t changed much in 40 years and median house prices appeared to be about NZ$300000.  Interest rates are at least as low as those here.  Check any website and you’ll easily find modern townhouses to rent in Little Rock for no more than NZ$1000 per month.   Try that in Wellington.

In a well-functioning market, when interest rates fall and prices look like beginning to rise, owners of land (whether existing sites in the city or new areas at the periphery) should be falling over themselves to get new land, and then new houses, to market, and owners of rental properties should be competing aggressively to get and keep tenants.  The alternatives would be a vacant property (earning nothing) or money in the bank (earning little more).

But this is New Zealand where, absent a well-functioning market, house/land prices have surged again, where rents have been rising, and where price to income ratios –  which should be less than 4 in well-functioning markets –  are now more like 10.

There has been all manner of policy announcements this year, some substantive and others little more than rhetorical.   The government has extended the “bright-line test”, so that investors selling properties within 10 years will pay a sort of capital gains tax, and – in one of the more bizarre moves – is legislating to stop businesses owning investment properties deducting their interest costs against taxable income.  A select committee is looked into new resource management legislation.    And, of course, some councils – including Wellington’s – are moving to allow some more intense development in some parts of the city.     Bureaucrats have got in on the act too, with renewed loan-to-value (LVR) restrictions from the Reserve Bank and the threat of more restrictions to come.  And the government has insisted that the Reserve Bank should talk more about house prices.

But there are two pointers that none of this amounts to much more than performative display. The first is that government ministers – from the Prime Minister down – refuse to express any interest in lower house prices.  Instead, they talk repeatedly about just lowering the rate of increase. Councillors, and Opposition parties, are rarely much better.

The second clue is that prices have kept on rising, and at best are perhaps expected to fall back just a few percentage points over the period ahead (despite the huge increases we’ve seen).   If people – smart people with lots of money at stake – really thought that the policy changes already made (tax rules, access to finance) or those in the works (such as the replacement for the RMA, or the National Policy Statement on urban development) were going to make an enduring difference, we’d see it in the prices of the assets already.  That is how asset markets work, whether stock markets, foreign exchange markets, or (a little more murkily) land markets.  But there are no signs or reports of substantial falls, whether for existing properties or potentially-developable land.

This year’s measures aren’t designed to fix the broken housing market, just to throw some sand in the wheels, be seen to be doing something, and perhaps to buy a bit of temporary relief.  Nothing done or promised is likely to make very much sustained difference at all, because none of it gets to the source of the problem.

Some put a lot of hope in provisions allowing for greater urban density – even as our cities are already quite densely populated by New World standards.  They are probably wrong to do so.   Increasing density has already been a feature of the last few decades – think of all the infill housing a decade or two back – and, of course, the physical footprint of our cities has also expanded.  But in the face of rapid population growth – likely to resume once Covid passes – these grudging changes have only been enough to avoid house prices rising sooner to even more outrageous levels.  

Without a radical freeing-up of land use at the periphery, creating aggressive competition between development options in cities and those at the margins, simply allowing a bit more densification will not bring land prices down. It may even bid up the prices of some sections, now able to be developed more intensively.  A lot of houses are being built right now, but there is no prospect of enduringly much lower prices unless or until owners of vacant land, on the peripheries of our city, are free to bring that land into housing and other urban uses.

New Zealanders should be able to count on a well-functioning housing/land market and ready access to finance.  Increasingly we have neither; just more complexity, more inefficiency, and more-unaffordable house/land prices.

Tightening LVR restrictions

Michael Reddell bank capital requirements, Financial stability, Housing

The Reserve Bank’s faux “consultation” on tightening LVR controls closes today. If you felt so inclined the consultation document is here, but it isn’t clear why you’d bother except for the record. Poor performance by powerful government agencies shouldn’t go unremarked.

I have put in a a short submission, simply to document some of the many problems with the consultation.

submission to RB on tightening LVR restrictions Sept 2021

Much of the text simply elaborates points I noted in a post last week. But here are a few extracts

More substantively, there is no discussion at all in the consultation document of the Reserve Bank’s capital requirements or the capital positions of the banks you are putting more controls on. As you will be well aware, the risk-adjusted capital ratios of New Zealand banks are high by international standards, and will be increased further – as a regulatory requirement – over the next few years.   Capital is, and always should be, the key buffer against loans going bad, and we know that the New Zealand framework imposes relatively (by international standards) high capital requirements in respect of housing loans, including high LVR ones.   It is simply unserious – or a desire to operate ultra vires – not to engage with the capital position of the banking system.  That is especially so as your consultation document acknowledges that tighter LVR controls will impair the efficiency of the financial system.  Given that acknowledged cost, there has to be a clear gain to financial system soundness (the other limb of your statutory goals/purposes) from any new regulatory impost, but your document makes no effort to quantify such a gain (reduced probability of failure), or to demonstrate that tighter LVR controls are the least-cost way to generate such a reduction.   There is not, I think, even any attempt to engage with the “1 in 200 years” failure framework that the Bank dreamed up a few years ago to support the capital proposals it was then consulting on.

….

The Bank’s consultative document also attempts to make quite a bit of an argument that somehow LVR restrictions now can dampen the size of future “boom-and-bust cycles” in the economy, even going so far as to claim these incremental restrictions will improve the medium-term performance of the economy. But none of this argument engages with the (very healthy) capital position of the banking system and at times it seems internally contradictory.  Thus, in paragraph 47 the Bank worries about dampening effects on consumption and economic activity from “increased serviceability stress” as a result of some future increase in interest rates, but never seems to recognise that the reason the monetary policy arm of the Bank would be raising interest rates is to dampen demand and inflationary pressures.  If anything, the Bank’s argument would seem to suggest that more high-LVR lending would, if anything, and in those circumstances increase the potency of monetary policy, and reduce the extent of any required OCR increases.    More generally, the Bank continues to place a considerable reliance on claims about a significant housing wealth effect on consumption that appear inconsistent with New Zealand macroeconomic data over many decades, and which appear to over-emphasise existing homeowners while largely ignoring the loss of wealth/purchasing power for those who do not (yet) own a house.

….

In conclusion, the Bank has simply not made any sort of compelling case for further tightening of LVR restrictions. At very least, such a case would have to involved a careful and documented cost-benefit analysis, that included engagement with the bank capital regulatory regime.  There is no pressing financial stability risk, and so this proposal – in practice, these new rules – has the feel of action taken for the sake of action, perhaps to provide some cover for a government that fails to address the house price issue at source, or to fend off (misguided) critics of the Bank’s LSAP monetary policy programme.   That isn’t a good or acceptable use of the powers of the state. 

To the extent the initiative is about protecting borrowers from themselves – as your communications sometimes suggests – it may be nobly intended but is no part of the Bank’s statutory responsibility (and thus not a legitimate basis for use of regulatory powers). Perhaps as importantly it seems to assume the current crop of central bankers and regulators knows more about the risks of house prices falling substantially and sustainably than (a) borrowers and their bankers (each with money on the lines) and (b) than their central banking predecessors over 30 years did (each Governor having at some point or other anguished about the risks of falls, even as central and local government policy continued to underpin the decades-long scandalous lift in real house prices). No evidence is advanced for either proposition.

 

My former Reserve Bank colleague – now Tailrisk Economics – Ian Harrison had a similarly cynical view on the consultation process but also put in a short submission, which he has given me permission to quote from.

Ian makes a number of serious analytical points about the substantive weaknesses in the Bank’s document

Introduction

It is clear that, from the content of the consultation paper and the time given for submissions, the consideration of submissions and final decision making, that this is not a serious consultation, and that submissions will mostly be ignored.  In that vein not all of this submission is entirely serious.  Part A discusses some key elements of the Bank’s analysis.  It shows that the Bank’s concerns appear to be driven by a data error and a lack of understanding of how loan portfolios evolve over time.

The Bank has suppressed lending to housing investors following the Minister’s wish to give first time homebuyers a better chance of securing a property.  Now that this demand has emerged the Bank wants to choke it off. 

This is based on an almost irrational obsession with housing lending risk.   Even when high LVR loans are a small part of banks’ portfolios, and its own stress testing shows that housing losses will account for a relatively small part of overall losses in fairly extreme stress events (about 28 percent), it does not seem to be able to resist tinkering with quantitative interventions.

The easiest and most effective solution to the identified problems would be to increase housing interest rates, but that option is not even mentioned.

Part B of this submission provides a different professional perspective on the Bank’s behavior.

But sometimes points are made more potently – at least in responding to unserious spin masquerading as policy analysis – by satire. And this is Ian’s Part B

Part B 

Meduni Vienna, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy

Währinger Gürtel 18-20
1090 Vienna, Austria 

Consultation report

 Patient : R. Bank 

Date:   7/9/2021

Diagnosis:

From our consultation with the patient R. Bank we observed the following clinical symptoms.  Our consultation conclusions are based on the patient’s writings (in particular the document loan-to valuation ratio restrictions) and our observations of behavior over the last three years.

Moderate paranoia: The patient had a tendency to blowup the risks of everyday life into impending disasters.

Hyperactivity: There was a pronounced tendency to do things when nothing needs to be done.

Megalomania: The patient exhibits the classic signs of megalomania: overestimation of one’s abilities, feelings of uniqueness, inflated self-esteem, and a drive to maintain control over others.

Misplaced empathy:  The patient exhibited some concern that others may make mistakes but uses this as a reason to exercise control over them.

Irrationality: There was a lack of capacity to identify real problems and connect them with solutions.

Unwillingness to listen to others:  The patient will pretend to listen to alternative views but this is almost always a sham.

Treatment:

  • Heavy sedation
  • Counselling

The patient should be removed from positions of authority until there is a pronounced improvement in behavior.

Albert Pystaek Phd., Dip. A.E.M, Fm.d, Head of Clinical Psychiatry

Housing

Michael Reddell Housing, Monetary policy, Reserve Bank

I hadn’t paid much attention to the renewed wave of restrictive regulation of the housing finance market being imposed by the Governor of the Reserve Bank this year, but a journalist rang yesterday to talk about the latest proposal which prompted me to download and read the “consultative document” the Bank released last Friday.

Why the quote marks? Because quite evidently this is not about consultation at all, simply trying to do the bare minimum to jump through the legal hoops to allow the Governor to do whatever he wants. The document was released on Friday 3 September. The consultation period is a mere two weeks, which is bad enough. But then they tell people who might be inclined to submit that ‘we expect to release our final decision in late September’ – at most nine working days after submissions close – with the new rules to come into effect from 1 October. And if you were still in any doubt there is that line they love to use: “we expect banks to comply with the spirit of the new restrictions immediately”.

WIth that sort of urgency and disregard for any serious bow in the direction of consultation and reflection, you’d have to assume the Bank had a compelling case for urgent action, such that (for example) a delay of even as much as a month would pose an unendurable threat to the soundness and efficiency of the financial system (still the statutory purposes these regulatory powers are supposed to be exercised for). And since the Bank is quite open about the fact that the new restrictions will impede the efficiency of the system, you’d expect an overwhelming case for a soundness threat, complete with a careful analysis indicating that these new controls – directly affecting huge numbers of ordinary people – were the best, least inefficient, response.

But there is nothing of the sort. Instead they are actually at pains to stress that the financial system is sound at present, so the worry is about what might happen if things went on as they are. But that can’t possibly be an issue that rides on a one month, it must be something about several more years.

But even then their case amounts to very little. For example, they point that if house prices were to fall 20 per cent from current levels some $4 billion of lending would be to borrowers who would then have negative equity, But that is hardly news. The typical first-home buyer has always – at least in liberal financial systems – borrowed at least 80 per cent of the value of the home they are purchasing. It is usually sensible and rational for them to do so (indeed 90 per cent would often be sensible and prudent). So a fall of 20 per cent in house prices would always put a lot of recent borrowers into a negative equity position. Note, however, that (a) $4 billion is not much over 1 per cent of total housing lending, and (b) it is $4 billion of loans, not $4 billion of negative equity. If I borrowed 82 per cent of the value of the house, the house fell in value 20 per cent, and I lost my job and had to sell up, the loss to the bank might be not much more than 2 per cent of the loan.

More generally, in the entire document there appears to be not a single mention of the capital position of banks operating in New Zealand, or the Reserve Bank’s capital requirements. You might recall that New Zealand banks have some of the highest effective capital ratios anywhere in the advanced world, and that the Bank is putting in place a steady increase in those capital requirements. Moreover, if you read the Bank’s document – at least as a lay reader – you might miss entirely the point that the capital rules, and the internal models banks use, require more dollars of capital for higher risk loans than for lower risk loans. It is how the system is supposed to work. There are big buffers, those buffers are getting bigger (as per cent of risk-weighted assets), and the dollar amount of capital required rises automatically if banks are doing more higher-risk lending.

Of course, the Bank says a significant fall in house prices is more likely now. But we’ve heard that sort of line from every Reserve Bank Governor at one time or another over 30 years now. As it happens – and for what little it is worth – I happen to think house prices may be more likely to fall than to rise further over the next 12-18 months (even put a number consistent with that in the Roy Morgan survey when their pollster rang a few days ago), but I don’t back my hunch by using arbitrary regulatory restrictions that – on their own telling – will force many first home buyers back out of the market.

And it might all be more compelling if the Bank showed any sign of understanding the housing market. Thus, we are told (more or less correctly) that immigration is currently low (really negative) and lots of houses are being built. But, amazingly after all these years, there appears to be no substantive discussion of the land-use regulations and the land market more generally. Perhaps there will be something of a temporary “glut” in dwelling numbers – at current prices – but unless far-reaching changes are made to land-use rules that won’t change the basic regulatory underpinning for land prices. We know the government’s RMA reforms aren’t likely to help – may even worsen the situation – including because if these were credible reforms, the effect would be showing through in land prices now. And we know from the PM and Minister of Finance – and possibly the National Party too – that they don’t even want to do reforms that would materially lower house/land prices.

It all just has the feel of more action for action’s sake. Perhaps the government isn’t too keen on first-home buyers being squeezed out, but at least when they are criticised for not fixing the dysfunctional over-regulated housing/land market they can wave their hands and talk about all the things they and their agencies do, however ineffectual. As even the Bank notes, LVR restrictions don’t make much difference to prices for long. And if there is a compelling financial stability case, it isn’t made in this document – which, again, offers nothing remotely resembling a cost-benefit analysis for respondents to address. This despite bold – totally unsubstantiated – claims in the paper that their new controls would be beneficial for “medium-term economic performance”.

Then again, why would they bother with serious analysis when the whole thing is a faux-consultation anyway.

At which point in this post, I’m going to turn on a dime and come to the defence of both the Bank and the government. A couple of weeks ago the Listener magazine ran an impassioned piece by Arthur Grimes arguing that the amendment to the Reserve Bank Act in 2018 was a – perhaps even “the” – main factor in what had gone crazily wrong with house prices in the last few years. Conveniently, the article is now available on the Herald website where it sits under the heading “Government has caused housing crisis to become a catastrophe”.

Grimes was closely involved in the design of the 1989 Reserve Bank Act, and for a couple of years in the early 1990s was the Bank’s chief economist (and my boss). He left the Bank for some mix of private sector, research, and academic employment, but also spent some years on the Reserve Bank’s board – the largely toothless monitoring body that spent decades mostly providing cover for whoever was Governor. These days he is a professor of “wellbeing and public policy” at Victoria University.

However, whatever his credentials, his argument simply does not stack up, and given some of the valuable work he has done in the past, on land prices, it is remarkable that he is even making it.

There is quite a bit in the first half of the article that I totally agree with. High house prices are a public policy disaster and one which hurts most severely those at the bottom of the economic ladder, the young, the poor, the outsiders (including, disproportionately, Maori and Pacific populations). But then we get a story that house prices have been the outcome of the interaction between high net migration and housebuilding. As Arthur notes, immigration has hardly been a factor in the last 18 months (actually it has been negative, even if the SNZ 12/16 model has not yet caught up) and there has been quite a lot of housebuilding going on.

And yet in the entire article there is nothing – not a word – about the continuing pervasive land use restrictions (and only passing mention about the past). If new land on the fringes of our cities – often with very limited value in alternative uses – cannot easily be brought into development (if owners of such land are not competing with each other to be able to do so) there is no reason to suppose that even a temporary surge in building activity will make much difference to a sustainable price for house+land. Instead, any boost to demand will still just flow into higher prices.

Remarkably, in discussing the events of the last year there is also no mention of fiscal policy – the boost to demand that stems from a shift from a balanced budget just prior to Covid to one that, on Treasury’s own numbers, is a very large structural deficit this year.

Instead, on the Grimes telling the problem is a reversion to “Muldoonism” – not, note, the fiscal deficits, but the amendment to the statutory goal for the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy enacted almost three years ago now. Recall the new wording

The Bank, acting through the MPC, has the function of formulating a monetary policy directed to the economic objectives of—

(a) achieving and maintaining stability in the general level of prices over the medium term; and

(b) supporting maximum sustainable employment.

The main change being the addition of b).

Grimes has been staunchly opposed to that amendment from the start, but his assertion that it makes much difference to anything has never really stood up to close scrutiny. It has long had more of a sense about it of being aggrieved that a formulation he had been closely associated with had been changed.

He has never (at least that I’ve seen) engaged with (a) the Governor’s claim (which rings true to me) that the changed mandate had made no difference to how the Bank had set monetary policy during the Covid period, (b) the more generalised proposition (that the Governor is drawing on) that in the face of demand shocks a pure price stability mandate (and the RB’s was never pure) and an employment objective (or constraint) prompt exactly the same sort of policy response, or (c) the extent to which the New Zealand statutory goals remains (i) cleaner than those of many other advanced countries and yet (ii) substantially similar (as the respective central banks describe what they are doing) to the models in, notably, the United States and Australia. Similarly, he never engages with the straight inflation forecasts the Bank was publishing this time last year: if they believed those numbers, the purest of simple inflation targeting central banks would have been doing just what the RB did (and arguably more, given that the forecasts remained at/below the bottom of the target range for a protracted period).

Grimes seems to be running a line that the LSAP was the problem

The central culprit has been monetary policy that has flooded the economy with liquidity. This liquidity in turn has found its way into the housing market.

But there is just no credible story or data that backs up those claims. Banks simply weren’t (and aren’t) constrained by “liquidity”. The LSAP was financially risky performative display, but it made no material difference to any macro outcomes that matter, including house prices.

There is quite a lot of this sort of stuff.

Grimes ends on a better note, lamenting the refusal of governments – past and present – to contemplate substantially lower house prices, let alone take the steps that would bring them about (his final line “And no politician seems to care enough to do anything about it” is one I totally endorse). But in trying to argue a case that a change to the Reserve Bank Act – that had no impact on anything discernible as it went through Parliament or in its first year on the books – somehow explains our house price outcomes (especially in a world where many similar price rises are occurring, and where there was no change in central bank legislation), seems unsupported, and ends up largely serving the interests of the government, by distracting attention from the thing – land use deregulation – that really would make a marked difference and which the government absolutely refuses to do anything much about.

Rising house prices do not make New Zealanders better off

Michael Reddell Housing, Monetary policy, Uncategorized

I didn’t really read the housing section of last week’s Reserve Bank MPS – housing isn’t their responsibility and their analysis of it has rarely been up to much, often lurching unpredictably from one story to another. And their new material on house prices in each MPS only stems from the Remit change Grant Robertson foisted on them early in the year, knowing it would make no substantive difference to anything, but designed to look as though the government cared.

So it was only when the Herald’s Thomas Coughlan tweeted this chart yesterday that I noticed it.

RB house prices

The chart is prefaced with this text

The MPC sets monetary policy to achieve its inflation and employment objectives in the Remit. It considers the outlook for the housing market because house prices can influence broader economic activity, employment, and consumer price inflation (figure A5).

So we are presumably supposed to take this as the best professional view of the seven members of the Monetary Policy Committee. After all, it isn’t a throwaway line from a single member in an ill-considered press conference or interview comment. There is a bunch of different channels identified (and no obvious space constraints – they could easily have added more if they thought others were important), and nothing of substance gets into a Monetary Policy Statement without a fair degree of senior management scrutiny and review.

There are so many problems with this graphic it is difficult to know where to start. But perhaps first with the clear impression a casual reader would take away from this that the seven Robertson-appointed members of the MPC think that higher house prices are “a good thing”. After all, for most of the last decade inflation undershot the Bank’s target (unemployment lingered disconcertingly high for a disconcerting period of time too). More would have been better on both counts. Perhaps a charitable reader might wonder if the MPC really only had some short-term effects in view, but there is nothing in the substance of the chart or its title to suggest that.

And then there is the problem of the left-hand box: they start from “house prices” and “housing market activity” but these things never occur in a vacuum (as, for example, they would no doubt – and rightly – point out if they were talking about any other price (say, the exchange rate). Most often, surges in house prices (at least in New Zealand) have been associated in time with surges in economic activity driven by a range of different (policy and non-policy) factors.

But perhaps the biggest problem is with the claim – almost explicit in the top box of the second column – that higher house prices leave New Zealanders as a whole (remember, this is a whole-economy macroeconomic agency) better off. They don’t.

That they don’t, in principle, is easy enough to see. Everyone in the country needs a roof over his or her head. If I need a roof over my head for the rest of my life, ownership of one house meets my housing consumption needs. What matters is the shelter services the house priovides not the notional value the house might be sold at. Whether my house is valued today as $0.5m (roughly what I paid for it years ago), $1.75m (roughly what an e-valuer site tells me it is worth today) or $3.5m makes not the slightest difference to me. I still want to consume the bundle of services (location, size, sun etc) that this particular house provides.

Now, I might feel differently if I had a large mortgage: after all, negative equity gives the bank the right to foreclose (which can be both expensive and inconvenient), and even if the bank didn’t foreclose (mostly they don’t) it might also make it impossible for me to buy a similar house elsewhere if job opportunities suggested a move.

But this is where one needs to step back and think about the population as a whole. To a first approximation, for every apparent winner from higher (national) house prices there is a loser and for most – perhaps especially middle-aged owner occupiers – it makes no difference at all. There is no more economywide purchasing power created. And real gains that accrue to some people are offset by real losses to others. Owners of rental properties really are better off when real house prices go up. After all, they don’t own houses to live in them, but mostly for the profit they expect to make and the future consumption opportunities for themselves and their families. They can realise their gains and move on, or simply borrow against them.

But on the other hand, there are a lot of people made materially worse off by higher house prices – the people who don’t own a house now who either want to buy one in future or who are, and expect to, keep on renting. Consider someone just graduating from university who, a few decades ago, might have expected to buy a house after a couple of years working. But with real house prices in New Zealand as they are now not only does the deposit requirement push back any feasible purchase date, but the total amount of the lifetime income of the young graduate will have to devote to house purchase costs is so much greater. (Of course, real interest rates are lower than they were decades ago but recall that in the Bank’s scenario we are just thinking about house prices.) Earnings that are (eventually) used for the acquisition of a house can’t be used for other things. Earnings saved now to accumulate a deposit are not spent.

The story isn’t so different for long-term renters since in the medium-term (the adjustment isn’t instantaneous) if house prices are higher one can expect rents to be higher (than otherwise). In latter day New Zealand that has taken the form of rents holding up, or rising a bit, even as real interest rates have fallen a lot, which would otherwise have been expected to lower rents. Earnings spent (and expected to be spent) on rents can’t be spent on other things.

What (mostly) happens when house prices rise is that purchasing power is redistributed – usually towards those who have (houses) and away from those who have not (houses). Of course, it is further muddled by things like the Accommodation Supplement which shifts some of the losses onto the Crown……but that only means that taxes will be higher than otherwise in future. There is no net new purchasing power for society as a whole. (Were one inclined to an inequality story one might note that wealthier people tend to have lower marginal propensities to consume than poorer people.)

Are there possible caveats to this in-principle story? The story I used to tell was that, in principle, we might be better off from higher house prices if we all sold our houses to foreigners (at over the odds prices) and rented for the rest of our lives. But it was a story to illustrate the absurdity (and marginal relevance) of the point, and that was before the current government made such foreign house-buying illegal.

I’ve told you an in-principle story. The Bank likes to claim that the data don’t back this sort of story, And it is certainly true that there will often be a correlation between increases in house prices and increases in consumer spending. But that is mostly because – as I noted earlier – in the real world something triggers house price increases, and that something is often strong lift in economic activity and employment (in turn with triggers behind those developments). When the economy is running hot – and especially when land supply is restricted – buoyant demand, buoyant employment, rising wage inflation, increased turnover of the housing stock, and surges in house inflation are often happening at the same time. And in recessions vice versa. It isn’t easy to unpick chains of causation in the data.

Since higher house prices do not add to the lifetime purchasing power of New Zealanders as a whole, the Bank’s wealth effect story has to rest largely on some sort of view that households are systematically fooled by the house price changes. It is possible I suppose, at least the first time prices surge, but it doesn’t seem very likely. It isn’t as if surges in house prices – nominal and/or real have been uncommon in modern New Zealand.

The Bank also sometimes likes to highlight a story (it is there in that graphic) that even if the population doesn’t feel any wealthier, rising house prices might also boost consumption – at least bring it forward, without boosting lifetime consumption – by easing collateral constraints. In principle, a bank would lend even more to me secured on the value of my house than they might have done a couple of years ago. But again my ability to borrow a bit more has to be set against the reduced ability to borrow of the young graduate who now has to save even more in a deposit to get on the (residential mortgage) borrowing ladder at all. Sadly, in today’s bizarrely distorted housing market, we often find parents with freehold or lightly-indebted houses gifting or lending money to children, net effect on consumption probably roughly zero. With real house prices surging to fresh highs each cycle for decades now, it doesn’t seem that likely that many people are very collateral constrained.

For years I’ve been running a commonsense test over the Bank’s claims. This chart is of New Zealand real house prices

house prices aug 21

This series ends in December last year, so as of now we can probably think of real New Zealand house prices being four times what they were in December 1990 (I chose the starting point because that quarter was just prior to the 1991 recession getting underway, but you can see that real house prices hadn’t moved much for several years).

These are huge increases in real house prices, some of the very largest (for a whole country) seen anywhere over a comparable period (notably a period in which productivity growth was underwhelming). Were there to be much to the Reserve Bank’s wealth effects story (or its collateral constraints story) at the whole economy level mightn’t one have expected to see consumption as a share of national income rising, savings as a share of national income falling?

Of course there is all sorts of other stuff going on, but this is a really big – unprecedented in New Zealand – change in real (and nominal) house prices. But here is consumption as a share of national disposable income, back to the late 80s, just before house prices began to surge. The data are for March years.

consumption and NDI

The orange line is private sector (households and non-profits) consumption, while the blue line adds in public (government) consumption spending.

Of course, there are cycles in the series. There are two peaks, during the two big recessions (1991/92 and 2008/09): consumption tends (quite rationally) to be smoother than income. There is quite a dip in the early-mid 2000s, which can readily be shown to line up with the really big surpluses the government was running at the time – the country was earning a lot of income, but the Crown was temporarily sitting on a disproportionate share of that income.

And what of the house price booms. There were three during the period in the data (so not including the last year) – the few years running up to 1996, the period from 2003 to 2007 (particularly the early part of that period), and the period from about 2013 to about 2016. There is nothing in the consumption/savings data over those periods that would surprise someone who didn’t know about the house price surges.

And across the period as a whole, at best consumption has been flat as a share of income over 30 years of unprecedented house price increases. Looked at in the right light perhaps it has even been trending down a bit (private consumption as a share of income was as low in the March 2020 year as it was 16-17 years early when not only was the Crown running huge surpluses but real house prices were much lower.

I’m not suggesting any of this is definitive but when there is (a) no reason to think that New Zealanders as a whole are any wealthier when real house prices rise, and (b) no sign over decades in the macroeconomic data of the sort of effect the Bank likes to talk up, it might be safer to conclude that the effect just isn’t there to any meaningful macroeconomically significant effect.

Of course, as noted earlier there are all sorts of short-term correlations, typically resulting from common third factors at work, but the story the Bank seemed to be trying to tell in that graphic was neither representative of the economy as a whole, nor helpful.

The line I’ve run in this post is not new. In fact, 10 years ago now the Reserve Bank itself published an article in its then Bulletin discussing many of the same issues, and suggesting very similar sorts of conclusions (with, of course, 10 years less data). I was one of the authors of the article but – as was the norm – Bulletin articles carried the imprimatur of the Bank, and were not just disclaimed as the views of the authors.

Banks, housing lending, and fixing housing

Michael Reddell Banking, Housing

In my post yesterday about the Reserve Bank’s FSR and the subsequent press conference conducted by the Deputy Governor I included this

The sprawling burble continued with questions about whether banks should lend more to things other than housing – one veteran journalist apparently being exercised that a large private bank had freely made choices that meant 69 per cent of its loan were for houses. Instead of simply pushing back and noting that how banks ran their businesses and which borrowers they lend to, for what purposes, was really a matter for them and their shareholders – subject, of course, to overall Reserve Bank capital requirements – we got handwringing about New Zealand savings choices etc etc, none of which – even if there were any analytical foundation to it – has anything to do with the Bank. 

Someone got in touch about the 69 per cent line and suggested that it must be a sign of something being wrong, going on to suggest that the Reserve Bank’s capital framework and associated risk weights was skewing lending away from agricultural and (in particular) business lending.

My summary response was as follows:

I guess where I would come close to your stance is to say that if we had a properly functioning land market producing price/income ratios across the country in the 3-4 range (as seen in much of the US, incl big fast-growing cities) then the share of ANZ’s loan book accounted for by housing lending would be much less than 69%, and in fact the total size of their balance sheet would be much smaller.  But my take on that is that the high share of housing loans is largely a reflection of central and local govt choices that drive land prices artificially high, and then we need financial intermediaries for (in effect) the old to lend to the young to enable houses to be bought.  The fault isn’t the ANZ’s and given the capital requirements in NZ there is little sign that the overall balance sheet is especially risky, and therefore should not be of particular interest to the RB (except perhaps in a diagnostic sense, understanding why balance sheets are as they are).  I’m (much) less persuaded that there is a problem with the (relative) risk weights, given that every comparative exercise suggests that our housing weights are among the very highest anywhere (and, in effect, rising further in October).

But to elaborate a bit (and shift the focus from one particular bank) across the depository corporations as a whole (banks and non-banks) loans for housing are about 62 per cent of total Private Sector Credit (and total loans to households are about 64 per cent). A large chunk of the balance sheets of our financial intermediaries are accounted made up of loans for housing.

The gist of my response was that that shouldn’t surprise us at all, given the insanity of the land use restrictions that central and local government impose on us, rendering artificially scarce – and expensive – something of which there is an abundance in New Zealand: land. If, from the perspective of the economy as a whole, relatively young people are buying houses from relatively old people (or from developers) the higher house/land prices are the more housing credit there needs to be on one side of banks’ collective balance sheets and – simultaneously – the more deposits on the other. If median house prices averaged (say) $300000 – as they do in much of the (richer) US – there would be a great deal less housing credit in total.

One other way to look at the stock of housing credit is to compare it to GDP – in effect, all the economic value-added in the entire country. Since the GDP series is quarterly and the credit data are monthly, I haven’t shown a full time series chart here. The data start from December 1990, and then only for an aggregate of housing+personal loans (but personal loans are small in New Zealand). So I’ve shown lending to households in Dec 1990, in mid-97 (roughly the peak of the business cycle), Dec 2007 and Dec 2019 (two more business cycle peaks), and March 21 (for which we have credit data, but only an estimate for GDP).

lending to households

There was a huge increase in the stock of lending, as a share of (annualised) GDP over the first 17 years of the series. What I’ve long found interesting is how little change there was over the following full business cycle (there were ups and downs in between the dates shown), and then we’ve had a bit of a step up in the last year or so (and even if house prices stay at this level, future turnover will tend to further increase housing debt expressed as a share of GDP).

Since real house prices have more than tripled since 1990 it is hardly surprising the stock of housing debt (share of GDP) has increased hugely. Were real house prices to, for example, halve then we might over time expect to see the stock of housing debt drift gradually back – it could take decades – towards say the 1997 sort of number.

Implicit in the journalist’s comment was a suggestion that lending to housing somehow limits how much lending banks do for other things. That generally will not be so. Banks (as a whole) are generally not funding-constrained – not only do loans create deposits (at a system level) but international funding markets are available (and used to be very heavily used, when NZ had large current account deficits). Of course, there is only so much capital devoted to New Zealand banking at any one time, but in normal circumstances capital flows towards opportunities.

But what has the empirical record been? The Reserve Bank publishes data for business lending from banks/NBDTs (which isn’t all business borrowing by any means – between funding from parents and the corporate bond market) and for agricultural lending.

Here is how the full picture looks

sec lending

For what it is worth, intermediated lending to business in March was exactly the same as a share of GDP as it was in December 1990. For younger readers, December 1990 was just a couple of years into banks working through the massive corporate debt overhang that had built up in the few years immediately following liberalisation. Farm credit, of course, has increased very substantially – again particularly over the years leading up to 2007/08 with the wave of dairy conversions and higher land prices.

On the business side of things, it is worth bearing in mind that business lending (share of GDP) was consistently weak throughout the last business cycle. Some will argue that banks had some sort of structural bias against business but even if so (a) over that decade or so there was no growth in the stock of housing lending as a share of GDP, and (b) there is little compelling evidence that systematic and large unexploited profit opportunities were going begging over that decade. It seems more likely that the markets – including banks – financed the profitable opportunities that were around, but there just weren’t many of them.

So my story remains one that if central and local government were to free up land markets and house price to income ratios dropped back to, say, 3-4 then over time the stock of housing debt (share of GDP) would shrink, a lot. There are some stories on which much cheaper house prices generate fresh waves of business entrepreneurship etc with workers able to flock to those opportunities, but I don’t find those stories convincing in New Zealand (in the aggregate). But simply repressing the financial system some more – the agenda the Reserve Bank and the government have been pursuing for several years now – will not change those business opportunities one iota.

(This post hasn’t tried to deal with the riskiness of the housing loans. My take on that is really the same as the Reserve Bank’s – at least when it isn’t champing at the bit to intervene. Capital requirements (and actual ratios) are high – materially higher than they were – and they are calculated in a fairly conservative way, with risk weights on housing that are fairly high, including by international standards. For what it is worth, the ratings issued by the agencies seemed aligned with that interpretation. )

That we have such a large share of total credit for housing isn’t, prima facie, a banking system problem – banks will follow the opportunities that (in this case) bureaucratic distortions create, and our central bank has demanding capital standards and in APRA one of the better banking regulators around – but rather just another indicator of how warped our housing market has been allowed – by governments – to become. But we knew that already. In fact, governments knew it to, but they prefer to try to paper over cracks, hide behind ever more pervasive RB controls, rather than tackle the core issue.

On which note, a couple of months ago the Wellington magazine Capital asked if I would contribute an article on what might be done to fix the housing market, with a Wellington focus. I wasn’t really familiar with the magazine – having previously seen it only in hairdressers, takeaway outlets and the like, for readers to glance through while they wait – but I said yes, and looking through the edition I picked up this week it looks like a mix of fairly geeky material (eg a whole article on lead-rubber bearings) and the lifestyle stuff.

Since I didn’t give them my copyright, many readers are out of Wellington. and the issue with my article seems to have been on sale for a while now here is the piece I contributed.

Free up the land: unravelling the unnatural housing disaster

Michael Reddell[1]

April 2020

New Zealand house prices, even adjusted for inflation, have more than tripled over the last 30 years.  The persistent trend was unmistakeable even before the latest surges.   Million-dollar houses were once the rare exception in Wellington, but now are almost the norm in too many suburbs.  The Wellington region median house price is now perhaps 10 times median income, putting home ownership increasingly beyond the reach of an ever-larger share of those in their 20s and 30s.

Most of the talk is loosely about “house” prices but what has really skyrocketed is the price of land in and around our urban areas; whether land under existing dwellings, or potentially developable land.  And this in a country with so much land that all our urban areas cover only about 1 per cent of New Zealand.

It is scandalous, perhaps especially because it is an entirely human-made disaster.   Land isn’t scarce, and hasn’t become naturally much more scarce, even as the population has grown.  Instead, central and local governments together have put tight restrictions on land use.  They release land for housing only slowly and make it artificially scarce, not just in and around our bigger cities but often around quite small towns.   And if there is sometimes a tendency to suggest it is “just what happens”, citing absurdly expensive (but much bigger) cities such as Melbourne, San Francisco or Vancouver, nothing about what has gone on is inevitable or “natural”.   

The best way to see this is to look at the experience in the United States, where there are huge regions of the country – often including big and growing cities – where price to income ratios are consistently under 4.    Little Rock, for example, is the state capital of Arkansas. It has a growing metropolitan population of just under 900,000, and a median house price of about NZ$300,000 –  little changed, after allowing for inflation, over 40 years.    The US also helps illustrate why it is wrong to (as many do) blame low interest rates:  not only are interest rates the same in both San Francisco and Little Rock, but US longer-term real interest rates are typically a bit lower than those in New Zealand.  The same goes for tax arguments: they have much the same tax code in both the high-priced growing US cities as in (much) more affordable ones.  High real house prices are a policy choice;  not necessarily the desired outcome of central and local government politicians, but the inevitable outcome of the land use restrictions they choose to maintain.

Both central and local government politicians sometimes talk a good game about making housing more affordable, but neither group seems to have grasped that in almost any market aggressive competition among suppliers is what keeps prices low.   People sometimes suggest there isn’t enough competition among, for example, supermarkets or building products suppliers, but if we really want widely-affordable housing again in New Zealand what we need is landowners aggressively competing with each other to get their land brought into development.  And that has to mean an end to local councils deciding where they think development should happen, whether within the existing footprint of a city or on its periphery.    We need a presumptive right for owners to build, perhaps to two or three storeys, on any land (and, of course, councils need to continue to be able to charge for connecting to, for example, water and sewerage networks).   It could be done now.  That it isn’t tells us that councils are the problem not the solution.  Too many –  including in Wellington –  seems to think it is their role to use policy so that in future lots of people are living in townhouses and apartments, even as experience suggests that what most (but not all) New Zealanders want, for most of their lives, is a place with a backyard and garden.  And they seem to fail to understand that simply allowing a bit more urban density, perhaps in response to a build-up of population pressure, hasn’t been a path anywhere else to lowering house prices. Instead, such selective rezoning simply tends to underpin the price of those particular pieces of land. 

Sometimes people suggest that even if this sort of approach would be viable in Hamilton or Palmerston North, it isn’t in rugged Wellington.    But as anyone who has ever flown into or out of Wellington knows there is a huge amount of undeveloped land in greater Wellington.    And if the next best alternative use should be what determines the value of land that could be used for housing, much of the land around greater Wellington simply does not have a very high value in alternative uses (not much of it is prime dairying or horticulture land).  Unimproved land around greater Wellington should really be quite cheap, although the rugged terrain would still add cost to  developing it to the point of being ready to build.

Some worry about, for example, the possibility of increased emissions.  But once we have a well-functioning ETS the physical footprint of cities doesn’t change total emissions, just the carbon price consistent with the emissions cap.  And for those who worry about traffic congestion, congestion charging is a proven tool abroad, which should be adopted in Wellington (and Auckland).

I’m not championing any one style of living.  The mix between densely-packed townhouses and apartments on the one hand, and more traditional suburban homes on the other, shouldn’t be determined by the biases and preferences of politicians and officials but by the preferences of individuals and families, exposed to the true economic costs of those preferences.  Similarly, policymakers should respect the (changing) preferences of groups of existing landowners what development can, or cannot, occur on their land.

The behaviour of councils over many years reveals them as, in practice, the enemies of the sort of widely-affordable housing which the market would readily provide (as it does in much of the US).  If councils won’t free up the land, to facilitate the aggressive competition among land providers that would keep prices low, central government needs to act to take away the blocking power of local councillors.

And this need not be the work of decades.  Of course, it takes time to build more houses, but the biggest single element of the housing policy failure is land prices. Once the land use rules look as though will be freed up a lot, expectations about future land prices will adjust pretty quickly, and prices will start falling.   We could be the boutique capital city with widely-affordable housing.  The only real obstacles are those who hold office in central and (especially) local government.

[1] Michael Reddell was formerly a senior official at the Reserve Bank, and also worked at The Treasury and as New Zealand’s representative on the board of the International Monetary Fund. These days, in additional to being a semi-retired homemaker, he writes about economic policy and related issues at http://www.croakingcassandra.com

Grant Robertson on housing

Michael Reddell Housing

The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance hit the weekend current affairs shows to make the case for the government’s housing/tax package.

I watched both the Newshub Nation interview – the one in which the Minister of Finance refused to rule out bringing in rent controls (a move which would, among other things, simply accelerate a trend towards the government itself being the main provider of rental housing) – and the one on Q&A. Perhaps because the latter is fresh in my mind – I only watched it this morning – but also because it was a better interview, I want to focus here only on the Q&A interview. For those who haven’t seen it, the whole thing seems to be available here. Incidentally, it was interesting that the government chose not to send out its Minister of Housing for these interviews.

What I found most striking was how this very senior minister, now with 3.5 years in office under his belt, floundered when asked about the effects of the government’s measures. It wasn’t, apparently, for him to say what the effect on house prices would be. Not only that but officials had apparently offered quite a range of views, (if so suggesting they didn’t really know either). He didn’t know what the effect would be on private rents either. This was, we were told, “highly contested territory”. Really all he was willing to say was that any effect on house prices would be to moderate the recent pace of increase, which he kept calling “unsustainable” – without apparently recognising that things that are unsustainable typically come to an end anyway. So if annual house price inflation slows to only 10 per cent per annum this year – under the influence of all sorts of possible influences – will the Minister of Finance be claiming this as a win for last week’s package? I don’t any serious analysts, let alone potential first-home buyers, will be. The Minister meanwhile claimed only to want to see an end to the “big big jumps in house prices”.

If you were a serious government, mightn’t you have adopted a package that you – and ideally your officials too – were confident would lower both house prices (actually the bundle of the house and the land under it) and private rents? After all, New Zealand real house prices have more the tripled in the last 30 years, and yet houses are little more than a combination of land (abundant in New Zealand), labour, and a bunch of tradables materials (timber, taps, pipes, gib board etc). General tradables inflation has been – as the Reserve Bank often points out – quite a bit lower than general CPI inflation for a long time. There aren’t any natural obstacles to (much) lower house prices. Just policy ones.

Or what about rents? Real rents fortunately have not tripled. The current SNZ rents index has data since 2006

Total percentage increases
Rents-stockCPI
2006 to 201012.213.1
2010 to 201516.35.4
2015 to 202017.78.4
Full period (06 to 20)53.229.2

So that is about a 20 per cent rise in real rents over 14 years, which might not sound so bad, except that over that period one of the key drivers of equilibrium rental yields – long-term interest rates (which are not only a financing cost but, more importantly, a return on a key alternative asset – have plummeted. Real 10 year government bonds yields were about 3.3 per cent at the end of 2006, 2.2 per cent at the end of 2015, and about -0.3 per cent at the end of last year. Rental yields have plummeted – and as the data show tenants have benefited from that – but real rents have not, because successive governments have adopted policies that drove real prices sharply up.

And don’t go blaming interest rates for the house prices, as the Minister tries to do (waving his hands and suggesting here are lots of things outside his control). Did you know that, even now, real interest rates in most of the advanced world are even lower than those here (in the US, for example, the real 10 year government bond yields is about -0.7 per cent)?

And, talking of the US, this is real house price inflation in (a) New Zealand as a whole (cities and towns and villages) and (b) the 20 or so metropolitan regions all with populations in excess of a million people that had house price to income ratios of less than 4 in the most recent Demographia report. You might not want to live in some or even most of these places, but plenty of people do (from memory, population growth in Columbus and Atlanta for example has exceeded that of New Zealand).

us and nz house prices

Of course, there are other US metropolitan areas where the picture has been less good, a few even where prices have been allowed to get as out of hand as they are in New Zealand. But in a sense that is the point. The entire US has the same interest rates – typically a bit lower than those in New Zealand. The entire US has much the same banking system, and even the same odd federal interventions in the housing finance market. The tax systems are much the same across the country. But the house price outcomes – even for similar population growth rates – differ hugely, consistent with a story about the importance of land use restrictions.

One might tell a similar story in Canada where the Demographia report has data for price to income ratios for six metropolitan regions each with a population of more than a million people. Same interest rates across the country, and fairly rapid population growth in both Toronto and Edmonton, yet Edmonton and Calgary have price/income ratios around 4 and Toronto and Vancouver 10 and 13 respectively (Ottawa and Montreal between 5 and 6).

So this should have been perhaps the cheapest time in history (rents relative to income) to be renting – here and abroad – and yet real rents have been rising, and the government cannot even manage a package that they, and their officials, are confident will lower rents. It really is hopeless.

In both weekend interviews the Minister did say that he would like to see the price/income ratios fall (suggesting that on a nationwide basis that ratio is now about 8. But even then, pushed by the interviewer, he wasn’t going to be pinned down or offer any hostages to accountability. He has “no number in mind”, said he “can’t tell what an affordable price is”, and butted away the interviewer’s suggestion that a ratio of 3 was not a uncommon benchmark in discussion of these issues, and wasn’t even willing to suggest that a ratio of 5 might be something to aspire to. He played distraction by suggesting that he would like to see incomes rise – which, of course, would lower the ratio – but has no policy to do anything about changing (improving) the future path of average/median income growth.

On Twitter on Saturday I did a quick exercise and pointed out that if house price inflation slowed to a long-term average of 1 per cent and incomes rose 2.5 per cent it would take almost 20 years for the price/income ratio to get to 6.

In the longer-term, incomes are likely to be driven by trends in nominal GDP per hour worked. That won’t be the only influence – people can work more (or fewer) hours, governments can run deficits in ways that put more in household pockets (or surpluses that take more out of household pockets), and relative returns to labour can change. But over a 20 year sort of horizon, nominal GDP per hour worked seems like a reasonable starting point: in New Zealand, the labour income share hasn’t changed much in 30 years, and while this government is doing a bit more redistribution governments come and governments go.

Nominal GDP per hour worked in turn reflects three broad factors:

  • general inflation (eg something like the CPI)
  • changes in the terms of trade
  • productivity growth (change in real GDP per hour worked)

The Reserve Bank has an inflation target of 2 per cent, which it hasn’t consistently met for a decade, but it is probably reasonable to think of something a bit above 2 per cent as towards the lower end of what average incomes might grow at over several decades. On other hand, productivity growth in New Zealand has been lousy for a long time, and nothing in what this government is doing – or what National is offering instead – looks set to improve that. And the best guess of a future real relative price like the terms of trade is today’s value. So I’ve done scenarios in which incomes rise anywhere between 2.25 per cent per annum and 3 per cent annum. Over 20 years, actual could still be better or worse than those numbers, but they seem like a plausible range. Over the last five or six years, actual growth averaged about 2.6-2.7 per cent (whether or not 2020 is included).

What about house price growth. Robertson and Ardern refuse to even talk about flat house prices, let alone falling ones, so I’ve used 1 per cent per annum as the lower end of the range of scenarios. And I ran the numbers for 2, 3, and 4 per cent. 4 per cent house price growth wouldn’t seem super low to most New Zealanders after the experience of recent decades, but there is no point running higher house price inflation scenarios because…….even at 4 per cent annual house price inflation price/income ratios keep rising forever.

If house price inflation slowed to 1 per cent per annum, year in year out and incomes rose by 2.6 per cent per annum, in 20 years time the nationwide price/income ratio would be 5.85.

If house price inflation averages 2 per cent per annum, and incomes rise 2.75 per cent, in 20 years time the price/income ratio is still 6.9 per cent.

If house price inflation and incomes grow at 2.5 per cent…..then of course, the price/income ratio never falls at all.

And it is no trouble at all to generate undemanding scenarios in which the price/income ratio just keeps lurching upwards – these things never happen steadily (every single year), but the long-term trend is what dominates.

And if by some chance you think a price/income of 6 doesn’t sound too bad. well (a) you’ve just too used to latter day New Zealand, and (b) check the table on page 15 of the Demographia report for the metropolitan areas (most of them) with ratios lower than 6, in lots of cases much much lower. New York – never really thought of as a cheap place to live – shows at 5.9, Montreal at 5.6, Manchester (UK) at 4.8, Nashville at 4.2, Edmonton at 3.8, and on downwards.

But the government has simply done nothing about freeing up the land, facilitating again aggressive competition among potential vendors on the periphery and in the intensifying centre and suburbs, which is the sure and reliable way of getting house prices (land prices) and rents down. And doing so quite quickly, because although it takes time to build, it takes very little time for expectations to change, and markets trade on expectations.

I could go one, but I won’t except to highlight the Minister of Finance’s desperate attempt to defend the spin – the lies really – that claimed that interest deductibility for rental property owners was a “loophole”. The interviewer challenged Robertson on whether the government would be removing deductibility for all businesses, and Robertson denied that was on the cards while doubling down on his loophole spin, claiming that property was a loophole because owner-occupiers couldn’t deduct their interest cost. Not even bothering to get into the point that the owner-occupier has no assessable income from the house (and under the government’s ringfencing change a couple of years ago could get no benefit from deductibility anyway), the interviewer asked the Minister about the purchase of a computer. The financing costs of such equipment (or a car) are deductible for businesses, but not for households. Was this a distortion the Minister was asked. He was floundering by this point simply reduced to asserting again that there was a “loophole” when it came to property. Only in the fevered imaginations of ministers and their spin doctors (and even they no doubt know better, they just take the public for fools).

It really was a poor performance by one of the government’s most senior ministers. And in that sense told you really all one needed to know about last week’s package: utterly unserious when it came to addressing the core issues (land use, and probably some construction cost issues thrown in) but simply a heavy dose of the politics of distraction, all while further messing up the tax system and the housing market itself.

(And lest anyone suggest this is partisan commentary, the unnatural disaster of the New Zealand housing market has been the responsibility of successive governments led by each of the main parties. But when you hold office you hold responsibility. Ardern and Robertson have held office for 3.5 years and now have a parliamentary majority that – for good or ill, per the New Zealand system and its limited checks and balances – would allow them to do almost anything they wanted. But they refuse to do anything that would, with confidence, lower house prices and rents, or to even suggest that lower house prices would be a desirable outcome. There are words for that sort of political betrayal. Mostly not terribly polite ones.

Housing, house prices, and the like

Michael Reddell Adrian Orr, Housing, IMF

We’ve had a couple of widely-reported contributions to discussions on housing policy in the last few days.

The first was the Concluding Statement from the staff mission responsible for conducting the latest International Monetary Fund Article IV consultation with New Zealand (usually a physical mission here from Washington, but presumably done remotely this time). These statements are not formally the official view of the IMF management, let alone the Board, but you don’t get to be a mission leader without demonstrating your soundness and ability to run a line that won’t upset the Board and management. That doesn’t mean the messages are typically consistent either across time or across countries, but it does mean the final report (and the Board review of it) won’t be materially different. Of course, it helps that New Zealand isn’t a very important country (to the IMF – we don’t borrow from them, we pose no threat to global or regional stability etc) – and that the New Zealand authorities don’t these days typically pay much heed to the IMF (in some countries, including a bigger one west of us, authorities have been very very concerned that never is heard a discouraging word from the Fund).

I used to have quite a bit to do with the Article IV processes, both from an RB/Treasury perspective, and in the couple of years I spent representing New Zealand on the Fund’s Board. Specifically, I used to be regularly involved in the final meeting between the Fund mission and Treasury/RB senior macro people on the drafts of the Concluding Statements. I guess it must have been different at times, in countries, when the Fund thought the authorities were going rogue, running reckless or dangerous policies, but if New Zealand has at times offered puzzles for the Fund, it has also been run with pretty cautious macro and financial policy approaches (low public debt, focus on balanced budgets, low inflation, stable banks, high capital requirements and so on). So whatever the Fund has to say tends to be pretty marginal or incidental anyway, and in many topics they touch on the mission team don’t actually have much specific expertise (they are mainly macro people, often very able to that narrow space). So the Fund team tended to be quite accommodating of Treasury/Reserve Bank preferences around what was said in any Concluding Statement, with a focus on “what would be helpful” to the authorities at that time. And this, of course, is only the end of days and days of meetings – often some wining and dining too (although I guess not this year) – in which staff are fully appraised of “sensitivities” and what officials (and the Minister) would prefer the Fund did or didn’t say. No doubt there are limits, but most often the remarks are about issues at the margin – either shades of policy in core areas, or matters on which the mission team doesn’t have much expertise, authority or mandate. Not often then will the Concluding Statement be troublesome for the authorities. (In fact, this is one of the downsides of the move to near-full transparency around the IMF Article IV processes in recent decades.) Favoured mantras will often, quite conveniently, be repeated back to the authorities, as little more than mantras: an example this time is “inclusive green growth”, whatever that means.

In this post I wanted to focus on housing, a rather central issue in current policy and political debate in New Zealand, arguably even a source of potential financial sector instability. What did the Fund have to say on the subject? There were several references, the first from the summary bullet points

  • The rapid rise in house prices raises concerns around affordability and financial vulnerabilities. A comprehensive policy response is needed, including measures to unlock supply, dampen speculative demand, and buttress financial stability.

Surging house prices have supported household balance sheets but amplify affordability concerns for first home buyers and financial stability risks.

“Affordability” has certainly been stretched (to say the least), but it isn’t clear there is any greater threat to financial stability at this point. After all, as the report notes, household balance sheets as a whole have improved – not worsened – and if some marginal borrowers have taken on new debt at very high valuations (a) they are the marginal players, and (b) both banks and the Reserve Bank have imposed new and demanding LVR standards. Private lending standards have tightened – over the whole of the last year – not loosened. But it will have suited the authorities to have these references included.

Then we start to get to policy. The first reference reads as follows

Surging house prices should be addressed primarily through fiscal, regulatory, and macroprudential measures, though monetary policy may have a role if house prices pose risks to the inflation objective.

FIscal (tax?) measures as the main way to “address” house prices? On what planet does the Fund think this would be anything more than papering over cracks, and distracting from the core issue? But it will have suited the authorities to have it. And when they say “macroprudential measures” what they really mean is just new waves of controls. After all, the rest of the report suggests no particular reason for concern about the soundness of the financial system. It might have been nice to have seen “deregulatory” instead of “regulatory”, but I guess we can let that pass.

And what about monetary policy? Remarkably, there is no mention at all in this Concluding Statement of the government’s recent change to the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy Remit – the one that seemed designed to create the impression monetary policy was going to do something, even as the Reserve Bank itself said it wasn’t (an impression that at some international audiences have also erroneously taken). And that final half sentence? Well, it just looked like pandering as the Statement had already indicated the team’s macro view that monetary policy is likely to need to “remain accommodative for an extended period”.

They then get a little more substantive

Tackling supply-demand imbalances in the housing sector requires a comprehensive approach.

· Achieving long-term housing affordability depends critically on freeing up land supply, improving planning and zoning, and fostering infrastructure investments to enable fast-track housing developments. Steps taken to support local councils’ infrastructure funding and financing would facilitate a timely supply of land and infrastructure provision. The reform of the Resource Management Act is expected to reduce current complexities in land use that restrict infrastructure and housing development and contribute to efficiency in strategic planning. Increasing the stock of social housing also remains important, and the Residential Development Response Fund’s plans to deliver 18,000 public houses and transitional housing space, undertake rental housing reforms, and provide assistance to low-income households are welcome.

I guess the government will be quite happy with that. Suggest it is all big and complex and will take years to come to much. Oh, and that final sentence which would appear to be pure politics – you might agree, or not, with building more state houses or handing out more money to low-income people, but it bears no relationship at all to the Fund’s macro mandate, let alone to fixing the housing/land market that regulation has rendered dysfunctional. Smart active (but big) governments are clearly the thing.

But the broad thrust of that paragraph isn’t really that objectionable. Where it gets really problematic is the next paragraph.

· Mitigating near-term housing demand, particularly from investors, would help moderate price pressures. Introduction of stamp duties or an expansion of capital gains taxation could reduce the attractiveness of residential property investment. The authorities should differentiate in these approaches between first home buyers and investors, while continuing to provide selective grant and loan assistance to first-time buyers.

and this one

The deployment of macroprudential tools to address housing-related risks is welcome. The reinstatement of loan-to-value ratio (LVR) restrictions in March and further tightening for investors from May 2021 will help mitigate stability risks. Additional tools, including debt-to-income ratio limits, caps on investor interest-only loans, and higher bank capital risk weights on mortgage lending, are under consideration and could play a useful role in addressing housing-related risks.

Of the first of those paragraphs, really the less said the better. Price freezes dampen reported CPI inflation, wage freezes dampen reported wage inflation. Lockdowns reduce effective demand for, say, restaurant or cafe services. And so on. All sorts of daft, dangerous and inefficient mechanisms can be deployed to try to suppress symptoms, but most of them never should be. And nothing in that first paragraph stands up to any serious (macroeconomic, or really housing market functionality) scrutiny at all. But it must have gone over quite well in the Beehive, where “investors” seem now to be scapegoats for all ills, almost in the way that Jews were often so tarred in eastern Europe etc 100+ years ago. Just an attempt to distract from the real issues, the real policy failures.

The IMF – once concerned with functioning markets and more efficient policy regimes – is now actively touting policy interventions that differentiate by type of buyers, even though this advocacy seems to rest on no analysis whatever. And take as a particularly egregious example the mention of a stamp duty. These sort of transaction taxes are widely disliked in the economics literature – since they impede the functioning of the market directly affected and impair, for example, labour market mobility. In fact, they used to be firmly disapproved of by the IMF – which within the last five years has again recommended to the Australian and UK authorities (with very similar housing markets) that they move away from using stamp duties. So where did this suggestion come from? Either the Fund itself – in which case, serious questions should be asked about consistency of advice – or from The Treasury or the Minister of Finance? Is this an option that they are considering – perhaps (as the Fund phrasing talks of) just for the despised “investors”? The government made those idle pledges about no new taxes, but the “two minutes hate” now routinely directed at “investors” might suggest the government could get away with such a (Fund-supported) fresh distortion, at least among their own base.

And what about that “while continuing to provide selective grant and loan assistance to first-time buyers”? Surely the Fund knows – they’ve told countries often enough – that such interventions tend to flow straight into prices? And what does any of it have to do with the Fund’s macro or financial stability mandate (let alone any focus on economic efficiency?) But no doubt it went down well with the government: was “helpful to the authorities”.

I have heard a suggestion that perhaps what the Fund might have had in mind was a “temporary” stamp duty – whether just for investors or for everyone. If so, they should have said so. But if so, what planet are they on? All manner of taxes have been introduced “temporarily” over the years in many countries. Few get removed very easily – governments become addicted to the revenue, and/or happy to continue to deal with symptoms not causes. And the Fund itself – at least those of its officials with any sense of political economy – knows that.

And then there is the financial controls paragraph. These days the Fund really likes LVR restrictions, and the tighter ones still to come. In none of this is there any hint of the efficiency dimension. In none of it is there any hint of the analysis of risk (let alone of the interaction with the demanding new capital requirements – which don’t mess up the allocation of credit across sectors – the Fund has previously favoured), And having favoured very stringent LVR controls there is then no discussion about what, if any, the residual systemic risks (related to housing) might be. Instead, they allow themselves to become a channel for communicating, and apparently endorsing, the Reserve Bank’s own interventionist aspirations. If the Fund favours, for example, banning interest-only mortgages to “investors”, how does it square that preference with a regulatory restriction that already requires investors to have a 40 per cent deposit? One or other restriction might, in some circumstances, make sense. Both combined just seem like giving up on the market allocation of credit, papering over symptoms, and returning to the control mentality of ministers like Walter Nash. All ungrounded in that statutory goal that the Reserve Bank must exercise its regulatory powers over banks towards: promoting the soundness and efficiency of the financial system.

(Oh, and if the IMF believes that higher risk weights are warranted on housing, it will be interesting to see any argumentation they can advance in their final report – surely there will be none – for how the Reserve Bank has previously got it wrong: the same organisation the Fund repeatedly praised over the years for its cautious (emphasis on risk) approach in setting capital requirements, including for housing.)

If one had any doubts about the direction in which things are heading, there was the Q&A interview with the Reserve Bank Governor yesterday. It was a seriously soft interview by a TV1 political reporter, who displayed (a) no sign of any understanding of the legal framework the Bank operates under, (b) no sign of any real understanding of the housing market, and (c) no interest in doing anything but helping the Governor run his message, even feeding him loaded phrases in the questions. There was not a single serious challenging question. Not one. (Not even – an obvious question for a political reporter – about the recent change to the MPC Remit, talked up the Minister of Finance and then talked down – to the point of being almost dismissed – by the Bank.)

Orr went on and on about investors purchasing housing, but never once noted that if the land market were sorted out – and he did in passing acknowledge supply issues – the entire environment would be different: not only would houses/land not be expected to appreciate in real terms, but owner-occupier affordability would be that much greater (and without LVR restrictions it would also be easier for first home buyers). He made no attempt to tie the fresh interventions he and the government seem to be cooking up to the soundness of the financial system. In fact, he almost disavowed that as a consideration, claiming that the Bank had previously focused on systemic stability (whole financial system) but now had a new mandate that would enable it to focus on a specific asset class. Here he appeared to be referring to the direction issued to be the Bank a couple of weeks ago under section 68B of the Reserve Bank Act. It reads

 I direct the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (“Reserve Bank”) to have regard to the following government policy that relates to its functions under Part 5 of the Act.

Government Policy

It is Government policy to support more sustainable house prices, including by dampening investor demand for existing housing stock which would improve affordability for first-home buyers.

As the Governor himself noted in a speech just a few days ago, no one really knows what “have regard to” (the statutory phrase) means. The Act itself provides no further guidance. But what is clear is that this direction provides the Bank with (a) no additional powers it had not already had, and (b) no change (broadening or narrowing) in the statutory goals the Bank is required to use its Part 5 (banking regulation) powers towards. Those powers must be exercised for these purposes (only):

The powers conferred on the Governor-General, the Minister, and the Bank by this Part shall be exercised for the purposes of—

(a) promoting the maintenance of a sound and efficient financial system; or
(b) avoiding significant damage to the financial system that could result from the failure of a registered bank.

It might be all very interesting to know that an incumbent left-wing government really doesn’t like non owner-occupiers buying housing, but what of it? If such activity threatens the soundness of the financial system the Bank should (have) acted anyway, and if it doesn’t well….they can’t. And any such interventions are all-but certain to detract from the efficiency of the financial system, a (statutory) consideration one never hears of from the Governor (except perhaps when he thinks banks don’t lend to people he thinks they should – but that is no definition of efficiency).

There is just nothing in the Act that allows the Bank to focus on the soundness or health or performance of anything other than the financial system (as a whole). And yet they appear to be lining up new restrictions on interest-only mortgages (see above) to help the government out politically, and pursue’s Orr’s own political agendas, not to underpin the soundness and efficiency of the financial system. (As he noted, using debt to income restrictions – which he is legally free now to deploy, if doing so would support the soundness and efficiency of the system, already buttressed by very high capital requirements – would almost certainly cut further against the government’s bias towards first-home buyers.)

Policymaking in this country has been going backwards for years. We see examples of it all the time (another recent one is of course the Climate Commission’s secrecy around its modelling, Treasury’s secrecy around relevant analysis), but the housing market and housing finance markets seem particularly egregious examples, where more interventions keep on substituting for addressing issues at source, adding ever more inefficiency and papering over the cracks (hoping prices will level off for a while and the political heat will recede) rather than cutting to the heart of the problem. It is bad enough when governments and government departments do it, worse when autonomous agencies like the Reserve Bank weigh in beyond their mandate, pursuing personal and political agendas. And whatever limited value an independent international agency like the IMF might have brought to the policy debate, is severely undermined when – supported by no analysis whatever – they just weigh in largely echoing the preferences of the moment of domestic political playersa.

Robertson playing distraction

Michael Reddell Housing, Monetary policy

On Tuesday afternoon we learned that the Minister of Finance had written to the Governor of the Reserve Bank about housing and monetary policy. At his press conference yesterday, the Governor told us that the first thing he knew about it was on Monday, suggesting that the government had become worried over the weekend that it was on the political backfoot on housing and felt a need to be seen to be doing something/anything, to change the headlines for a day or two at least.

There wasn’t much to the Minister’s press statement. Perhaps it might even have seemed not-unreasonable if he’d come into office for the first time just a few days ago, but he’s been Minister of Finance for three years, and the housing disaster has just got steadily worse over that time. Little or nothing useful has happened in that time to do anything other than paper over a few symptoms of the problem. And no one believes any agenda the government has is likely to markedly change things for the better: if they did, expectations would already be shaping behaviour and land/house prices would already be falling. Why would one believe it when the Prime Minister refuses to talk in terms of materially lower house prices, and even the Minister of Finance yesterday could only talk about wanting “a sustained period of moderation in house prices” – ie enough to get the story of the front pages, not to actually fix the problem? That makes them no better than their National predecessors.

And so he made a bid to play distraction, writing to the Governor and suggesting that he (the Minister) might change the Remit the Monetary Policy Committee operates under. The Minister can make such changes himself (he does not need the Bank’s consent), but must seek comment from the Bank first.

It was a limp suggestion, as the Minister must have known when he wrote the letter (and as The Treasury would almost certainly advised him, if he asked for advice from them). In the Remit, consistent with the Act, the MPC is required to use monetary policy to keep inflation near 2 per cent, and consistent with that to do what it can to support “maximum sustainable employment” (in practical terms, low unemployment). And then there is this

4b

The Minister suggested in his letter that he might like to add “and house prices” to the end of the worthy grab-bag phrase in b(ii).

b(ii) has been in the Bank’s monetary policy mandate (the old Policy Targets Agreements –  which I’d link to, but the Bank seems to have removed them from their website) since the end of 1999.    It was inserted when Labour became government that year and the new Minister of Finance, Michael Cullen, wanted some product differentiation.  The Bank had had a bad run over the previous parliamentary term, including the period when it ran things using a Monetary Conditions Index operating guideline, which led to us actively inducing a wildly unnecessary degree of variability in short-term interest rates.  Cullen had also, for some years, been somewhat exercised about the cyclical variability of the exchange rate.

It was cleverly-crafted wording.  Don Brash agreed to some new words that sounded worthy –  who, after all, wants “unnecessary” variability in anything – but which really changed nothing at all.  Better (or worse) still, no one has ever known quite what it meant, or if it meant anything at all beyond what was already implicit in a medium-term approach to inflation targeting (looking through short-term price fluctuations –  per b(iii) now –  had always been integral to the way we’d run thing).  A lot of time and energy was spent trying to articulate what it might mean –  the Bank’s Board were particularly exercised, since they were supposed to hold the Governor to account, and it wasn’t clear how, if it all, b(ii) changed anything.  For practical purposes, in all the years I sat on the OCR Advisory Committee, with b(ii) as part of the mandate we were advising against, I’m not convinced it ever made any material difference to any specific OCR decision.   If the Governor didn’t want to tighten much anyway, it was sometimes a convenient reference point –  wanting to avoid “unnecessary instability” in the exchange rate –  but a more hawkish Governor, or a more accurate set of forecasts, might just as easily have determined that any resulting pressure on the exchange rate, while perhaps a little regrettable, was nonetheless, “necessary”.    And then there were the tensions –  avoiding a bit more upward pressure on the exchange rate might actually contribute to increasing the variability in output, and so on.  

The clause was, and is, largely meaningless in any substantive sense.  From a purely substantive perspective I’ve argued for some years that it should simply have been dropped, but the fact that it lives on is a reminder that documents grow not necessarily because the substance requires it, but because there is a political itch to scratch. 

So Grant Robertson’s suggestion that he might change the Remit to add “and house prices”  to b(ii) should be seen in exactly that light. It is about scratching political itches – and distracting from the government’s own failures on housing –  not about substance.     We know this also because the Minister was at pains to reassure people that he wasn’t proposing to change the operational objectives the MPC is required to pursue.   If not, then adding “and house prices” is really no more than getting the MPC to add another few lines to the occasional MPS, to imply that they had paid ritual obeisance.  It might do no harm, but it will do no substantive good either.

But it won Robertson quite a few headlines, and even got the markets excited for a while, temporarily prompting the sort of lift in the exchange rate that might otherwise appear appear out of step with the government’s alleged desire to promote investment in more “productive assets”. 

But if there was anything real to it –  if the aim was actually to make the MPC set monetary policy differently (tighter at present) –  it would, of course, have to have come at the cost of a more sluggish recovery, lower than target inflation, and cyclical unemployment higher than necessary.  Which would have seemed very odd coming from a Minister of Finance who had explicitly introduced to the Act –  what was always implicit –  the cyclical unemployment dimension just a couple of years ago, complete with reminders of the importance his Labour forebears –  notably Peter Fraser –  had placed on full employment.    (I suppose, charitably, it could have involved some more fiscal stimulus to offset less monetary stimulus, but if the Minister had been serious about that he could do it anyway – the RB sets monetary policy in the light of government fiscal choices whatever they are.)

But of course it wasn’t serious. It was political theatre, and distraction, including an attempt to distance himself from monetary policy policy that he had explicitly authorised.  Thus he claims 

mof letter

But as the Minister knows very well, not only was the Bank well advanced in thinking about unconventional monetary policy options by then – they’d published a whole Bulletin article about it in May 2018 – and much of the rest of the world had been using them for some years, but that the LSAP programme (the one actually in effect this year) has been inauguarated with the explicit and repeated consent of the Minister of Finance himself (through the guarantees he has provided to the Bank). Unconventional monetary policy is, in any case, yet another ministerial distraction, since no supposes that whatever contribution monetary policy might have made to this year’s house price developments, it would have materially different if the Minister had ensured that the Bank had its act together in ways that meant that they used a negative OCR this year.

Anyway, the Minister’s letter prompted a quick response from the Bank. Perhaps some wonder if that was necessary – these things could be dealt with to a greater extent in private – but I’m with the Governor on this one. It was the Minister who chose to issue his letter the afternoon before the Bank’s long-scheduled FSR press conference. The Bank had no effective choice but to respond, and better to put things in writing than just rely on throwaway comments at a press conference.

I thought the Governor’s letter was mostly a fairly sensible and moderate holding response. He promised to come back to the Minister with more considered thoughts on the suggested addition to b(ii). There were a couple of bits that could be read more pointedly. For example, the Governor noted that

We welcome the opportunity to contribute to your work programme aimed at improving housing affordability. As I’ve said publicly on many occasions, monetary and financial regulatory policy alone cannot address this challenge. There are many long-term, structural issues at play.

The Bank had, in fact, had some nice lines to that effect in its Monetary Policy Statement just a couple of weeks ago

RB on housing

This is a government failure, not a central bank one. But I guess I wouldn’t expect any central bank Governor to be quite that pointed in public.

Several have also noted that the Governor pointed out that the Bank already considers house prices in setting monetary policy.

I can assure you that the MPC, in making its decisions, gives consideration to the potential impact of monetary policy on asset prices, including house prices. These are important transmission channels that affect employment and inflation. Housing market related prices are
also included in the Consumer Price Index, for example rents, rates, construction costs, and housing transaction costs.

But actually that was a bit cheeky. On those terms, at times like these the Bank positively welcomes higher house price inflation because of the beneficial spillovers they think that leads to in raising CPI inflation. Recall just a few weeks ago their chief economist was actively welcoming higher house prices, distinctly averse to falling prices.

Out of that first round, I’d suggest that the Governor came out ahead on points. The Minister got his headlines – lots of them in some media – but the Governor gave no hint of believing that there was likely to be anything of real substance there.

But the Governor must have over-reached yesterday. At the FSR press conference he expansively declared his pleasure that the Bank has been invited to share its expertise in advising on the wider issues of supply and affordability. In an interview with Stuff – now the frontpage story in the Dom-Post – Orr went further, talking about the tax advice they might also offer. It wasn’t clear what expertise the Governor thought the Bank had in these areas – there is nothing in their research publications or speeches in recent years that suggests any – but I guess that doesn’t often deter the Governor.

But all that talk can’t have gone down well with the Minister, as the newsroompro newsletter this morning includes this

milnes rb

Ouch.

All seems not to be sweetness and light between the Governor and the Minister. But then they deserve each other really. Robertson was engaged in a transparent attempt to distract briefly from the three years of failure of his own government, writing to the Reserve Bank – sure to get headlines – rather than putting the hard word on his own boss and his ministerial colleagues. And Orr, who surely knows there is nothing there and how empty b(ii) really is – and who genuinely seems to think monetary policy should be focused on boosting aggregate demand in ways that lift inflation and employment, can’t help himself in openly trying to embrace a much wider role as adviser on all manner of things that really have nothing much to do with the Bank. Meanwhile, through this period we have had precisely no serious speeches or research papers on monetary policy, we have a central bank that fell back on LSAP partly because it didn’t think to do the basics and check that banks could operate with a negative OCR, and (of course, still) the invisible external members of the Monetary Policy Committee. A high-performing central bank and Monetary Policy Committee would have done a much better job over months of articulating a story, and explaining the place of monetary policy in the mix.

Then, of course, there was the question as to whether had the proposed amendment to b(ii) been in place back in March anything about monetary policy this year would have been different. Orr – probably diplomatically – avoided answering that, but of course the straightforward answer is no. That is so for two reasons. First – and this is a point Orr made in his MPS press conference – the threat to output, employment, and inflation in March was so large that the operational objectives the Minister has given the MPC would simply have impelled a significant easing in monetary policy. But the other reason – actually more an explanation for monetary policy choices than is often realised – is the forecasts. Back in March, hardly anyone (no one I’m aware) would have forecast the rise in house prices we’ve actually seen. Most probably expected – I did – something more like 2008/09, with a dip in prices for a time. So sitting in an MPC meeting in March with an amended b(ii) the house price issues would have appeared moot. Monetary policy would have been conducted just as it was. Oh, and not to forget my point earlier: no one knows what b(ii) means in practice anyway.

But of course if the Minister took any economic advice at all before sending his political theatre letter, he’d have known that too.

So change the Remit, or don’t, in this way and (a) it won’t make any difference to the conduct of monetary policy, and (b) it won’t change the fact that the reforms that might make a real difference now to land/house prices are all matters under the control of ministers already, backed by their majority in Parliament. If my kids can’t buy houses 10 years hence, it is going to be the fault of Ardern and Robertson, and not at all that of the Reserve Bank.