Two sets of fiscal deficits

May 19, 2023May 19, 2023 Michael Reddell Fiscal policy, inflation, Monetary policy

In the government’s Budget, the Treasury projects that on current policies the government will be running an operating deficit for six straight years (while in the 7th the surplus is so tiny that even if it were not for Eric Crampton’s point about tobacco excise revenue we might as well just call it a coin toss as to whether, if the economy played out as Treasury projects we’d see a surplus or a deficit that year).

People have from time to time pointed out that under the previous National government there was also a spell of six straight years of deficits. In fact, here is a chart. The blue lines shows actual fiscal balances from the last surplus (year to June 2008) to the first surplus again (year to June 2015), while the orange line shows actual and Treasury forecasts from the year to June 2019 (last surplus) to the first (tiny) projected surplus (year to June 2026)

In each period, there was one really really large deficit year. In the earlier period that was the year to June 2011, which captured much of the cost to the Crown resulting from the Canterbury earthquakes. In the more recent period, the peak deficit was the year to June 2020, the period encompassing the first and longest Covid lockdown (huge wage subsidy outlays and all).

If these forecasts come to pass we”ll have had an operating surplus (or balance) in five of the last seventeen years.

What about context? In both periods there was a very big exogenous event: earthquakes in the one period and Covid (lockdowns) in the other. Both were, almost necessarily, very expensive for the government. Few people have much problem with meeting many of the direct costs as fiscal obligations.

But….there was a really important difference between the two periods. In the first, the economy headed straight into a fairly deep recession (partly domestically-sourced – our inflation rate had got above the top of the target band – and partly the global downturn associated with the 2008 financial crisis. It was all aggravated by the fact that the 2008 Budget was very expansionary – and yes, that was extravagant and it was election year, but the Treasury advised them that such an approach would not push the budget into deficit over the forecast horizon. It wasn’t one of Treasury’s better calls.

By contrast, at the end of 2019, the unemployment rate was low and, notwithstanding the brief but severe interruption to output around the lockdowns, has mostly remained very low since. When there isn’t excess capacity in the economy, tax revenue tends to come flooding in.

Here is a comparative chart of the unemployment rates in the two periods.

That difference in the unemployment rates makes quite a big difference to the fiscal outcomes, for any set of spending choices. You might criticise the previous government for doing nothing about a Reserve Bank that let unemployment linger well above the NAIRU for so long, as you might criticise the current government for doing nothing about a Reserve Bank that had the economy so overheated for so long. But the economic backdrops to those paths of fiscal deficits were simply very different: with an overheated economy and lots (and lots) of fiscal drag, the revenue was flooding into Treasury over recent years. There was simply no good macroeconomic reason for having operating fiscal deficits at all in an overheated economy, especially once the big direct Covid spending had come to an end (which it had a year ago). By contrast, the earlier government presided over a very sluggish recovery – and so weak, relative to target, was inflation that there was barely any fiscal drag. Even if the Budget was structurally balanced, cyclical factors would have left a small deficit (on Treasury and Reserve Bank numbers there was a negative output gap every year through to 2016).

If the unemployment rates and output gaps give a sense of the cyclical slack (or overheating), labour force participation rates are also valuable context

A materially larger share of the population is now in the labour force now than in the period of that previous run of deficits (and given that unemployment rates have been lower this time, the difference in employment rates is even larger. Revenue has been abundant.

I’m not really convinced there was an overly strong case for the previous government having continued to run operating deficits in the last couple of years of their stretch of six. Had the Reserve Bank been doing its job better, perhaps they wouldn’t have (the economy would have been more fully employed and inflation would have been nearer the target).

But I’m quite convinced there has been no good economic case at all for operating deficits in 22/23. 23/24, or 24/25. Take 22/23 (the year just ending) as an example: on Treasury estimates there has been a positive output gap, and the unemployment will have averaged about 3.5 per cent (well below anyone’s estimate of NAIRU). And with 6-7% inflation, fiscal drag has been a big revenue raiser. And if there has been any residual direct Covid spending (a few vaccinations?), the amounts involved must have been vestigial indeed. So cyclically the revenue was flooding in, but they still ran a deficit: it was pure choice to undertake routine operational spending without the honesty to go to the electorate and raise the taxes to pay for that spending.

The cyclical position is less favourable over the next couple of years – the recesssion (as indicated by the 2 percentage point rise in the unemployment rate) required to get inflation back down again – but the government has chosen to adopt discretionary new giveaways with borrowed money.

It isn’t just some idiosyncratic Reddell view that operating budgets should be balanced (none of this is about capital spending or arguments about infrastructure). It is there in the Public Finance Act

Now, if I was writing the Public Finance Act, I wouldn’t word things quite that way. But……the Public Finance Act is something both main parties have signed up to. It may make sense to borrow to fund useful longer-term investment, but it makes no sense to be borrowing to pay the groceries, especially in times when income has been more abundant than usual.

Just two more Budget charts. The first is one I showed on Twitter yesterday

Now, there is plenty of scope for political argument about the appropriate size of government spending, and left-wing parties will typically be keener on higher numbers than right-wing parties. My own interest here is more about fiscal balances, but it is worth being conscious of just how much larger a share of the economy is now represented by Crown operating spending than was the case even five or six years ago. Those were the days of the pre-election Labour/Greens budget responsibility rules

Next year’s spending at 33 per cent of GDP is not quite at the previous peaks (Covid and the earthquake years) but nor might one really have expected it to be. But there is an election to win I guess.

And finally, inflation. Treasury doesn’t run monetary policy but (a) the Secretary sits as a non-voting MPC member, and (b) Treasury are the Minister’s advisers on the Bank’s performance, so they aren’t just any forecaster. On the Treasury numbers, it isn’t until the year to June 2027 that CPI inflation gets back to the middle of the target range (the 2 per cent midpoint the MPC is supposed to focus on).

This chart uses Treasury’s annual numbers to illustrate what a difference the monetary policy mistake has made, and is making, to the price level

The blue line is the actual (annual) data and the Treasury forecasts. The orange line is what the price level would have looked like in a stylised scenario in which the MPC had delivered 2 per cent inflation each year over this period. The difference is substantial: the price level in the blue line is almost 13 per cent higher than in the orange line by the end of the period. The Minister of Finance appears to be quite happy for the current gap (about 10 per cent) to keep widening for the next five years. He shouldn’t be.

We do not run a price level targeting regime. That means bygones are treated as bygones and we don’t attempt to pull the actual inflation rate back down to the orange line having once made the policy mistake that pushed it so far above. It does not – or should not – mean indifference to the arbitrary redistributions that big unexpected changes in the price level impose, strongly favouring borrowers (especially those with nominal debt and long-term fixed interest rates) and heavily penalising financial savers (holders of real assets can be largely indifferent over time). Inflation – and especially unexpected inflation – is deeply damaging, and there were good reasons for reorienting monetary policy to deliver medium-term price stability. But now the powers that be appear unbothered by 7 years in succession of inflation above the target midpoint. It seems about on a par with being happy to set out to deliver six successive years of operating deficits. Poor fiscal policy, poor monetary policy, poor performance from both the Governor and MPC and the Minister of Finance (the latter not only having direct responsibility for fiscal policy, but overall responsibility for monetary policy and the people he appoints to conduct it). It will be interesting to compare the Reserve Bank (considerably more up to date) forecasts next week.

I’m going to be away for the next couple of weeks so there won’t be any new posts here until after King’s Birthday.

Sources of inflation

April 18, 2023April 18, 2023 Michael Reddell Fiscal policy, inflation, Monetary policy, Treasury

I was on Newstalk ZB this morning to talk about the ASB recession forecasts and this article on the Herald reporting some recent statistical analysis from Treasury staff that attempted to provide another perspective on what has caused New Zealand’s high inflation rate.

I don’t want to add anything on the ASB forecasts other than to say that (a) their story and numbers seem quite plausible, but (b) macroeconomic forecasting is a mug’s game with huge margins of uncertainty and error, so not much weight should be put on anyone’s specific forecast ever (with the possible exception of a central bank’s forecast, which may be no more accurate than anyone else’s but on which they may nonetheless act, with consequences for the rest of us).

The Treasury staff analysis was published a couple of weeks ago as a 2.5 pages Special Topic in their latest Fortnightly Economic Update. You can tell from the Herald headline why one of their political journalists might have latched onto this really rather geeky piece

But there is less to the analysis than the headline suggests. The term “government spending” doesn’t appear in the Treasury note at all (I think “fiscal policy” gets one mention). The focus of the paper is an attempt to better understand the relative contributions of demand and supply factors to explaining inflation, and while fiscal policy is one (at times significant) source of demand shocks and pressures, there is no effort in the paper to distinguish the relative roles of fiscal and monetary policy (or indeed, to distinguish either of those policy influences from other sources of demand pressures). That isn’t a criticism of the paper. The technique staff used, introduced for those purposes a few months ago by a Fed researcher (his paper is here), isn’t designed for that purpose.

Loosely speaking, the technique uses time series modelling techniques to look at both prices and volumes for (most of) the items included in the CPI. When there are surprises with the same sign for both a price and the corresponding volume that is (in their words) suggestive of a demand shock (increased demand tends to lift prices and volumes) and when the surprises have opposite signs this is taken as suggesting a supply shocks (disruptions in supply tend to see lower volumes and higher prices go together). It is a neat argument in principle.

But it doesn’t look to be a very good model in practice. Here is The Treasury’s summary chart. the source of the line that (on this analysis) demand and supply shocks may have contributed roughly equal amounts to inflation over the last year, and that demand shocks were more important back in the early stages of the surge).

Not only is a large chunk of recent inflation not able to be ascribed to either demand or supply shocks, but there have been periods even in the quite short span shown here when the identified demand and supply shocks don’t explain any of the then-current inflation at all (eg 2019).

This is even more evident with some of the sub-groups they show results for. Thus, home ownership (which in the CPI is mostly construction costs)

For most of the decade, neither (identified) demand or supply shocks explain the inflation, and that is so again in the most recent data. And if the model suggests that sharp rises in construction cost inflation in recent times have little to do with demand at a time when house-building has been running at the highest share of GDP in decades, so much the worse for the model.

Services make up a large chunk of the economy, and a fair chunk of the CPI too. Here is the chart for that group

Not only are there periods when neither demand or supply shocks (as identified by the model) explain any of services inflation, but how much common-sense intuition is there is the idea (which the chart suggests) that for most of the period what services inflation can be explained is all either supply shocks or demand shocks and not some combination.

The Treasury paper notes some overseas comparisons, in particular that for the US

The results for New Zealand show lower supply-side contributions to inflation than estimates for the US and Australia. In the US, supply-side drivers account for about 60% of the annual change of the PCE deflator that the model can explain (Figure 7).4

(the footnote is to the original Fed paper)

and they show this US chart which I assume comes from the same model

Note, first, that the PCE deflator has a materially different treatment of home ownership – using imputed rents – than either the NZ or US CPIs.

But perhaps more importantly, in the original Fed paper there is this line

And here is a relevant chart from the same paper (grey-ed periods are NBER recessions)

Not only does it show the entire period since 1990 (one of my uneases about the New Zealand work by Treasury is showing only the last 10 years), but it also illustrates that, as defined for the purposes of these models, both supply and demand factors are large influences, almost always positive, over the entire 30+ years. In other words, if there is anything unusual about the current situation it is not the relative contributions of supply and demand influences but simply that inflation is high (both demand and supply influence). It simply doesn’t seem to add much value in making sense of why things unfolded as they did over the last couple of years. (Although it is interesting how different the last 10 years of the chart look for the US, as opposed to New Zealand in the first chart above.)

What these US charts also illustrate is that supply and demand shocks/drivers here don’t mean the same as they typically do when thinking about monetary policy. Monetary policymakers will (rightly) talk in terms of generally wanting to “look through” supply shocks – the classic example being spikes in world oil prices, which not only flow through to the CPI almost instantly (faster than monetary policy could react) but also make us poorer. The focus instead is on whether these headline effects flow through into generalised inflation expectations and price-setting more broadly. Climate-induced temporary food price shocks (from storms or droughts) are seen in the same vein.

Those sorts of shocks are generally thought of as being as likely to be negative influences on headline inflation as positive ones. Oil prices go all over the place, up and down. Much the same goes for fruit and vegetable prices. These are the two main things excluded in that simplest of core inflation measures, ex food and energy. Some of the Covid-related disruptions are probably more one-sided: there aren’t really obvious favourable counterpoints to severe supply disruptions (even if such disruptions themselves generally unwind over time). But even taken altogether they aren’t the sorts of things that will produce positive influence on core inflation over single year for over 30 years (as in the US core inflation chart immediately above).

When macroeconomists think of inflation they often do so with a mental model in their heads in which this period’s inflation is a function of inflation expectations, some influence from the output/employment gap, and then any residual (supply shock) types of items. Those supply shocks can run in one direction for a couple of years in succession (and probably did in the last couple) but the expected value over long periods of time is generally thought to be pretty close to zero. Monetary policy determines core inflation – monetary policy shapes expectations and influences and responds to developments in the output (or employment) gap. Of course, monetary policy takes account of trend supply developments – adverse shocks may not only raise headline inflation, and risk raising inflation expectations, but can lower both actual and potential output (many positive supply shocks work in the opposite manner).

I don’t want to be particularly critical of The Treasury. We should welcome the fact that their analysts are trying out interesting different approaches and keeping an eye on emerging literature, and even that they are making available some of that work in generally low-profile publications. That said, Treasury is not some political babe in the woods, and I’d have thought there should have been some onus on them to have provided a bit more context and interpretation in their write-up. For example, whereas the US is often treated as a closed economy, New Zealand clearly isn’t. I don’t have a good sense as to how general imported inflation – or that reflecting exchange rate changes – is going to affect this sort of decomposition. If, as I believe, a wide range of central banks made very similar policy mistakes, we’ll be seeing more inflation from abroad (if our Reserve Bank takes no steps to counter it) not tied to demand pressures in particular domestic sectors. I’m also not really clear how the lift in inflation expectations that we observe in multiple surveys fits into this sort of decomposition exercise.

Oh, and it was perhaps convenient that of the CPI groups Treasury showed, motor fuels was not one of them. Headline inflation currently is held down quite a bit by the NZ Cabinet shock – holding down petrol excise taxes etc.

My own approach to the question of where the responsibility lies for core inflation (and note that Treasury focuses on headline not core) tends to be simpler. When this century the unemployment rate has dropped below about 4 per cent core inflation has tended to become quite a serious problem (mid-late 00s and now). The Reserve Bank itself has been quite clear in its view that employment is running above the “maximum sustainable employment” (itself determined by other government policies), and thus, by implication, the unemployment rate – at near-record lows is below sustainable levels. That is a function of excess demand relative to the ability of the economy to supply. Core inflation – the bits we should most worry about, because we could usefully do something about them – is an excess demand story, risking spilling over into embedded higher inflation expectations.

And when ZB’s interviewer asked me this morning whether Mr Robertson or Mr Orr was to blame (fiscal or monetary policy), I was quite clear that the answer was monetary policy (Orr and the MPC). That isn’t because monetary policy loosenings in 2020 were necessarily the biggest source of stimulus to demand, but because the model is one in which (a) fiscal policy is transparent, and (b) monetary policy moves last, with the responsibility to keep core inflation at/near target. You might think (I certainly do) that less should have been done with fiscal policy, but it isn’t up to the MPC to take a view on that, it is their job simply to have a good understanding of how the whole economy, and the inflation process in particular, works, and to adjust monetary policy accordingly. In extremis, fiscal policy can overwhelm the best efforts of central banks, but that wasn’t an issue or a risk here, or most other countries, in recent years. Central banks simply got things wrong. (They had company in their mistake, but they were/are paid to get these things right.)

RB chief economist on inflation

March 27, 2023March 27, 2023 Michael Reddell inflation, Monetary policy, MPC

It was something of a (perhaps minor) landmark event last Thursday when the Reserve Bank’s chief economist Paul Conway gave an on-the-record speech on inflation. It was only Conway’s second on-the-record speech (the first was on housing, something the Bank has little or no responsibility for) and thus only the second speech from a Reserve Bank chief economist for almost five years. Five years in which chief economists have become statutory decisionmakers (members of the MPC), in which monetary policymakers have dealt with a huge and expensive shock, and in which inflation – prime focus of central bank monetary policy – has been let run amok in ways never seen previously (arguably never envisaged) in the first 30 years of inflation targeting. And when (a) external MPC members are barred from research/analysis, and (b) barred from speaking or disinclined to do so, and (c) the chief economist’s own boss has no qualifications/background in economics or monetary policy, we should be able to look to the Bank’s chief economist for incisive and insightful analysis and perspectives on the macroeconomic dimensions of the Bank’s responsibilities. If not him then who?

Sadly, the answer to that seems to be no one at all.

There have been worse things from the Reserve Bank on monetary policy in recent years. The most egregious have been the (apparently) unscripted one-liners from the Governor. One could think of his claims – never backed by any analysis at all – that the economic gains from the LSAP programme were “multiples” of the $10.5bn (Treasury estimate) direct fiscal loss from the LSAP, or the preposterous spin he tried on Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee just a few months ago

Not even arguable, just false.

There is nothing quite so egregious in Conway, mercifully (he is a more earnest, less flamboyant – or worse – character).

But what is there in his speech is far from the sort of standard we should expect from a senior policymaker addressing the biggest monetary policy failure in decades. And it is not as if his speech was delivered to a bunch of high schoolers or the Gisborne U3A (no offence to either) but to an (at least) expert-adjacent group at the ANZ-KangaNews New Zealand Capital Markets Forum.

The Bank’s PR people billed the speech this way

Item 3 is easy. The only thing the Bank can do is raise the OCR and hold it higher for long enough. Although Conway never acknowledges this, it is hard to be very confident in their view (or anyone else’s) on how high or how long might be required, not just because there are always new shocks, but because neither the MPC nor others really yet have a compelling story for why core inflation went so high so quickly.

So much of the speech is made up of plaintive pleas to the public to believe the MPC when they say they are serious, and to act accordingly, without giving us any basis to believe the MPC really knows what it is doing. After all, not much more than 18 months ago Conway’s predecessor was telling the Reserve Bank’s Board there was no hurry and no real need to worry, and their published forecasts were telling us they expected inflation would be almost bang in the middle of the target range by now. It would have been a bad (and costly) idea for people to have based their plans on those forecasts and the contemporaneous rhetoric. You might have hoped that if he really wanted to jawbone us, and have people take seriously his rhetoric, that the Bank’s chief economist (of all people) would be presenting persuasive analysis that they understand what they got wrong and reasons to think they are better now. But there is none of that in the speech, and it refers us to no serious supporting analysis or research either.

Instead there is lots of spin.

One of the most striking things in the speech was something that wasn’t there. Central bankers often, and rightly, pay a lot of attention to measures of core inflation. But in a major (rare) speech about inflation, there is but one (passing) mention of the term (or cognate terms), simply noting in the final few sentences that core inflation is about middle of the pack among OECD countries/economies.

Instead, we get a great deal about “the pandemic, the war, and floods”, which seems to be a slightly more sophisticated attempt at distraction than his boss’s claims quoted above.

No doubt, as Conway notes, the floods will put some pressure on resources over the next few years (particularly to the extent losses are covered by offshore reinsurers, as distinct from being net NZ wealth losses), as the 2010/11 and 2016 events did, and may result in some direct price pressures (some fruit and vegetable prices) in the next couple of quarters. But, thanks to New Zealand’s infrequent and badly lagging CPI, none of that is in the published inflation numbers yet.

What of the pandemic? It is clear that here Conway is not talking about the (with hindsight) gross macroeconomic mismanagement (the RB MPC being the last mover, and thus primarily responsible) that delivered us, several years on, really high core inflation, but the direct price effects of pandemic-driven supply chain disruptions several years ago. Some of those effects may have been material contributors to headline inflation back in 2020 and 2021, but it is now 2023, and if we could do a good decomposition (a good topic for some RB analysis) it seems likely that if anything the unwinding of those disruptions is probably holding headline inflation down a little now (eg global freight costs have fallen a lot). Perhaps he has in mind airfares – where capacity has been slow to return – but that is a good reason to look at, and cite, analytical core inflation measures.

And then there is “the war”. At the Reserve Bank, they are very keen on “the war” as distraction and cover.

We all know world oil prices shot up quite a bit in the immediate wake of Russian’s invasion last February. But not only are world oil prices now lower than they were (real and nominal terms) prior to the invasion, but New Zealand headline annual CPI inflation is still held down artificially at present by the kneejerk petrol excise “temporary” remission put on last March and still in place (strangely, Conway never mentions this). Where else might we find these “war” effects in New Zealand inflation? Wheat prices also rocketed upwards initially, but again they are lower now than they were at the start of last year. I guess fertiliser prices are still higher than they were, but it hardly seems likely to add up to much in NZ CPI inflation. Especially when we know – although Conway never mentions – that core inflation had already risen a lot, to quite unacceptably high levels, well before the invasion.

Conway does acknowledge that monetary policy should have started to tighten earlier (and doesn’t even fall back on the silly line he and Orr have previously used, that a slight difference in timing would have made only a slight difference to inflation – well of course, but the real problem, with hindsight, was not “slight” differences in timing), but engages in a fairly sustained effort to leave readers thinking there really was not an evident problem in 2021, just a few “one-offs”. But this is where analytical measures of core inflation come in. Trimmed mean and weighted median measures are pretty standard parts of many monetary policy analysts’ toolkits.

The big increase in quarterly core inflation took place in 2021.

The sectoral core factor model, like all models of its class, has end-point issues and estimates prone to revision, but the best guess now is that core inflation had already doubled (to in excess of 4 per cent) by the end of 2021.

But none of this mentioned at all in the speech. Nor is the fact that by late 2021 the unemployment rate – best simple measure of changes in excess capacity – was dropping rapidly to below levels anyone regarded as sustainable.

Many of these events took the Reserve Bank (and others by surprise), but they are the ones paid to get these things right. We live with the consequences when they don’t. But nowhere in the speech is there any acceptance of responsibility.

We also get attempts to suggest there is nothing the MPC can do about inflation sourced from abroad…….in a speech where the exchange rate gets no substantive (and only one formal) mention at all.

There is a chart in the speech which purports to illustrate the problem, showing tradables inflation as a share of headline inflation, without any acknowledgement that if tradables tend to average 0% and non-tradables 2.5 per cent (loosely the case pre-Covid) and then tradables average 2% and non-tradables 4.5% tradables would make up a larger share of headline inflation even though nothing about the relationship between tradables and non-tradables had changed at all. Yes, tradables inflation has increased relative to non-tradables but if we look at the core components of each the recent change isn’t unprecedented, tradables didn’t lead non-tradables, and (in any case) the Reserve Bank’s own past analysis has tradables as a typically fairly small component in the overall sectoral core inflation measure.

If – as happened – other countries run high inflation, the job of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand is to tighten monetary policy here to lean against importing that inflation. That will generally occur through a higher-than-otherwise nominal exchange rate.

I’m not going to spend any more time on the jawboning rhetoric. No doubt it feels good inside a central bank – I’ve run plenty of it in my time, in writing and in speeches – but it is really a distraction from the core issues (MPC responsibilities) and less persuasive now – when, with the best will in the world, the central bank has just messed up badly – than perhaps it might have been decades ago when we first trying to transition from high inflation to low inflation, with a newly-independent central bank.

Conway’s speech was made just a month on from the latest Monetary Policy Statement. In that flagship MPC document, there was a substantial four page section on “The International Dimension of Non-Tradables Inflation”. No doubt, the analysis in that section came from Conway’s own Economics Department. But in a flagship speech on inflation just a few weeks later there is no mention, not even a reference, to that analysis at all. In my MPS commentary (last few paras) I briefly identified a number of apparent weaknesses in the analysis. Perhaps on reflection Conway accepted the issues I had raised, but whatever the explanation it seems odd to have such analysis feature prominently one month and simply disappear from consideration the next.

These were two of the last three paragraphs of the speech (emphasis added)

At one level, it is hard to argue. It all sounds good. Except….where is the substance to back up the words? The Bank’s own published research output has slowed to a trickle, there is no serious analysis or insight in the speech, and we know that the Minister of Finance has reaffirmed only last year his commitment (in league with Orr and Quigley) to ban anyone with an active or even future interest in serious research or analysis from serving as external MPC members. Oh, and the Reserve Bank has the least-qualified deputy chief executive responsible for macroeconomic and monetary policy of any advanced country central bank (and probably most emerging and many developing countries as well). Nothing we’ve seen so far suggests any particular reason to treat these words as anything other than spin.

I was mildly hopeful (prone to naive optimism perhaps) when Conway was appointed. Perhaps things are about to change. There is, after all, a position on the MPC that comes vacant next week, currently held by someone who has no relevant subject expertise, who has never explained her views on monetary policy in four years in the job, and who was (so the papers confirm) pretty clearly appointed mostly because she was a woman. Replacing her with a more serious appointee, and overhauling the protocols in a way that encouraged or compelled externals to be individually accountable, would be a small start in the right direction. If Orr, Robertson, and Quigley were serious. I am not, however, holding my breath.

The contrast between Conway’s speech and those of his peers in other advanced central banks once again leaves the New Zealand institution looking well off the pace. Just the slides published for an ECB Board member’s talk yesterday have considerably more substance than Conway’s full speech (and she speaks often). I’ll leave you with this chart, inspired by one of Schnabel’s slides

Terms of trade fluctuations – “direct price effects of the war and the pandemic” – just aren’t a big macroeconomic issue in New Zealand.

A couple of MPS thoughts

February 23, 2023February 23, 2023 Michael Reddell inflation, Monetary policy

I don’t have very much I want to say about yesterday’s Reserve Bank Monetary Policy Statement – although “welcome back from the long holiday” might be in order. Oh, and I noticed a nice photo from my own neighbourhood on page 6 of the pdf.

As so often, I continue to be a bit surprised by the fairly superficial analysis of inflation itself. Thus, they include a chart of various core inflation measures, but all as annual rates. Surely, surely, surely, a central bank Monetary Policy Committee, ostensibly forward looking, would want to be focused as much as possible on the very latest quarterly data. For example, this chart from my own post last month on inflation data.

It isn’t impossible that the “true” story is less encouraging than this quarterly series might appear to suggest, but I’d have hoped to hear/see the analysis why or why not from the Bank. As just one example, the data aren’t seasonally adjusted, but the RB is big enough and has enough clout with SNZ that they could either redo the series using seasonally adjusted data or get it done for them (or having looked into it concluded any difference was small enough it didn’t matter). As it is, even if there are some seasonality issues the Q4 numbers for both series were lower than for Q4 in 2021. It looks to be a somewhat encouraging story – still some way to go to get back to annual rates around 2 per cent – but better than it was, better than it might have been.

There is still no sign either – in the MPS or any of the other material the Bank has published in recent months – that the Bank has thought any deeper about what and why they (like many other people) got the inflation (and, thus, monetary policy) story so badly wrong over 2020 to 2022. The Governor was reported this morning as telling MPC that he didn’t think the inflation outcomes represented a “failure”. With hindsight, things might be partly understandable, perhaps even somewhat excusable, but against (a) the targets the government set for the Bank, and (b) the promises of central bankers over recent decades as to what they could deliver, it does not help the advancement of knowledge or understanding (although perhaps it helps MPC members sleep at night) to pretend what has happened has been anything other than a failure. I

I’m not taking a strong view on what the inflation outlook is, or even how much additional monetary policy restraint may (or may not) be needed, but the second point from the MPS that struck me was around their own story and how well it held together.

On their numbers, the output gap was estimated to have been 2.1 per cent of (potential) GDP in the June quarter last year, rising to a new peak of 3.2 per cent in the September quarter. Here are the estimates and forecasts

Their forecasts show that they expect the output gap to have averaged 2.7 per cent of (potential) GDP for the Dec and March quarters too. In other words, the period of maximum pressure on resources and of upward pressure on core domestic inflation includes right now (around the middle of the March quarter).

If so, core inflation (quarterly) should have been continuing to rise, something there is no sign of in the data. And a great deal turns on the June quarter, when they expect a sharp fall in the output gap as GDP growth itself turns negative. That is a fairly big call in itself (and of course, actual events will be messed up by post-cyclone repair activity).

But what of inflation? The Bank forecasts that by the December quarter of this year, headline quarterly CPI inflation will be down to only 0.6 per cent. There is some seasonality in the headline CPI numbers, and December inflation tends to be a bit lower as a result. But the difference looks fairly consistently to be only about 0.1 per cent, so that a seasonally adjusted forecast for the December quarter (measured as at mid November, nine months from now) is probably 0.7 per cent. That would be the least bad outcome since 2020, and in annualised terms back inside the target range. (And the December quarter numbers won’t have been thrown around by the end of the petrol excise tax cut or temporary fruit and veg effects of the cyclone). If they deliver that it will be a good, and welcome, outcome. If we apply the eyeballed seasonal factors to their remaining CPI forecasts, by the September quarter of next year, quarterly seasonally adjusted inflation is right back down to 0.5 per cent – slap bang in the middle of the target range.

But I’m left puzzled about two things. The first is that the Bank usually tells us that monetary policy takes 12-24 months to have its full effects on inflation. If so, then why on their story do we need further OCR increases from here when inflation 18 months hence is already back at target midpoint. And then, given that inflation is at the target midpoint 18 months from now, why is policy projected to be set in ways that deliver deeply negative output gaps (not narrowing rapidly at all) all the way out to March 2026? Perhaps there is a good and coherent story, but I can’t see what it is (and I don’t see it articulated in the document). Entrenched inflation expectations can’t really be the story, because as the Bank has often noticed medium to long term expectations have stayed reasonably subdued and shorter term surveys of inflation always tend to move a lot with headline inflation which is expected to be rapidly falling by this time next year.

(My own story would probably put more emphasis on the unemployment rate as an indicator of resource pressures. On the Bank’s (and SNZ”s) numbers, the unemployment rate troughed a year ago.)

The final aspect of the MPS I wanted to comment on was the brief section (4 pages from p30) on “The international dimension of non-tradables inflation”. It is good that they are attempting to include some background analysis in the document, although sometimes one can’t help thinking it might better have been put out first in an Analytical Note where all the i’s could dotted and t’s crossed, and the argumentation tested. We might reasonably wonder what the non-expert members of the MPC make of chapters like this, which they nonetheless own.

The centrepiece of the discussion is this chart, which looks quite eye-catching.

Count me a bit sceptical for three reasons. The first is that I am wary of a picture that starts at the absolute depth of a severe recession and would be interested to know what it would have looked like taken back another three or five years. Perhaps they didn’t do so because the treatment of housing changed (very materially) in 1999, when the dataset they used starts from, but one is left wondering. Second, end-point revisions are a significant issue with the techniques used to derive the global CPI component, and might be particularly so over the last year when headline inflation has been thrown around so differentially depending on (a) exposure to European wholesale gas prices and mitigating government measures. And then there is the question of the countries in the sample. Of the 24, 12 are part of the euro-area (or in Denmark’s case, tightly pegged to the euro) for which there is a single monetary policy. For these purposes, it is like using as half your sample individual US states or Japanese prefectures. I don’t understand why they chose those countries, or why (for example) Hungary is in but the Czech Republic and Poland (all with their own monetary policies) are out. Or why you’d include Luxumbourg – which has the euro as its currency – and not (similar-sized) Iceland with its own monetary policy. And since this is just using headline CPI inflation data why you’d use only these countries anyway and not a range of non-OECD countries with market economies and their own monetary policies. Perhaps it would make little difference, but we don’t know, and the Bank makes no effort to tell us or to explain their choices.

Now, to be honest, if you had asked me before seeing this section I would probably have said ‘yes, well given that a whole bunch of advanced economy central banks made similar mistakes I might expect to see a stronger than usual correlation between New Zealand non-tradables inflation and some sense of “advanced world core inflation”. And thus I wasn’t overly surprised by the right hand side of the chart above.

The Bank attempts to address that question, summarised in this chart, using the same period and same 24 countries as in the earlier one.

But count me a little sceptical. Almost every OECD country – including their 24 (with all the same issues around selection of countries) – had unemployment rates late last year at or very close to cyclical lows. As New Zealand did as well. But whereas the Reserve Bank estimates our output gap late last year was +2.7 per cent of potential GDP (and, by deduction, the Bank must be using their own estimate in this calculation) OECD output gap estimates have 12 of the Bank’s 24 countries running negative output gaps last year (they don’t even think New Zealand’s output gap was positive last year, despite abundant evidence of resource stresses here). Given the choice between fairly hard unemployment rate indicators and output gap estimates which are notorous for revisions, personally I’d be putting a lot more weight on the labour market indicators where (as the Governor himself has emphasised in the past) all his peers say they have the same issue of “labour shortages”. (The OECD no longer publishes “unemployment gap” estimates but they do publish “employment gap” estimates, and of the Bank’s 24 countries only a handful had (small) estimated negative employment gaps in 2022).

They end the special section with a paragraph “What does this mean for monetary policy?”. I didn’t find their story persuasive – that it would mean monetary policy was harder – but given how little confidence we can have in the charts, it isn’t worth spending more time on that discussion.

A mixed bag

January 26, 2023January 26, 2023 Michael Reddell inflation

Quite a bit later than almost all other advanced countries we finally got an update on December quarter inflation yesterday. Even then, our quarterly CPI is mostly a measure of the change from mid-August to mid-November, while almost all other OECD countries have data for the month of December.

From the government we heard more of the same old spin, about how low New Zealand’s inflation is relative to that in other countries. At a headline CPI level there is, of course, some truth to that, but (a) we have an independent (of other countries) monetary policy to ensure that we can control our own inflation rate, and (b) New Zealand, mercifully, has not faced the gas price shock most of the European countries have. I presume not even the government is claiming credit for that – it is almost entirely just good luck, a rare advantage of our extreme remoteness.

For international comparisons across a wide range of countries that focus on the inflation central banks and governments can sensibly be held accountable for, really the only available data are for the respective CPIs ex food and energy. It isn’t a perfect measure by any means – and differences in the ways countries put together their CPIs, notably the treatment of housing, also matter – but it is what we have. Here are the latest annual CPI ex food and energy inflation rates for the OECD countries (euro-area shown as a single number, reflecting the single monetary policy). (The OECD has not yet updated their table for yesterday’s Australian CPI, so I use here the very similar RBA series CPI ex volatile items (ie fruit and vegetables and motor fuel).

New Zealand and Australia are both at 6.7 per cent, just a touch above the median country. But note that if there are countries that have done worse than us, all the main advanced countries or country groupings (Japan, euro-area, Canada, UK, US – something close to the G7) are now less bad. Most haven’t done very well – 5 per cent core inflation is nothing to be complacent about or comfortable with – but less bad than us, or more specifically our central bank.

On a quarterly basis, the New Zealand exclusion measures of core inflation also don’t look particularly good – the latest annualised rates are around 8 per cent.

Once one gets away from international comparisons, it is often better to focus on the so-called analytical measures of core inflation. In New Zealand’s case these still aren’t ideal as (unlike the ABS) SNZ does not report these on a seasonally adjusted basis, but eyeballing the series seasonality does not appear to be particularly strong.

These measures either exclude or de-emphasise particularly large price changes and try to get to something more like a central tendency (the Reserve Bank’s sectoral core inflation series also aims to do something like this, but it uses annual data only and is prone to big revisions when the inflation rate is moving around a lot).

This chart seems to me the most favourable story one can currently tell about New Zealand inflation. There is an unusually large gap between the rates of increase in the two series – which should be a little troubling – but both series suggest that the peak has passed, that quarterly inflation was at its worst in perhaps the March quarter of last year (by when the OCR was still below pre-Covid levels). Given that the unemployment rate stayed at/near record lows all last year – and on all forecasts is expected to increase from here – one could take a reasonable amount of comfort from this chart. (Core) inflation should never have been allowed to get away – that it was is a generational failure by the new MPC – and is still, in annualised terms, a long way from 2 per cent, but things seem to be heading in the right direction.

One of the wild cards in the entire story is the price of air travel, and particularly international air travel (the latter currently 83 per cent more expensive than just prior to Covid)

You would have to suppose that in time (real) prices will fall back, and it is in some sense a Covid phenomenon. On the other hand, it is also a classic case at present where excess demand (relative to available capacity) is an issue, and excess demand often shows up more in some places than others (a few quarters back it was domestic construction costs that were increasing at annualised rates of around 20 per cent). High air travel prices aren’t now a direct consequence of current government interventions – and the New Zealand government is actually still in the last few months of subsidising international air freight capacity, having kept air travel capacity higher than otherwise. But you wouldn’t want central bankers aggressively targeting a measure that currently gives a significant weight to air transport prices.

For now, things look to be moving in the right direction in New Zealand. They would need to be, after such a signal policy failure. The forward indicators are for much weaker economic growth quite soon which, all else equal, will continue to pull the inflation rate back towards target – although the question forecasters will need to grapple with is “how rapidly?”. The coming suite of labour market data will be the next piece in the New Zealand puzzle.

Whether or not things are yet on track in New Zealand, this is one of those times when one would much rather be sitting in the New Zealand central bank than at the RBA. Here are the analytical measures of quarterly core inflation for Australia

Not only are they now higher than those for New Zealand, but there is no sign they have necessarily yet peaked. It is perhaps not too surprising when the RBA was so late to start raising the policy rate – against a very similar Covid and economic backdrop to New Zealand (and a stronger terms of trade).

At it again

December 16, 2022December 16, 2022 Michael Reddell inflation, Reserve Bank

At last year’s Annual Review hearing at the Finance and Expenditure Committee the Reserve Bank Governor was shown to have misled (presumably deliberately) Parliament twice. Last month he was at it again with the preposterous claim to FEC that the Bank would have to have been able to forecast back in 2020 the Ukraine invasion for inflation now to have been in the target range. It was just made up – quite probably on the spur of the moment – and of course they’ve never produced any later analysis to support the claim (despite an MPS and the five-yearly review of monetary policy in the following weeks).

On Wednesday afternoon the Bank was back for this year’s Annual Review hearing. It was the last day of term for Parliament, and there was quite a feel to it in the rather desultory scatter-gun approach to the questioning from the Opposition. You wouldn’t know that the two Opposition parties had just openly objected to the Governor’s reappointment to a new five year term.

But MPs – and the viewing public – were still subject to more of Orr being anything other than straightforward, open, and accountable. More spin, usually irrelevant and sometimes simply dishonest.

The meeting opened with Orr apologising that the Board chairman was absent. Apparently he had some function to attend in his fulltime executive job, but you might have thought that when you were the chair of the Board through a year when inflation went so badly off the rails, and still chair now when the Bank is averring that a recession will be needed to get things back under control, you might have made it a priority to turn up for Parliament’s annual scrutiny of the Bank’s performance. And if your day job commitment was really that pressing you might have sent along a deputy. Whether prior to 1 July (the year actually under review) or since the Board was explicitly charged with holding the Governor and MPC to account. and the Board controls all the nominations for (re)appointments. The Board was, after all, complicit in barring people with actual relevant expertise from serving as external MPC members.

No doubt the failure of anyone from the Board to show up just speaks to how – whatever it says on paper – the Bank is still a totally management (Orr) dominated place.

Then there was Orr’s transparent attempt to talk out the clock, reducing available question time with a long opening statement (with not even a hint of contrition over the Bank’s monetary policy failures). Mercifully, the committee chair eventually told him to cut it short.

If the Opposition’s questioning was never very focused or sustained, to his credit National’s Andrew Bayly did attempt a question about the appointment of Rodger Finlay – then chair of NZ Post, majority owner of Kiwibank, subject to Reserve Bank prudential regulation – to the “transition board” as part of the move to the new governance model from 1 July this year. As regular readers will know, the Reserve Bank has been doing everything possible to avoid giving straight answers on the Finlay matter, and Orr was at it again on Wednesday. First, he attempted to deflect responsibility to the Minister of Finance as the person who finally makes Board appointments (even though documents the Minister and The Treasury have already released make it clear that management and the previous Board were actively involved in the selection of people to recommend for the new Board) and then he fell back on the twin claim that there was no conflict of interest as regards the “transition board” (which had no formal powers) and that if there were any conflicts they had been removed by the time Finlay was on the Board itself.

There was no follow-up from Bayly, who could and should have made the point that when Finlay was appointed to the “transition board”, in October 2021, he was also appointed to the full Reserve Bank Board from 1 July 2022, and at that time – indeed right up to mid-June this year when Cabinet was considering his reappointment to the NZ Post role – there had been no suggestion that Finlay would not remain in his NZ Post role while serving on the Reserve Bank Board which would be directly responsible for prudential regulation. Indeed, documents already released reveal that the Bank had told The Treasury and the Minister that they had no concerns about this. It was an egregious appointment, inconceivable in any well-governed country, and yet the Opposition did not pursue the matter and the Governor – the one who likes to boast of his “open and transparent” institution – makes no effort to honestly account for his part in this highly dubious appointment.

If Orr was put under no pressure on the Finlay matter, on monetary policy and related issues he had a clear field. There were no questions at all – nothing for example about the Annual Report (the basis for the hearing) in which climate change featured dozens of times and the inflation outcomes – well outside the target range, on core metrics – got hardly any attention. No suggestion that a simple apology from the Governor and MPC might be in order – not one of those faux ones regretting the shocks the New Zealand economy was now exposed to. It was after all these people who voluntarily took on the role (and pay and prestige) of macro stabilisation and, on this occasion and perhaps with the best will in the world, failed. Just nothing.

And so the field was left to Orr. In his opening remarks we had this

Which is just spin. He seems to want to claim credit for New Zealand’s low unemployment rate even though (a) as he often and rightly points out the Reserve Bank has no influence on the average rate of unemployment or the NAIRU (which are functions of structural policy), and (b) the extremely overheated labour market and unsustainably low unemployment rate are a big part of our current excessively high core inflation problem. In the end, aggregate excess demand is the fault of the Reserve Bank. not something they should be claiming as a “good thing”, let alone seeking credit for. (In their better moments – eg the MPS – they know this, talking about the labour market being unsustainably overheated, but then Orr’s spin inclinations take hold). At the peaks of booms, unemployment is always cyclically low (or very low). But often what matters is what needs to be done to get inflation back in check.

And what about that claim on inflation? Well, if he wants to simply say the New Zealand is fortunate not to be integrated to the global gas and LNG market that is fine, but it is a complete distraction from a central bank that is responsible primarily for core inflation in New Zealand. On core inflation – in this case, because it is available and comparable, CPI inflation ex food and energy – for the year to September (latest NZ data) we are no better than the middle of the pack.

An honest central bank Governor, committed to serious scrutiny, might better say that we are in a quite unfortunate situation, for which the Reserve Bank itself has to take much of the responsibility. Instead we get more spin

“Even with the expected slowdown in the period ahead, it is anticipated that the level of employment will remain high.”

which is no doubt true, but the Bank’s own forecast is for a sharp rise in the rate of unemployment.

But Orr is more in the realm of minimising (his) responsibility. In recent months we’ve had the absurd and unsupported claim that without the war inflation would have been in the target range. We’ve also had the suggestion – heard a couple of times from his chief economist – that perhaps half the inflation is overseas-sourced. This claim also appears to be undocumented, and simply doesn’t stack up: core inflation is the Bank’s responsibility, the New Zealand domestic economy is badly overheated, and the whole point of floating the exchange rate decades ago was so that even if other countries had increases in their core inflation rates, New Zealand did not need to suffer that inflation. We had our own independent monetary policy, and a central bank responsible for New Zealand core inflation outcomes.

To FEC, Orr ran this claim

It is certainly true that if the Bank had begun to raise the OCR a little earlier in 2021, it would not have made that much difference to inflation (core or headline) now. 25 basis points in each of May and July 2021 might together have lowered headline inflation by September 2022 by half a percent at most. But in this framing – also in their recent Review – there are two elements that are little better than dishonest. Purely with the benefit of hindsight (their own criterion) it is now clear that monetary policy should not have been eased at all in 2020, and that monetary policy should have been run much tighter over the period since then. Had that been done, core inflation would have stayed inside the target range. Now that might be an impossible standard, but that is simply to point out what I noted in my post on the Review was the major weakness: there was just no sign the Bank or MPC had devoted any serious thought or research to trying to understand what they (and everyone else) missed in 2020 and 2021. But they were responsible.

And then there is the continual effort to blame food and energy price shocks, in a way that simply flies in the face of the data. Headline inflation is the year to September was 7.2 per cent. Excluding food and energy, it was 6.2 per cent. 6.2 per cent is a long long way above the top of the Bank’s target rage – more than 4 percentage points above the target midpoint the Minister of Finace requires them to focus on.

And as I pointed out in a post debunking the “war is to blame” claim, core inflation was very high, the labour market well overheated, before the war.

Oh, and Orr was at it again with his claim – apparently intended as a defence – that

I’ve shown before that 7 OECD central banks (out of 20 or so) had started raising their policy interest rates before the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (Orr seems to want to claim credit for stopping the LSAP but (a) he has claimed that by 2021 it wasn’t having much effect anyway and b) the Funding for Lending programme carried on all the way to this month). And since each central bank is responsible for its own country’s (core) inflation, a simple ranking of who moved when reveals precisely nothing. As early as the end of 2020, only 8 OECD central banks were experiencing annual core inflation (ex food and energy) higher than New Zealand (quite a few with higher inflation targets than New Zealand, including chaotic Turkey). By mid 2021, there were only 7 central banks with higher core inflation than New Zealand (mostly the countries that began raising policy interest rates earlier than New Zealand). New Zealand’s core inflation then was already materially higher than that in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the euro area (but behind the US, and I find the Fed’s approach to monetary policy last year quite impossible to defend).

Overall it is hard to find any OECD central banks that have done a good job over the last couple of years (the central bank of Korea looks like one candidate for a fairly good rating). It is quite possible – current core inflation might suggest it – that the Reserve Bank of New Zealand has done no worse than average. But that isn’t ever the spin we get from the Governor, for whom responsibility let alone contrition seem like words from a foreign language for which no dictionary was available. No one is suggesting the last 3 years have been other than hard and challenging for central banks, but that is nothing to what they are proving for the people who have suffered – and will suffer over the next year or two – from their misjudgments, well-intentioned as they may well have been.

Orr’s behaviour has been given licence by the Minister of Finance – reappointing him despite his poor record on multiple counts. But it would have been nice if Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee had ever shown a bit more vigour and focus in holding the feet of the Governor and his colleagues to the fire, instead of all wishing each other Merry Christmas and heading off for the holidays.

Making stuff up and misleading Parliament

November 4, 2022March 27, 2023 Michael Reddell Adrian Orr, inflation

Legislatures typically take a dim view of efforts to mislead them or their committees. This is from our own Parliament’s online “How Parliament works”

The Governor of the Reserve Bank seems just not to care, treating Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee with as much contempt, and disregard for basic standards of honesty and care as some juvenile delinquent.

Yesterday the Governor and a couple of offsiders fronted up to the FEC, as they always do, following the release of the six-monthly Financial Stability Report. Were one of a particularly generous cast of mind one might almost have felt a little sorry for the Governor at times: the report was about financial stability not monetary policy, and yet most of the serious questioning was more about monetary policy, and then there was the old game of MPs attempting to get officials to say something (whether on tax, spending, immigration policy or whatever) that helps their party in its partisan jostling, even if such matters were nothing to do with the Bank’s own responsibilities. But Orr is paid a lot of money and given a lot of power, and doesn’t even make an attempt to treat elected MPs – from whose legislation flows his power and his office – with even a modicum of respect. As it was, no one forced him to answer monetary policy questions – he responded to most of them by referring MPs to their internal review of the last five years of monetary policy, to be released next week. But when he chose to answer, he had some fundamental obligation to give straight answers, not trail red herrings and other outright spin (or worse) across the path.

Orr has form. Last December, he fronted up for the Bank’s Annual Review and he and a senior offsider actively misled the committee about senior staff turnover (something that became very clear very quickly). It took a little longer, and an OIA request, to show that he had also actively misled the committee with claims that the Bank had done modelling of its own about the (supposed) climate change threat to financial stability, when in fact they’d done none.

You can watch the full hearing here, or you read an account of the relevant bits here. Orr was on the backfoot over the stewardship of monetary policy – and there is at least an arguable connection to financial stability (more so to individual financial stress) given the cycle in both interest rates and house prices, and the likely cycle in unemployment). There are some things Orr (and the MPC) can and should be held accountable for – floating exchange rates mean that what happens with inflation in New Zealand is largely a New Zealand monetary policy (passive or active) choice – and others that the central bank has never been expected to counter (the most obvious example is the price effect of GST increases, but you could think too of exogenous shocks like sudden oil price changes).

Orr’s first claim in his defence was that New Zealand has one of the “lower inflation rates in the OECD”. That is probably defensible. The ways CPIs are calculated differs across countries but on the headline numbers reported by the OECD for the year to September 2022 there were eight OECD countries with lower inflation rates than New Zealand’s 7.2 per cent (and Australia’s was almost the same at 7.3 per cent). Even if one were to treat the euro-area countries as a single unit (they all have the same monetary policy), the picture doesn’t change much. Not, of course, that we should care too much what inflation rates other countries have when we are so far from target – the exchange rate was floated 37 years ago to give us effective monetary policy independence – but when a bunch of countries have made similar mistakes (not that Orr yet concedes to regretting anything), it is better to be on the less-bad side of the pack.

But not all countries experience the same shocks the same way. Wars, rumours of war, and associated sanctions/boycotts etc have affected energy prices in particular this year. No one has ever expected inflation targeting central banks to prevent the direct price effects of immediate energy price shocks – indeed, mandates (including in NZ) have often explicitly urged central banks to “look through” such effects and focus or core measures and/or any spillover into generalised future inflation).

The CPI ex food and energy is the most commonly used measure for international comparisons of core inflation (not because it is ideal, but because it exists), and is well-suited this year when fuel and (to a lesser extent) food have been in the spotlight in the context of the Russian invasion etc. Some countries are very very heavily exposed to changes in gas prices in particular, and others (notably including New Zealand which for better or worse is not linked into a global LNG supply chain) are not. But here is how CPI ex food and energy inflation for the year to September looked (chart scale truncated – Turkey is worse than that).

New Zealand? Middle of the pack, and almost identical to the numbers for Australia and the United States (a bit higher than the UK, and a lot higher than the euro-area). This is closer to the stuff central banks individually are responsible for.

But this is really just scene-setting. Orr’s most egregious claim – and it was particularly egregious for being repeated twice perhaps 40 minutes apart – was that for New Zealand’s inflation to have been inside the target range now, the Bank would have had to have forecast the Russian invasion back in 2020.

It was just a mind-boggling claim – not that any MP on the FEC seemed to be alert enough to notice. It seemed to be implying that if we abstracted from the direct price effects of the war, inflation would otherwise be in the 1 to 3 per cent per annum target range. But here is what those data show, using the SNZ exclusions covering both fuel individually and fuel and food.

For the year to September [2021], all those exclusion measure of inflation were still in excess of 6 per cent, more than double the rate of inflation envisaged by the very top of the target range.

Oh, and when did the war start? The invasion began on 24 February. The March quarter CPI is centred on mid-February, and all those exclusion measures were already between 5.7 and 6 per cent by then. Before the war began. Now, it is certainly true that oil prices had risen in the preceding months as rumours of war mounted but (a) that wasn’t until late last year, and b) these are exclusion measures (ie excluding the direct effects of higher fuel prices). And the best indicator of domestic cyclical stress – the unemployment rate was already at 3.2 per cent in the December quarter last year (and again in March), also before the war began.

And what about more analytical measures of core inflation here in New Zealand?

For what it is worth, the highest rate of quarterly inflation on these core measures had already been recorded in the March quarter CPI, which (need I remind you) is centred on 15 February (most prices are surveyed mid-quarter), before the war began. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the worst of the (core) inflation was around the time the unemployment rate was falling to its lowest level (at a time when monetary policy was being particularly slow to act – recall that it was not until February that the OCR got back to pre-Covid levels). High core inflation – in annual terms on these measures now between 5 and 7 per cent – is a domestic phenomenon, for which monetary policy is (by default, being the last mover) responsible.

Of course, Orr knows all this (and, linking back to that parliamentary document, ought reasonably to have known it – having chosen to take the job, and accepted the $830000 salary for it). And his staff knew all this. The Governor was appearing at FEC remotely from his office, and it would have been easy for his economics staff to have slipped him a note saying “Governor, you really can’t make those claims about inflation and the war”, but (a) Orr is known to be intolerant of dissent and correction, and (b) if perhaps some brave staffer did slip him such a note, he went ahead and repeated the big and preposterous claim again later in the same appearance.

There are many many reasons why Orr should not be reappointed but simply making out stuff, that he knows – and certainly should know if he holds that job – to be simply false is not one of the least of his offences. Misleading Parliament really should matter, if we care at all about good governance any longer. On the further evidence of yesterday’s performance Orr seems not to. Just imagine if one of the institutions he regulated tried that sort of performance on him.

Inflation and monetary policy

October 19, 2022October 19, 2022 Michael Reddell inflation, Monetary policy

In a post a couple of weeks ago I outlined some reasons for scepticism about the case for increasing the OCR by 50 basis points specifically at the then-forthcoming OCR review. My point was mostly about the data hiatus – the OCR decision would be taking place almost 3 months after the most recent CPI data and more than 2 months since the last main labour market data. It seemed (and seems) foolish for the MPC to stick to its schedule of review dates, including the long summer holiday it will give itself after next month’s MPS. It remains highly problematic that New Zealand governments have penny-pinched on core statistics and as a result we have such slow and infrequent macro data (we got the September quarter CPI inflation data yesterday, Switzerland by contrast released September month data on 3 October).

But there were also some considerations in the macroeconomics

the reasonably long lags in monetary policy (the OCR really only having been aggressively tightened fairly recently)
weakening commodity prices,
relatively subdued nominal GDP growth, among the very lowest in the OECD,
and some indications in core inflation measures that at least things had not been getting worse (continuing to spiral upwards)

All the inflation rates were, of course, unacceptably high.

Of course, as was universally expected the MPC did raise the OCR by 50 basis points in their October review. And yesterday we got the September quarter CPI data, which took by surprise all those who’d published forecasts (and, I guess, almost any of us who’d heard their headline forecasts). The outcome was higher than the Reserve Bank’s last published forecast, but since that forecast was more than two months old and anyway isn’t broken down into headline and core components – and they’d given us no sense of an update in the October review – not too much weight should now be put on that particular aspect of the surprise.

I don’t do short-term components forecasting, so what follows isn’t about the extent of the surprise (immediate prior expectations vs outcomes) but about what to make of the actual outcomes and current inflation. First, I’ll step through and update the charts from the earlier post.

These two – commonly used abroad – core inflation measures might suggest a little room for encouragement. Both quarterly changes are still high (far too high), and the gap between them is unprecedented, but they both look as though they could be past their respective peaks.

Monetary policy always takes time to work, and as this Reserve Bank chart reminds us it was only late last year that new mortgage rates really started rising.

But then there are these two exclusion measures

neither of which offers any reassurance.

And the picture here is similar

and from these monthly food price components, a bit of a mixed bag, but at least nowhere near as bad now as a few months ago.

The building market has been one of “hottest” areas of the economy and the labour market, with staggering rates of increases

Those numbers are still high but seem to be beginning to move in the right direction.

And then there are rents. Rents now make up just over 10 per cent of the CPI. On a quarterly basis the rents item in the CPI increased by 1.2 per cent in the September quarter, as high (equally high) as it has been this cycle. On an annual basis, this is the picture

In the CPI rents are included using a stock measure – the rate of increase in the average rents being paid by all tenants. And there is a certain logic to that, but we also know that new rents are falling (not just the growth rate slowing, but the level of rents dropping)

The flow measure – new rents – is (naturally) noisier but it (also naturally) leads the stock measure. There is a lag from monetary policy to the CPI for numerous reasons, but one is the choice to include average prices rather than marginal prices for rents. New rents – the ones policy and market developments affect most immediately – have now been falling for several months.

For completeness, I’m including this chart of the Reserve Bank’s sectoral factor model measure of core inflation.

It used to be the Reserve Bank’s preferred measure (and mine too – I championed it when I was still at the Bank), and it is probably still the single best guide to historical core inflation, but (in the nature of the technique) it is prone to big and lagging revisions when inflation is moving a lot. When the September 2021 CPI came out last October the model estimated core inflation then to have been 2.7 per cent (high, but still inside the target range), but the model – learning from what has happened since – now reckons core inflation last September was already up to 3.8 per cent. At this point, there really isn’t any information (good or ill) in the latest quarterly observations (which in any case use annual rather than quarterly data).

Moving beyond the specific inflation data series, there are a few other considerations that seem relevant to me. The first is to remember the lags (something notably absent from any of the media coverage I heard or read). There are at least two that are relevant. First, the September quarter CPI is really a mid-August measure: there are some noisy components – notably petrol – sampled weekly, and food is captured monthly but the whole thing is centred on 15 August, which is now a bit more than two months ago. So we (and the RB) aren’t exactly using real-time data. And second, the OCR takes time to work – this isn’t in dispute and shows up in all the modelling work – and on 15 August the OCR was 2.5 per cent (it was raised at the MPS a couple of days later). In fact – and it is easy to forget this now – until 12 April, the OCR was no higher than 1 per cent, the level (designed to be somewhat stimulatory) it had been at immediately prior to Covid. Now, of course markets and market pricing anticipated OCR increases to come to some extent, but the market (let alone firms and households) have been repeatedly surprised, constantly revising up their view of what OCR would be required.

I’m also not about to take a view on what the Reserve Bank could or should do in November. Market economists have to, I don’t. There is another round of really important labour market data due out in a couple of weeks (of which the most important bits should be the employment and unemployment numbers rather than wages). Of course, it lags too – centred on mid-August (and I really don’t understand why a household survey collected by phone within a quarter can’t be processed much more quickly than SNZ manages) – but it will still represent an addition to our knowledge. If, for example, the unemployment rate were to have dropped further, the argument for a big OCR increase would inevitably strengthen, all else equal – people will cut central banks less slack now than they might have if we were dealing with core inflation at, say, 3.5 per cent.

But is always going to tempting to just ignore the lags, even after increases in the OCR of unprecedented pace this year. And the lags are real, the lags matter. Robert MacCulloch, macroeconomics professor at Auckland, yesterday reminded us of Milton Friedman’s take on that issue almost 55 years ago.

There was a time for 75 or even perhaps 100 basis point OCR increases – last November or February perhaps – but for now it is much less clear that now is one of those times (and few if any of those now calling for such large increases now were calling for them then).

Of course, it doesn’t help that the MPC chooses to take a long summer holiday. That really should be revisited now.

And just one last graph, since air travel prices were a non-trivial influence in yesterday’s headline (and exclusion) measures. More than a little noise in those series.

A canary in the coalmine?

September 21, 2022September 21, 2022 Michael Reddell inflation, Monetary policy

A couple of days ago, I put this chart and brief comment on Twitter

I added “I do not think nom GDP targeting is generally superior to inflation targeting for NZ, but recent outcomes (latest annual 5.9%) are at least one reason for a little caution about further aggressive OCR increases”.

There is a long history of people writing about nominal GDP targeting (it was being championed in some of the literature before inflation targeting was even a thing). I’ve written about it a few times (including here and here) and just this morning I noticed a new commentary from Don Kohn, former vice-chair of the Federal Reserve looking (sceptically) at some of the issues. No central bank has shifted to nominal GDP targeting (whether in levels or growth rates) but a fair number of people (including Kohn) will suggest that there may still be useful information in developments in nominal GDP – something to keep at least one eye on.

Almost every piece of economic data has been made harder to interpret over the last couple of years by Covid. In my chart, the eye immediately tends to go to the unprecedented fall (in 2020) and unprecedented rebound following that. But my eye next went to what wasn’t there: the most recent rate of increase (nominal GDP in the June 2022 quarter is estimated to have been 5.9 per cent higher than that in the June 2021 quarter) wasn’t at all out of line with typical experience in the last few decades. It is quite a different picture than we see with headline and core inflation measures. And although Covid has continued to affect economic numbers, last June quarter seemed relatively little affected by Covid here (the Delta outbreak was mid-August), and by the June quarter we were through the worst of the restrictions. Perhaps as importantly for what follows, the June quarter was pretty normal for most other countries too (and the June 2020 quarter was pre-Omicron disruptions).

One upside of New Zealand’s slow publication of macroeconomic data is that when our GDP numbers are finally published, pretty much everyone else’s are available for comparison. And although people often note (fairly) that nominal GDP numbers are published with a longer lag than inflation numbers, we are also now in the long New Zealand hiatus where it is two months since we last saw an inflation number, and another month until we get another one. The MPC makes its next OCR decision before that.

So how did New Zealand’s estimated nominal GDP growth for the year from the June quarter last year to the June quarter compare with the experience of other OECD economies? Here I’m focused on places having their own monetary policies, and so show the euro-area rather than the individual countries in that area. I’m also going to leave Turkey off my charts – mostly to keep them more readable, in a context where they are running a crazy monetary experiment and have recorded nominal GDP growth of 115 per cent in the last year.

Nominal GDP growth in (fairly low inflation) Norway went sky-high because the invasion of Ukraine etc has sent oil and (especially) gas prices very high.

But look at New Zealand: we had the fourth lowest rate of nominal GDP growth in that year among all the OECD countries (monetary areas). And two of those below us – Switzerland and Japan – had not only not eased monetary policy in 2020, but had spent years grappling with such low inflation they’d needed persistently negative policy interest rates.

Absolute comparisons like this can mislead a bit. Some countries have higher inflation targets than others – Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Colombia for example target 3 per cent inflation, and have historically had somewhat higher nominal GDP growth rates consistent with those higher targets. But I could take the Latin American countries (poor enough that they are really OECD diversity hires) off the chart and it wouldn’t much change the picture as it affects New Zealand and the countries we often compare ourselves to. In Australia, for example, nominal GDP increased by almost 12 per cent in the year to June.

The last quarter before Covid was December 2019. Across the OECD as a whole (and in New Zealand) core inflation at the time was generally a bit under the respective (core) inflation targets, and many central banks had been cutting policy rates that year.

Here is nominal GDP growth (as now recorded – GDP revisions are a thing) for the same group of countries for the last pre-Covid year.

New Zealand’s rate of nominal GDP growth then was a bit higher than the median OECD country, perhaps consistent with the fact that our population growth rate was faster than those for most advanced countries. But our nominal GDP growth rate that year was also a bit higher than the average rate New Zealand had experienced in the previous decade or more. (Note Norway again; not even the staunchest advocates of nominal GDP targeting recommend it for countries with terms of trade shocks on that scale.)

The next chart shows annual growth in nominal GDP for the latest period less annual growth to the end of 2019. The idea is to see how much acceleration there has been (with the sort of lift in core inflation we’ve seen across most of the world all else equal one might expect to have seen quite a lift in nominal GDP growth).

Fair to say that New Zealand stands out somewhat. In the year to June 2022 New Zealand was the only OECD country to have had nominal GDP growth lower than in the immediate pre-Covid period. And if our terms of trade have fallen a bit in the last year, that was still in a context where (NZD) export prices were up 17 per cent in the most recent year, with import prices up even more.

I am genuinely not sure what to make of these pictures and the New Zealand comparisons specifically. If you look across that last chart you would have little hesitation in suggesting that a lot of monetary policy tightening (interest rate rises) has been warranted in the advanced economy world. For the median country, nominal GDP growth has accelerated by 6 percentage points. But in New Zealand, nominal GDP growth has slowed.

And if one were a champion of nominal GDP levels targeting, here is New Zealand’s nominal GDP over the last decade

Things have (inevitably) been bumpier in the Covid period, but there is nothing there suggesting things have gone off track in recent times (although the mix has changed, with less population growth and more inflation).

The usual fallback position when anyone invokes nominal GDP numbers is to note (entirely fairly) that revisions to GDP are very much to be expected. Perhaps we will find, five years hence, that nominal GDP growth in the year to June 2022 was really a couple of percentage points higher than SNZ currently estimate. That would be a pretty large change for a single year (as distinct from historical levels revisions as data collections and methodologies change). But – if every other country’s estimates didn’t change – one could revise up New Zealand’s rate of nominal GDP growth by 2 percentage points and we would still be equal lowest (with Japan – where they are still running avowedly expansionary monetary policy) on that chart showing the acceleration in the rate of nominal GDP growth.

Two other considerations are worth noting. It isn’t true that our Reserve Bank was particularly early in raising the OCR again – about six of these countries were ahead of them – but market interest rates had already risen quite a bit last year in anticipation and we had had one of the frothiest housing market during the Covid period, and are now somewhat ahead of the pack in seeing house prices and house turnover falling away. Even if – as I am – one is sceptical of house price wealth effects, housing turnover itself is one (modest) component of GDP. Either way, our subdued nominal GDP growth may be foreshadowing what could be about to happen elsewhere.

Monetary policy is avowedly run on forecasts – that would be true (or the rhetoric) even if one were targeting nominal GDP growth rather than inflation – and I guess it is always possible that we might see an acceleration of nominal GDP growth from here, that might support further Reserve Bank tightening from here. Perhaps, but it is difficult to see quite where this acceleration might come from.

I have been a little more sceptical than some in recent months of quite how much further the OCR is really likely to need to be raised, but I am not drawing strong policy conclusions from these data just yet. But they do seem like a straw in the wind that (a) warrants further investigation and (b) might make one somewhat cautious about championing further tightenings, especially in the absence of timely fresh inflation data. Subdued growth in nominal GDP is more or less exactly what one might expect to see if, with a lag, core inflation was already on track to slow, perhaps quite a bit.

A voice from the past

July 26, 2022 Michael Reddell BNZ & Wheeler, inflation, Monetary policy

Various media this morning have given quite a lot of coverage to the new paper released by the NZ Initiative, headed How Central Bank Mistakes After 2019 Led to Inflation. The authors are Bryce Wilkinson of the Initiative and former Reserve Bank Governor (2012-17) Graeme Wheeler – the coverage probably mostly because of the trenchant words from the former Governor, I think the first we have heard from him since he moved back to corporate board land in late 2017.

I’m not one of those who has any particular problem with former Governors and Deputy Governors commenting on what is going on with monetary policy. If it isn’t always common, well we have a fairly thin pool of commentators in New Zealand, and these are hardly ordinary times. The quality of the debate is only likely to be improved by hearing, and challenging/scrutinising, alternative perspectives. We can only hope that one day the Reserve Bank’s own Monetary Policy Committee will learn from that sort of example, instead of continuing to act as some impenetrable monolith, even faced with the inevitable huge uncertainties of macroeconomics and monetary policy. And if Graeme Wheeler was not, to put it mildly, known during his term as Governor for welcoming debate and dissent – internally or externally – I guess we can only say better late than never.

In some ways the Wilkinson/Wheeler collaboration is a curious one. They go back 45 years to when Wilkinson was Wheeler’s boss in the macro area of The Treasury, and have apparently been friends since. But whereas Bryce Wilkinson has long been sceptical of any sort of active monetary policy (I have various emails on file challenging me as to what evidence there is that central bank policy activism has accomplished anything much useful over the years), Wheeler chose to take on the job of central bank Governor under an entirely-standard policy target, put into sharper relief than previously with the addition that the Governor was to be required to focus explicitly on keeping future inflation close to the 2 per cent midpoint of the target range. And there was nothing very unusual or distinctive about the way monetary policy was run on his watch – conventional models, conventional judgements, and in many ways conventional errors. If there were distinctives, they were mostly that Wheeler proved more thin-skinned than your typical central bank Governor or Monetary Policy Committee members (the young or those with short memories may have forgotten Wheeler deploying his entire senior management group to attempt to silence criticisms from BNZ’s Stephen Toplis – several relevant posts here).

The (quite short) paper isn’t specifically focused on New Zealand and our central bank, and consistent with that the authors have secured a Foreword from Bill White, former deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, and then long-serving Chief Economist of the Bank for International Settlements, from which perch he irritated many with his warnings about system fragility in the years leading up to 2008. He is a really smart guy and what he writes is usually worth thinking about, and I’ve enjoyed various stimulating discussions/debates with him over the years. His views today, reflected in the Foreword, still stand out of the mainstream (rightly or wrongly). If he is keen on fiscal consolidation etc across the advanced world, he champions “significant tax increases, particularly on the wealthy”, and while suggesting this would be desirable but politically impossible then suggests that a heavy reliance on monetary policy may pose a threat to democracy itself. White appears to believe that we are on the cusp of a very substantial adjustment, as the public and private debt built-up over the last few decades is sorted out (“we must review carefully our judicial and administrative procedures to ensure the necessary debt restructuring, and there will be a lot of it, will be orderly rather than disorderly”. Perhaps, but it is a long way from debates about how monetary policy has been run in the last 2.5 years or so. (And, for what it is worth, New Zealand has low public debt, and (for ill) its housing debt remains underpinned by governments and councils that refuse to free up land use on the margins of our cities.)

But enough introductory discussion. What should we make of the substance of the note? There is 13 pages of it, but about half is itself scene-setting or largely descriptive stuff. There are bits I might quibble with, bits I strongly agree with (unexpectedly high core inflation is the responsibility of central banks and the results of mistake choices by them – given inflation targets that is close to being a tautology), five big charts. Oh, and this was good to see.

Wheeler and Wilkinson seem to think QE-type operations (including our LSAP) are more effective macroeconomically (for good and ill) than I reckon, but the sheer scale of the losses is a reminder that even if there are some potential benefits, those would need to be weighed against the potential downside risks.

But the heart of the note is in the six points under this introduction

The first is “Central banks became over-confident in their inflation targeting frameworks”.

Much of the discussion of this point could have been written 15 years ago, although even then if there was much to the story it wasn’t so in New Zealand. We grappled with needing interest rates higher than the rest of the world to keep inflation near target, as well as repeated political assaults on whether we had the right target or the right tools.

But the story of the decade prior to Covid, in New Zealand and most other advanced countries, was of central banks struggling to keep inflation UP to the respective targets. New Zealand went for a decade with core inflation never once getting up to the 2 per cent midpoint that Wheeler himself had signed up to target. Now, I think it is probably true that in 2020 and early 2021, many central banks and central bank observers were more focused on the previous decade and its (very real) downside surprises, and not perhaps alert enough to the possibility of (core) inflation rising sharply. But that seems to me to be an importantly different thing to what Wheeler and Wilkinson are arguing.

They end this discussion with this point

But for now I think the evidence is against them. With headline inflation as high as it is, what is striking is how low market-based measures of inflation expectations still are (around 2 per cent here and in the US). The Bank’s own survey of 2 year ahead expectations, at 3.3 per cent in May, is higher than it should be, but probably not disastrously so at this point (and I reckon there is a good chance that the next survey, just being finished now, will show slightly lower numbers). Central banks were slow to act last year, but for now evidence suggests some confidence that they have, and will, acted decisively to keep medium-term inflation in check.

I also reckon that Wheeler and Wilkinson don’t adequately grapple with complexities and uncertainties of the Covid shock. It doesn’t really excuse the slow unwind last year – as, for example, the unemployment rate was falling rapidly – but it certainly makes much more sense of the initial monetary policy easing in 2020. Wheeler faced nothing of the sort during this term.

I had to splutter when I read the second item in their list: “Central banks were over-confident in the models they use to base monetary policy decisions”. Several paragraphs follow making the widely-accepted point that it is hard to work out the size of the output gap at any particular time, or to know with confidence the neutral interest rate. All very true, but who is going to disagree with them on that?

Well, one person who might was Governor Graeme Wheeler over the period from about 2013. He was convinced – quite convinced – that the OCR was a long way below its neutral level, and that large increases would be appropriate to get things back in check. So much so that in late 2013 he was openly asserting (in public) that 200 basis points of OCR increases were coming (any conditionality was very muted). These were the 90 day/OCR forecasts the Bank published while Wheeler was Governor

He was convinced that inflation pressure were building and rate rises would be required. Overconfidently, he started out on his tightening cycle in 2014, got 100 basis points in, and then finally was confronted with the data. The rate increases had to be reversed in pretty short order (and later in his term, the Bank was much more modest in its assertions). Note that although there were a number of central bankers globally who were keen on eventually getting policy rates higher, Wheeler was one of the few to back his model with ill-fated policy rate increases.

And to be fair to today’s central bankers, I haven’t detected an enormous amount of confidence in comments over the last couple of years, but rather (a) a huge amount of uncertainty, and then (b) some really big (but widely-shared) forecasting mistakes.

In the podcast interview that accompanies the research note, Wheeler does show some signs of (belatedly) accepting that he made a mistake. But even then he continues to claim it wasn’t really his fault, that the domestic economy really had been overheating, and that it was all the fault of the inscrutable foreigner (ok, he calls it “tradable inflation”, from the rest of the world.

Very little of this stacks up:

core inflation (whether something like the sectoral core model that the Bank claimed to favour during the Wheeler years or the simple CPI ex food and fuel) was well below the midpoint of the target range throughout the Wheeler term.
Wheeler claims that non-tradables inflation was high but (a) non-tradables inflation always runs higher than tradables, and (b) if one looks at core non-tradables inflation it was at a cyclical low when Wheeler took office, was not much higher when he left office, and was never high enough to be consistent with 2 per cent economywide core inflation, and
Whatever the vagaries of output gap estimates, the unemployment rate lingered high (even at the end above most NAIRU estimates) throughout his term.

But read his press statement from early 2014 and you’ll see someone in the thrall of their model (at the time many people supported the broad direction of policy, but not all – whether outside or inside the Bank).

The third item on the Wheeler/Wilkinson list is “Central banks were excessively optimistic that they could successfully “fine tune” economic activity”. This is a longstanding Wilkinson theme, but is a curious one for Wheeler to have signed up to, given that he signed up to a tighter inflation target (focus on the midpoint) and after 2015 was more focused on getting inflation back up towards target. And, in fairness to our RB, their “least regrets” framework exploicitly recognises the huge amount of uncertainty that was abroad in the Covid era/

The fourth item is “Central banks took their eye of their core responsibilities and focused on issues that were much less central to their roles”. Of course, I agree with them that the Orr Reserve Bank has chased after all sorts of non-core hares (to the list WW provide one might add the “indigenous economies” central bank network), and I’ve been quite critical of that. But I just don’t think the case has compellingly been made that these fripperies really made that much difference to the conduct of policy. Take it all out and in the NZ context, Orr was still as he was, the MPC was weak and muzzled, and the Bank’s forecasts often weren’t that different from those in the private sector. Perhaps the (chosen) distractions made a substantive difference, but there needs to be a stronger case made than WW yet have (and central banks with much more talented Governors and MPC often seem to have made similar monetary policy mistakes to those of the RBNZ).

The fifth item in the list is “Dual mandates for monetary policy create conflicts”. In principle they can, in practice the case simply is not made as regards the last 12-18 months, when both inflation and employment limbs pointed the same way (here and abroad). Arguably they did so in 2020 too, at least on the forecasts/scenarios central banks, including our own, were working with. Forecasting was the biggest failure…….faced with a shock for which there was simply no modern precedent.

The final item on the list is “Did some central banks try too hard to support government political objectives in making judgements about monetary policy?”

The short answer is that WW offer no evidence whatever of anything of the sort, either in New Zealand or other advanced economies. They make this claim

which is probably true in some less developed countries, but do they have any examples in mind in advanced economies or New Zealand? I think not. In New Zealand, MPC members have been reappointed with no scrutiny, and politicians – government or Opposition – seem reluctant to focus on the central bank’s part on the inflation outcomes. There is no sign of any serious pressure on the Bank – not even much sign Grant Robertson cares much. Look at the underwhelming crew he just appointed to the Reserve Bank board – not evidently partisan, just deeply inadequate to the task (including holding the Bank and MPC to account).

And that is it.

In the end there simply isn’t a great deal there. It is good to have more voices sheeting home responsibility for high core inflation to the central banks. If you accept the assignment of responsibility for achieving an objective, you are responsible when things fall short (even if, as Wheeler argues was true of his own stewardship) you’ve done the best job possible with the information to hand at the time. How much that sort of explanation is sufficient to the current situation can and should be debated, but it probably needs much more engagement with data, and forecasts etc, than WW have room for in their piece.

Wheeler and Wilkinson end this way

I largely agree (although would put much more weight on top notch macro and monetary policy expertise, relative to financial markets). But what is noticeable throughout the paper is how little weight they appear to put on transparency or accountability. There is no call for diverse views and perspectives on the MPC, openly testing alternative perspectives, and individually accountable. But I guess – given his onw track record re dissent – such a suggestion would be too much for Graeme Wheeler even now five years safely out of office. It might after all have required more openness to stringent criticisms from people with a view different than the Governor’s

Incidentally I am pleased to see that his attitude to external scrutiny and challenge from former central bankers has moved on a little from his approach just a few years back when he claimed to believe that former staff – surely even more former Governors – owed some vow of omerta to the Bank and its mistakes, whether operational or policy.

croaking cassandra

Economics, public policy, monetary policy, financial regulation, with a New Zealand perspective

inflation