Monetary policy

Cosmetics (can) matter: Labour’s monetary policy proposals

Michael Reddell labour party, Monetary policy

I’ve already written a bit about Labour proposals on monetary policy (here and here) and, for now at least, I don’t want to write anything more about the proposed changes to the decision-making process or the plan to require the Monetary Policy Committee to publish its minutes.  If there are all sorts of issues around the details of how, I haven’t seen anyone objecting to the notion of moving from a single decisionmaker model to a a legislated committee, or objecting to proposals to enhance the transparency of the Bank’s monetary policy.    The Bank was once a leader in some aspects of monetary policy transparency, but is now much more of a laggard.

Where there has been more sceptical comment is around Labour’s proposal to add full employment to the statutory monetary policy objective.    At present, section 8 of the Reserve Bank Act reads as follows:

The primary function of the Bank is to formulate and implement monetary policy directed to the economic objective of achieving and maintaining stability in the general level of prices.

Responding to this aspect of Labour’s announcement hasn’t been made easier by the lack of any specificity: we don’t know (and they may not either) how Labour plans to phrase this statutory amendment.    There are some possible formulations that could really be quite damaging.  But there are others that would probably make little real difference to monetary policy decisionmaking quarter-to-quarter.  Probably each of us would prefer to know in advance what, specifically, Labour plans.  But this is politics, and I’m guessing that there is a range of interests Labour feels the need to manage.  In that climate, specificity might not serve their pre-election ends.  One could get rather precious on this point, but it is worth remembering that there are plenty of other things that may matter at least as much that we currently know little about.  Under current legislation, who becomes the Governor of the Reserve Bank matters quite a lot to shorter-term economic outcomes, and we have no idea who that will be.   The details of the PTA can matter too, and under the governments of both stripes the process leading up to the signing of new PTAs has been highly secretive (often even after the event).  For the moment, we probably just have to be content with the “direction of travel” Labour has outlined.

In some quarters, Labour’s plans for adding a full employment objective have been described as “cosmetic”, as if to describe them thus is to dismiss them.    That is probably a mistake.  When I went hunting, I found that cosmetics have been around for perhaps 5000 years (rather longer than central banks).   People keep spending scarce resources on them for, apparently, good reasons.     Why?  They can, as it were, accentuate the positive or eliminate the negative –  highlighting features the wearer wants to draw attention to, or covering up the unsightly or unwanted marks of ageing.    They (apparently) accomplish things for the wearer.

What is the relevance of all this to monetary policy?  Well, there has been a long-running discontent with monetary policy in New Zealand, especially (but not exclusively) on the left.  In the 28 years since the Act was passed there has not yet been an election in which some reasonably significant party was not campaigning to change either the Act or the PTA.  We haven’t seen anything like it in other advanced countries.   Personally, I think much of the discontent has been wrongheaded or misplaced –  the real medium-term economic performance problems of New Zealand have little or nothing to do with the Reserve Bank –  and many of the solutions haven’t been much better (in the 1990s, eg, Labour was campaigning to change the target to a range of -1 to 3 per cent and NZ First wanted to target the inflation rates of our trading partners, whatever they were).     But that doesn’t change the fact that there has been discontent –  and more than is really desirable.

I’m quite clear that there is no long-run trade-off adverse trade-off between achieving and maintaining a moderate inflation rate (the sorts of inflation rates we’ve targeted since 1990) and unemployment.  And since something akin to general price stability generally helps the economy function better (clearer signals, fewer tax distortions etc) there is at least the possibility that maintaining stable price might help keep unemployment a little lower than otherwise.  Milton Friedman argued for that possibility.

But I don’t think that is really the issue here.

Because it is not as if there are no other possible connections between monetary policy and unemployment.   Pretty much every analyst and policymaker recognises that there can be short-term trade-offs between inflation and unemployment (or excesss capacity more generally –  but here I’m focusing on unemployment).   Those trade-offs aren’t always stable, even in the short-term, or predictable, but they are there.    Thus, getting inflation down in the 1980s and early 1990s involved a sharp, but temporary, increase in the unemployment rate.  That was all but inescapable.  And when the unemployment rate was extremely low in the years just prior to 2008, that went hand in hand with core inflation rising quite a bit.  Monetary policy decisions will typically have unemployment consequences.    Unelected technocrats are messing, pretty seriously, with the lives of ordinary people.   It is all in a good cause (and I mean that totally seriously with not a hint of irony intended) but the costs, and disruptions, are real –  and typically don’t fall on the policymaker (or his/her advisers).

And it isn’t as if monetary policymakers are typically oblivious to the pain.   There was plenty of gallows humour around the Reserve Bank in the disinflation years, a reflection of that unease.  And yet often the official rhetoric is all about inflation –  as if, in some sense, what look like relatively small fluctuations around a relatively low rate of inflation, matter more than lives disrupted by the scourge of unemployment.

So perhaps that is why cosmetics can matter, and serve useful ends even in areas like monetary policy.     There isn’t that much difference, on average over time, in how the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Reserve Bank of Australia, or the Federal Reserve (or various other inflation targeting advanced country central banks) conduct monetary policy.   They each tend to react to incoming data in much the same way (again, on average over time).   In the financial markets, they probably each have much the same degree of “credibility” (people think the respective central banks are serious about their stated inflation targets).   And yet my impression is that the Federal Reserve, for example, talks much more about unemployment than the Reserve Bank of New Zealand does.   The Fed gives the impression that (a) it is aware, and (b) that it cares.  In the last decade or so at least, that has been much less so here.

In New Zealand, the problem has been compounded by a sustained period when the Reserve Bank turned out to have run monetary policy too tightly (including two tightening phases that had to be quickly reversed).  Over that period –  and today –  the unemployment rate (the number of people unemployed  – the phrase I always used to encourage staff to prefer when we replied to correspondence) has been persistently above estimates of the NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment).

The Reserve Bank is entrusted with a great deal of discretion, in an area riddled with uncertainty and imprecision.  We don’t know exactly what the NAIRU is (nor does the Bank).  We don’t even know what “true” core inflation is, let alone what it will be over the 12-24 months ahead, the sort of period today’s monetary policy decisions affect. That makes signalling and symbols perhaps more important than otherwise.

It is also why lines like

“It is mathematically impossible to target two variables with one instrument.” 

while formally true, aren’t really the point here.   Voters –  or some subsets of them –  simply want to know that those other things matter –  and matter quite a lot –  to the people wielding the power.    And as there is quite a connection between monetary policy choices and fluctuations in the numbers of people unemployed, they aren’t irrational to do so.    After all, they might well note that the old argument –  “well if unemployment is too high, inflation will undershoot the target and the Bank will quickly correct that” doesn’t sound so compelling after years of an undershoot, and years when unemployment has lingered quite high.

There is a whole variety of ways to send the signals:

  • one can tinker with the PTA again (most of the changes of 28 years have had this quality about them –  including for example the current references to unnecessary variability in output, interest and exchange rates),
  • one can choose a Governor who is known to care (although typically technocrats won’t be much known at all),
  • one could require the Bank to publish estimates of the NAIRU and report regularly on how monetary policy was affecting the gap between actual unemployment and the NAIRU,
  • the Bank could regularly write about, or give speeches, highlighting the importance of unemployment (gaps) in its thinking, and expressing discomfort whenever unemployment has to be temporarily high.

Or one could tinker with section 8 of the Act and add a full employment reference.

Perhaps Labour actually has a combination of these sorts of approaches in mind.  Amending the Act is isolation might not do much (even in signalling and symbolism) in isolation, but it might encourage the appointment of a Governor who took seriously the concern (after all the Bank’s Board has to operate under the Act), and it might encourage the Governor, the Bank, and any future Monetary Policy Committee to address these issues more directly in their own communications.

And at a political level, if they are serious about prioritising full employment as one  over-arching goal of economic policy (which seems a worthy goal to me, even if there are good and bad ways of pursuing it), a change to the Reserve Bank Act might also signal –  what the monetary policy analysts already know – that in the medium to longer-term monetary policy and the Reserve Bank are no obstacle to full employment.

As I noted last week, in 1950 the incoming National government amended the Reserve Bank Act to specify an objective for monetary policy as follows

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

Something similar, in today’s language, seems at worst unobjectionable to me.  At best, it might strengthen public confidence in the Bank and encourage the Bank and its incoming Governor and Deputy Governor to convey with more conviction how seriously they take the overall economic environment –  real firms, real people –  within which the Bank exercises its considerable discretionary power.

Reflecting on all this over the weekend, another parallel struck me.  In wartime, the priority is to win the war.  In many ways it is as simple as that.  A single objective.   And yet combat generals, delegated power by political leaders, who become known as reckless with the lives of their men eventually forfeit trust, corroding the loyalty of those who serve them (and those who appoint them).   Wars involve losses of life, often heavy losses. No general can take on the role without being ready to see young men lose their lives, perhaps in very large numbers.  And yet –  at least in a free society –  we don’t want generals who are indifferent to the cost.  We want them to spend lives as if each one were precious.  Soldiers who believe that of their generals probably fight with more conviction and determination.  And societies give leeway and respect to those generals, allowing them to lead the battles that, in time, win the war.   It isn’t a dual objective –  in the end societies do what they need to to survive and prevail –  but it isn’t irrelevant either.

 

Possible Reserve Bank reforms: some reactions

Michael Reddell labour party, Monetary policy, Reserve Bank

Some of the media reaction to talk –  from both the government and the Labour Party –  of possible changes to the Reserve Bank Act  has been a bit surprising.  One leading journalist behind a paywall summed up both the review Steven Joyce has requested and Labour’s proposals as “utter balderdash”, apparently just because there are more important issues politicians should be addressing.  No doubt there are –  housing, the languishing tradables sector, non-existent productivity growth and so on –  but competent governments, backed by a large public service, can usually manage more than one thing at a time.    And although there are plenty of details to debate on Reserve Bank governance, they aren’t exactly divisive ideological issues.   A parliamentary under-secretary or Associate Minister handled most of the details of the 1989 Reserve Bank Act, in a government that did a great deal of other (often more important) stuff.

Bernard Hickey’s story on the government’s review and Labour’s proposals is headed Monetary Policy Reforms a Mirage.     That could be so.  If National is re-elected, they might advance no governance reforms.  Or they might just legislate for something very like the sort of internal committee that, in various shapes and forms, has been the forum in which the Governor made OCR decisions ever since the OCR was introduced.  But apparently at his post-Cabinet press conference, the Prime Minister –  who had rejected earlier Treasury advice in this area in 2012 –  opened up the possibility of a committee not just composed of insiders.

Meanwhile, English hinted Treasury might look at whether a rate-setting committee could include non-Reserve Bank personal. That would be a matter for the review, he said.

Beginning a process of discussing reform options tends to put a range of issues and options on the table.

The sort of decision-making and governance reforms being advanced by Labour and the Greens would be most unlikely to be “simply a mirage”.     There are number of concerns that what Labour is proposing does not go far enough, but again they are probably best seen as the starting point for a more detailed review if/when Labour and the Greens take office.  There is a risk that it could all come to not very much.   After all, even over the last 15 years the Reserve Bank has had a couple of Governor-appointed outsiders involved in the advice and decisionmaking process –  the Prime Minister’s brother is one of them at present –  and that hasn’t made much difference at all.  And requirements to publish minutes/votes can be subverted too.      But that it is why the appointment of the new Governor is so important.  If Labour and Greens are serious about reforming the way the Reserve Bank operates,  then if they become government they need to move quickly to find a person (perhaps a top team) they have confidence in, to work with The Treasury and the government to implement legislative reforms, and to lead the internal process changes to make the new, more open, vision a reality.    If they are serious about greater openness, they need to ensure they have a Governor who shares that reforming vision.   Such a Governor could make a considerable difference even if, for example, the new Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) were to have a majority of executive members.

In some ways, much the same goes for the, less substantively important, proposal to add some sort of full employment aspiration/objective to the statutory goal for monetary policy.    I’ve described it as virtue-signalling, but on reflection that might be slightly unfair.  In the narrow context of the Reserve Bank Act, it is probably about right –  if the Bank has had things a bit tight over the last few years, leaving unemployment higher than it needed to be, then often enough over the life of the Act, the unemployment rate has been below the NAIRU.   Changing the words of section 8 of the Act in isolation won’t make much difference. After all, Australia and the United States have wording Labour prefers, and yet the cyclical behaviour of their economies hasn’t, on average over time, been much different from New Zealand’s.

So I’m sure there is a bit of pure product-differentiation about Labour’s proposal in this regard.  That isn’t unusual. Most changes to the Policy Targets Agreements over the years –  from both sides of politics –  have been more about product differentiation than substance, about scratching itches rather than making much difference to how monetary policy is actually run.  For Labour there is probably is some perceived need to differentiate, and a desire to campaign (and govern?) on a whole-of-government commitment to promoting and facilitating full employment.   That is an unquestionably worthy goal.    If monetary policy choices aren’t going to make very much difference to the medium or long-term rate of unemployment, they can (and have) made quite a difference in the shorter term.  So one way of telling Labour’s story is that they want the word to get out to the public that they are committed to (medium-term) full employment, and they want the public to know that the Bank isn’t in any sense an obstacle to that, and to hear the Bank talking of the importance of the issue.  These are real people’s lives.   I noted yesterday

So the problem typically hasn’t been that the Reserve Bank doesn’t care about unemployment –  although they don’t mention it often, and there is little sense in their rhetoric of visceral horror at waste of lives and resources when unemployment is higher than it needs to be.

They probably should be talking about it more, with conviction.  The legitimacy of independent public agencies depends on part of people believing that those entities have the public interest at heart.  And everyone knows –  central banks acknowledge –  that in the shorter-term their choices do have (sometimes painful) implications for the numbers of people unemployed in New Zealand.  At a bloodless technocratic level, I’ve suggested Labour could amend the Act to require the Bank to regularly report on its estimate of the NAIRU, and how monetary policy is affecting the gap between the actual unemployment rate and the NAIRU.  But this isn’t just a bloodless technocratic concern.

So again, getting the right Governor matters –  someone who will talk convincingly and engagingly as if what they are about affects ordinary people, including those at the margins (vulnerable to unemployment and the resulting dislocation to their lives).

So, from the perspective of both strands of the Labour reform proposal, my concrete suggestion to them is that if they lead a new government after the election, they should quickly pass a one (substantive) clause amendment to the Reserve Bank Act.

Section 40 of the Act at present reads

40 Governor

(1) There shall be a Governor of the Bank who shall be appointed by the Minister on the recommendation of the Board.

(2) The Governor shall be the Chief Executive of the Bank.

Simply deleting “on the recommendation of the Board” would make our practice much more consistent with that in most other countries.  It would remove the controlling influence of a Board appointed entirely by the previous government, and it would allow Labour to have in place to lead the rest of their Reserve Bank reforms, someone of their choosing, someone in whom they have confidence.  That is how other advanced democracies do things.  It isn’t about appointing party hacks –  it is how Janet Yellen, Mark Carney, Ben Bernanke, Glenn Stevens and Phil Lowe were all appointed; capable people who commanded the confidence of the government that appointed them.

(Although it isn’t a priority for me, making this change might actually strengthen the effectiveness of the Bank’s Board in holding the Governor to account.  At present, when the Board (in effect) appoints the Governor they have a strong interest in backing their own judgement, and providing cover for the Governor.   If they were responsible for monitoring the performance of a Governor directly appointed by the Minister, they’d have less vested interest in the individual, and perhaps be more ready to represent the interests of the Minister and of the public).

As I was finishing this post, I noticed a highly critical article on interest.co.nz by Alex Tarrant.  Although he isn’t quoted, it reads in part as if Tarrant has been interviewing his father, Arthur Grimes, one of the designers of the current Reserve Bank Act monetary policy provisions, and former chair of the Reserve Bank Board.   There is a lengthy discussion of time-inconsistency issues –  a regular theme of Grimes’s.    I’m not going to attempt to respond in any detail now, but would just observe that whatever the explanations for the rise of inflation in the 60s and 70s (and I’m not persuaded by the story Tarrant quotes), what Labour seems to be proposing is something not far removed from the sorts of formal wording, and policy rhetoric, routinely used at the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Federal Reserve.  One can debate whether it makes much sense to use such langugage, or whether the formal statutory provisions in those countries make much difference, but it is hard for any detached observer to suggest credibly that the Reserve Bank of Australia or the Federal Reserve have suffered greater difficulties with credibility, or with the willingness of the public and markets to take their words seriously, than the Reserve Bank of New Zealand has faced with the current section 8 wording.   If anything, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand has had rather more problems –  odd experiments like the MCI, and two quickly-reversed tightening cycles in the last decade –  even if those particular mistakes and problems don’t have their roots in the wording of section 8.  And unlike other inflation targeting countries, there has never been an election since the Act was introduced in which some party or other (and not just the remnants of Social Credit) has not been campaigning for changes to the Reserve Bank Act or the PTA.  You don’t find anything like it in other inflation targeting countries.

Grant Robertson made my day

Michael Reddell Governance, labour party, Monetary policy, Uncategorized

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

The two main aspects of Labour’s proposal are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on Grant Robertson on the RB VUW 10 April 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agreeing with the Governor

Michael Reddell inflation, Monetary policy

If I go on finding myself agreeing with Graeme Wheeler, there won’t be much point writing about OCR announcements.  But, as it happens, he has only three more to deliver.

I could quibble about a few details in this morning’s announcement, but the only one I wanted to highlight briefly was this proposition

Monetary policy will remain accommodative for a considerable period.

In six months and a few days, the Governor will have moved on.  We’ll then have an acting Governor, with no Policy Targets Agreement, for six months.  And not until this time next year will we have in place a monetary policy decisionmaker, with an agreed target, who can make moderately credible statements about possible monetary policy decisions over the medium-term.    So to be strictly accurate,  that sentence should probably have read something like

“If the forecasts underpinning today’s decision are roughly right, and if my successors have (a) the same target I do, and (b) the same interpretation of that target, and the same reaction function, then monetary policy will remain accommodative for a considerable period.”

But in this post, I’m backing the Governor, and one line I was particularly pleased to see was this one (emphasis added)

Global headline inflation has increased, partly due to a rise in commodity prices, although oil prices have fallen more recently. Core inflation has been low and stable.

I made that point here a while ago, so I was pleased to see the Reserve Bank also highlight the  point.    Here is what I mean, using the OECD’s data on CPI inflation ex food and energy –  the one readily available and consistently compiled core inflation measure.

OECD inflation ex food and energy

I’m using monthly data, to be as up-to-date as possible, and New Zealand and Australia don’t have monthly CPI data.  But the comparable quarterly chart doesn’t look materially different.

I’ve shown two lines.  The first is the median core inflation rate for all individual OECD countries (with monthly data).  But that includes 19 euro countries (plus Denmark) that have only one monetary policy.  So the second line is the median core inflation rate for the distinct monetary policy countries/areas –  ie delete the individual euro area countries, and replace them with an inflation rate for the euro area as a whole.  I’d probably tend to emphasise that measure.

But on neither measure is there any sign that core inflation has been picking up at all.  And although the US has been raising its policy interest rate to some extent, there have been more cuts in policy interest rates in the last 18 months or so (the sort of time it takes policy to work) than increases.

Of course, that is only actual inflation outcomes.  Perhaps there is more inflation just ahead of us –  a story markets seem to have taken a fancy to.

For what it is worth, international agencies still thought there was a negative output gap across the advanced world last time they looked (the OECD thought it was -1.4 per cent last time they updated their published forecasts).

The unemployment picture –  another read on excess capacity and resource pressures -is a bit different.    For the G7 countries as a whole, the unemployment rate is now a touch below the troughs reached at the peak of the last boom.    For the OECD group as whole – even including places like Greece –  it is only around 0.7 percentage points higher than at the peak of the last boom.  For the median OECD country, the unemployment rate now only about half a percentage points above the average for the last boom year (2007).

Here are the unemployment rates for the largest OECD economies

U rates big countries

The unemployment rates have been falling for some considerable time, and there has been no pick up in inflation yet.  For each fall, of course, the respective NAIRUs must be getting closer, but it is probably safer to wait and see that core inflation has actually begun to rise –  especially in view of the low starting level –  than to simply assume that it must happen soon.

Of course, when one looks at unemployment rates what does tend to stand out is how little the unemployment rates in New Zealand and Australia have come down.

U rates NZ and AusIn both countries the current unemployment rate is around 1.5 to 1.7 percentage points higher than it was in the year or so prior to the global downturn.  And neither country was troubled by a domestic financial crisis, nor did they run out of room to use conventional monetary policy.  The monetary policy authorities should have been able to do better.   If I look across the monetary areas in the OECD (again replacing individual euro area countries with the region as a whole), the only places with a worse record on this score –  unemployment rates now compared to the pre-recession levels – are:

  • the euro area as a whole (visible in the first chart above) where they did run out of conventional monetary policy options,
  • Norway, and
  • Turkey, not a paragon of economic management or political stability.

Core inflation measures have been picking up a little here, as they should have after the sharp cuts in the OCR the Reserve Bank had to implement.    But our unemployment record –  at a time when much of the rest of the advanced world has been able to run unemployment rates back near pre-recessionary levels without (yet) seeing signs of core inflation rising –  is one reason why I think the Governor is quite right not to express any bias about the direction of the next change in interest rates, however far away (and delivered by a person yet unknown) that might be.

Labour on monetary policy

Michael Reddell Governance, labour party, Monetary policy

Alex Tarrant of interest.co.nz had an interesting article earlier this week on the approach the Labour Party plans to take on monetary policy and Reserve Bank issues.    It seems that we should take it as a reasonably authoritative description, even though the formal policy has yet to be released. Labour’s finance spokesman Grant Robertson  described it thus

Useful write up from Alex Tarrant on monetary policy in NZ, including some thinking from yours truly.

From the article

Labour’s stance that the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s (RBNZ) price stability goal should be accompanied by a focus on employment will not see it propose a specific, nominal employment or unemployment figure for the central bank to target, finance spokesman Grant Robertson told interest.co.nz.

Meanwhile, Labour is set to follow the US example of not outlining which of price stability or employment the central bank should prioritise if the two goals were to clash at any point, he said.

Being picky, one might hope that Robertson appreciates the difference between real and nominal targets:  ‘nominal’ is usually a term referring to price measures, money supply measures, or even nominal GDP (the dollar value of all the value-added in New Zealand), while “real” usually refers to quantities/volumes, or to a price-change adjusted for the movement in the general level of prices (eg real house prices, or real interest rates).    Employment or unemployment are “real” variables, not nominal ones.

Mostly I don’t have too much concern if a Labour-led government were to seek to amend the Reserve Bank Act, or to put words in the policy targets agreeement for the new Governor next March, that made some reference to employment or unemployment.  So long, that is, as no one thinks it will make any difference.

No one seriously doubts that monetary policy choices can affect employment/unemployment in the short-term.  But, equally, no one seriously thinks that monetary policy can make much difference to those variables over the longer-term.

Monetary policy affects employment/unemployment in the shorter-term to the extent it affects economic activity.  And thus, when the Policy Targets Agreement states, as it has since 1999 when the incoming Labour Minister of Finance inserted the words, that the Bank should avoid “unnecessary instability in output”….

In pursuing its price stability objective, the Bank shall implement monetary policy in a sustainable, consistent and transparent manner, have regard to the efficiency and soundness of the financial system, and seek to avoid unnecessary instability in output, interest rates and the exchange rate.

….it was already enjoining the Bank to be concerned about the shorter-term employment/unemployment implications of its monetary policy choices.  And in inserting those words it was really just describing –  to help make it better understood to a wider audience –  what it was the Reserve Bank had been doing anyway.  Those considerations were the reason why, from the very first Policy Targets Agreement, price stability had been something to be pursued over the medium-term, with explicit provision for various shocks to prices.  If the Reserve Bank had attempted to fully offset those shocks –  GST increases, or petrol price increases for example –  it would have come at a cost of unnecessarily disrupting output and employment.

So one option for Labour could simply be to add in “employment” or “unemployment” to the existing list of things the Bank should try to avoid unnecessary instability in.

It is also worth noting that Policy Targets Agreements have long opened with descriptions of what a monetary policy focused on low and stable inflation is trying to achieve –  again, mostly an opportunity to remind people that price stability isn’t just an end in itself.   Under the current government, those words have read

The Government’s economic objective is to promote a growing, open and competitive economy as the best means of delivering permanently higher incomes and living standards for New Zealanders.  Price stability plays an important part in supporting this objective.

Although it isn’t stated explicitly, presumably high employment/low unemployment is part of that mix.

But under the previous (Labour-led) government, it was explicit.  These words were added to the PTA in 2002 by Michael Cullen when Alan Bollard took office

The objective of the Government’s economic policy is to promote sustainable and balanced economic development in order to create full employment, higher real incomes and a more equitable distribution of incomes. Price stability plays an important part in supporting the achievement of wider economic and social objectives.

Of course, those words made no discernible difference to how the Bank ran monetary policy. But then they weren’t really meant to: it was more a matter of “virtue-signalling”: “we care, and monetary policy isn’t just some Don Brash thing”.

And so a challenge that should be put to Grant Robertson and his colleagues is to clarify whether they think that adding a “focus on employment”, whether to the Act or the PTA is intended to make any substantive difference whatsover, and if so how?

In his interview, Robertson refers to the example of the United States, where the Federal Reserve is often described as having a dual mandate.   In fact, in statute that isn’t really true.  Here is what the Federal Reserve Act says of the objectives of monetary policy

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.

The goal, in the somewhat outdated language of the 1970s, is to “maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production”.    All the rest of it is simply a description of outcomes that, over time,  pursuing that nominal (money and credit) target can help achieve.

Of course, you won’t often hear Federal Reserve officials highlight that statutory goal –  and they will often talk of “dual objectives” –  but it does highlight that there isn’t an easy off-the-shelf model of legislative wording for Labour to adopt.

A few years ago, recognising that these issues were now the subject of active debate in New Zealand, the Reserve Bank did a Bulletin article collecting and classifying the statutory and sub-statutory (eg PTA type documents) monetary policy objectives for a variety of advanced countryies  If I say so myself, it remains a useful reference (partly in highlighting the different roles that different ways of framing objectives can play –  some are explicitly aspirational, some more accountabilty focused, some language is old and some new etc).  In many of the countries, employment pops up somewhere or other –  but mostly, apparently, in that same sense that we’ve seen in New Zealand, or in the US statutory objective, that a well-run monetary policy will contribute over time (perhaps in quite small ways) to a well-functioning economy, and labour market.

Robertson has also talked about the statutory language in Australia.  The Reserve Bank of Australia Act specifies (as it has since 1959)

It is the duty of the Reserve Bank Board, within the limits of its powers, to ensure that the monetary and banking policy of the Bank is directed to the greatest advantage of the people of Australia and that the powers of the Bank … are exercised in such a manner as, in the opinion of the Reserve Bank Board, will best contribute to:

a.the stability of the currency of Australia;

b.the maintenance of full employment in Australia; and

c.the economic prosperity and welfare of the people of Australia.

But surely the challenge for Robertson is “so what”?    Is there any evidence he can point to suggesting that, over time, the Reserve Bank of Australia (or the Federal Reserve) have run monetary policy materially differently from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand?    Past research the Reserve Bank has done looking at exactly that issue suggested not.

Perhaps this might seem a curious stance for me to be taking.  I’ve been repeatedly critical of the Reserve Bank’s conduct of monetary policy over the last couple of years  at a time when the unemployment rate that has lingered well above estimates of the NAIRU  (while, curiously, Robertson has often been a defender of the Governor).    But it is most unlikely that any sort of weak reformulation of the statutory goal would make any material difference, especially when  according to Robertson

Labour is set to follow the US example of not outlining which of price stability or employment the central bank should prioritise if the two goals were to clash at any point, he said.

and

He told interest.co.nz that Labour is not going to tell the RBNZ whether one is more important than the other.

The Bank’s failures over the last few years, to the extent that they can be seen as such, have been mostly about forecasting, combined with some over-confident priors, not about policy preferences, or an aversion to seeing high employment/low unemployment.

But if Labour really wants to give the Reserve Bank two objectives, and not even subordinate one to the other (on, for example, the basic grounds that in the long run nominal instruments –  monetary policy –  can only really achieve nominal targets), it is simply fairly explicitly abdicating what are inherently political choices to unelected technocrats.    The strongest case for an independent Reserve Bank is when there is a widely-accepted single target.

Then again, perhaps what is really going on is just “virtue-signalling”.  I’m sure Labour has access to plenty of people who can tell them that the RBA, the Fed, the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada –  all with different ways of phrasing monetary policy goals –  don’t do things much differently from each other, or from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.  Each will make mistakes at times, each with have idiosyncrasies, and from time to time each might have poor decisionmakers, but there is just no evidence that the framing of the New Zealand target keeps the Reserve Bank from making good policy.  But promising to tinker with the central bank goals probably sounds good in certain quarters –  suggesting that the speakers aren’t dreaded “neo-liberals” and might be “sound” on other stuff.

The Tarrant article also confirms that Labour is looking at governance changes for the Reserve Bank.  Sadly not the right ones.

If Labour leads the government after the 23 September general election, it will immediately launch a review into its proposals. This will also include a look at a Labour preference of taking sole rate-setting responsibility from the RBNZ Governor in favour of a rate-setting board that includes the Governor, his deputies and potentially other voices within the bank.

I hope Robertson and his colleagues bear in mind that governance reforms along exactly those lines –  entrenching a legislative role for internal technocrats –  was rejected by the previous Labour government in 2001.  I thought they were right to do so then (even though at the time I held a role that Labour’s independent reviewer, the academic expert Lars Svensson, thought should be a statutory member of the decisionmaking monetary policy committee), and I hold to that view.

At very least, a decisionmaking committee comprised of internal line managers would necessitate wider changes.   Since the case for moving away from a single decisionmaker is to reduce the risks associated with one person, one shouldn’t just move to a system where that one person, together with people s/he appoints/remunerates, make the decisions.  In the right hands, it might work fine, but we build institutions to protect us against bad outcomes and people who turn out to be poor appointees.  The sort of Governor one might have to worry about isn’t likely to be appointing people who will systematically differ from him/her.  If deputy or assistant governors are to be given statutory decisionmaking powers, those appointments (and that of the Governor) need to be ministerial appointments.  But I’m not aware of any other New Zealand government agency where a group of line managers get to make key policy decisions (perhaps Robertson is?).  Far better to use line managers to service (provide the research and analysis to) a decisionmaking committee, appointed by the Minister of Finance, and made up of a mix of internal and external people (as in Australia or the UK, and –  in a different system of government –  the US).

Although I don’t agree with their specific solution, on this issue I think the Green Party is much closer to proposing a good model than Labour (at least on the evidence of this article) is.  The same goes for enhancing the openness and transparency of the Reserve Bank –  another issue Labour seems not greatly interested in.  On that score, one option perhaps the parties on the left could think about is to require the Reserve Bank to publish, at least six-monthly as part of a Monetary Policy Statement, its estimates of the NAIRU (and perhaps other medium-term trend real variables, such as the natural rate of interest, and the projected trend rate of labour productivity).

There are plenty of aspects of the Reserve Bank legislation and practice that warrant review and reform.  Time has moved on, the Bank’s responsibilities have changed gradually etc.   If Labour is in the position to lead a government after the election, I hope they would be open to setting the terms of their review sufficiently broadly to encompass those issues (eg decision-making, appointment procedures, transparency, openness, the allocation of prudential policymaking powers between the Bank and the Minister etc).  I doubt any of these are really vote-winners, but they are the sort of issues that a modern responsible competent government would put on its agenda, for a tidy-up and modernisation.

Perhaps there are votes in promising to rearticulate the monetary policy objectives. But if so, it is more likely to be through “virtue-signalling”, than through the likelihood that  the sort of stuff Labour is talking about would make any material difference at all either to how monetary policy is actually run, or to the resulting economic outcomes.  Surely Labour must know that.  But does it bother them?

New Zealand has serious long-term structural economic underperformance challenges that need to be grappled with.   Sadly, the current government seems largely indifferent to them.  One can only hope that as policy programmes emerge over the next few months, the opposition parties will be offering some serious alternatives.  At present, there doesn’t appear to be much reason for hope on that score.

 

The new tightening cycle?

Michael Reddell Monetary policy, Reserve Bank

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

This chart shows the Reserve Bank’s projected future OCR tracks from last November’s MPS and the track from yesterday’s MPS.

ocr-projections-feb-17-and-nov-16

Using the definition of an “easing cycle” they appear to have adopted yesterday, to try to provide some cover for their 2014 misjudgements, this must surely mark the beginning of a new “tightening cycle”?     And, yes, the forward track was revised up very slightly.  Given that the Bank usually moves in increments of 25 basis points, the first actual OCR increase is currently expected in 2020 (this is the first time we’ve had projections for 2020).

But, of course, you didn’t hear the words “tightening cycle” from the Governor, or his offsiders, to describe what they’d done yesterday.  (I missed the start of the press conference, but I’ve seen no references anywhere to the words, or ideas).  And that is because it wasn’t the start of a “tightening cycle”.  Indeed, if one takes the projections seriously, one must assume there is about as much chance of another OCR cut in the next year to two, as of an increase.

And the Bank’s own official words back up the idea that this wasn’t the start of a tightening cycle.  Here are the key final sentences from the press release for the November MPS when, you’ll recall, they cut the OCR.

Monetary policy will continue to be accommodative. Our current projections and assumptions indicate that policy settings, including today’s easing, will see growth strong enough to have inflation settle near the middle of the target range. Numerous uncertainties remain, particularly in respect of the international outlook, and policy may need to adjust accordingly.

and here are the sentences from yesterday’s statement.

Inflation is expected to return to the midpoint of the target band gradually, reflecting the strength of the domestic economy and despite persistent negative tradables inflation.

Monetary policy will remain accommodative for a considerable period.  Numerous uncertainties remain, particularly in respect of the international outlook, and policy may need to adjust accordingly.

Parse it as you will, in substance those statements are all but identical.  If one wanted to be picky, one could highlight the addition of the words “for a considerable period” –  but it was probably aimed at those market participants who the Bank thinks (rightly in my view) have got a bit ahead of themselves in their enthusiasm for OCR increases later this year.

It would simply be nonsensical to claim that yesterday’s MPS was the start of a “tightening cycle”. It clearly wasn’t.  The Bank didn’t present it that way, and neither markets nor media have interpreted in that way.

It was even more nonsensical for them now to attempt to rewrite history and suggest that they began an easing cycle in June 2014.  They didn’t, they didn’t think that was what they were doing at the time, no one else did then (here, for example, was one of Wheeler’s bigger fans’ own quick assessment at the time) , and no one else does now.  They should be embarrassed.

Perhaps some readers will think I’ve made too much of the point.  But Parliament has given a great deal of power to the Governor, who has openly argued that the Bank is highly accountable.  One of the vehicles for that accountability –  a statutory vehicle –  is the Monetary Policy Statement.   Reasonable people can and do differ over the conduct of policy in 2014, and it is healthy to have the debate –  human beings learn from considered reflection and examination.    But attempting to twist language to try to rewrite the historical memory isn’t the sort of thing we should be expect from public servants who wield so much power.   And while Wheeler himself will soon be history, he has been keen to argue that he governs collegially –  emphasising the role of his deputies and the assistant governor.  Of them, the deputy chief executive will succeed Wheeler as Governor for six months, and most lists of potential candidates for the next permanent Governor seem to include both the other deputy governor, Geoff Bascand, and the assistant governor John McDermott.  The Governor signs the MPS, but McDermott’s department generates the document –  text and supporting analysis.   An excellent central bank –  doing policy well, producing strong supporting research and analysis, being open and accountable (rather than just playing political games), should be doing a lot better than this.

I was also struck by another of the Bank’s attempts in yesterday’s MPS to smooth over its record.  They noted in chapter 2 that

“Annual CPI inflation has averaged 2.1 per cent since the current target range was introduced in 2002”.

Which is true, but not particularly revealing.    For a start, during the Bollard decade, it averaged 2.5 per cent (excluding the direct effects of the higher GST) and in the Wheeler years it has averaged so far 0.8 per cent.  Lags mean Brash (and the old target) was responsible for the first year or so of the Bollard results, and Bollard was responsible for the first year or so of the Wheeler results, so here is a chart showing a three-year moving average of annual CPI inflation (again ex GST).  I’ve started from September 2005, so that all the data cover periods when the inflation target midpoint was 2 per cent.

cpi-inflation-3-yr-ma

It isn’t exactly a record of keeping inflation near the midpoint, even on average.  If the Bank seriously wants to argue that its performance should be evaluated over 15 year periods, they should abandon any pretence that there is serious accountability embedded in the system. Or, they could just play it straight, recognise their own (inevitable) limitations, and participate in some thoughtful, rather than propagandistic, reflections on the past conduct of policy and lessons for the future.  We should be wanting –  the Minister and Board should be seeking –  a Governor who has that sort of open-minded self-confidence.

When I exchange notes with other former Reserve Bank people one common line that comes up is a sense that the analysis in the Bank’s Monetary Policy Statements is often rather tired, and adds little of value to the reader.    Someone went as far yesterday as to send me a 20 year old MPS as a standard for comparison.  I often caution people that each generation is prone to view their successors that way, and insert the caveat that I hesitate to claim much for a period in which the Reserve Bank had the MCI (and a key senior manager, who fortunately didn’t last long, who often nodded off, just across the table from the Governor, in Monetary Policy Committee meetings).  Nonetheless, I can’t help coming to the same conclusion myself.    There are defences –  for a small central bank, four full MPSs a year is probably too many –  simply cranking the handle to churn out the documents take a lot of resource.  But it is the Bank that chooses that model –  Parliament only requires two statutory MPSs a year.  It could be argued also too that most of the value in the document is in the one page press release and a single table  –  but then why produce 30 to 40 pages?   And sadly, even when they do try to introduce new material, I often don’t find it very persuasive or enlightening.  And sometimes, the emphases seem quite politically convenient –  productivity, for example, (or the complete lack of it in New Zealand’s case) appears not at all in the text of yesterday’s MPS.

I wanted to touch on just two examples from yesterday’s document.  A year or so ago, the Reserve Bank introduced LUCI –  the labour utilisation composite index, an attempt to provide a summary measure of resource pressure in the labour market.    It was interesting innovation, if not fully persuasive as an indicator.  They ran the chart in yesterday’s document

luci

In the text, the Bank simply notes that labour market tightness increased over 2016.  But if this indicator is supposed to be a measure of that, how seriously can we take the claim?  After all, this index appears to suggest that in the Bank’s view the labour market is now almost as tight as it was at the peak of the previous boom (late 2004?) and materially tighter than it was over say 2006 and 2007 –   a period when the unemployment rate averaged less than 4 per cent, and when wage inflation was quite high, and increasing further.

Over the last year, however

  • the unemployment rate was basically flat (actually 2016q4 was higher than 2015q4, but lets treat that as possibly just noise),
  • wage inflation was flat or falling,
  • and in the Bank’s Survey of Expectations, expectations of future wage inflation were flat as well (actually down a bit in the latest survey)

And all this when the unemployment rate has been persistently above the Bank’s own estimate of the NAIRU (which appears to still be around 4.5 per cent), let alone Treasury’s which is around 4 per cent.  There is little to suggest anything like the degree of labour market pressure that was apparent in the pre-recession years.

No doubt, there are good answers to some of these questions and apparent contradictions.  But the Bank has made no attempt to address them, even though other labour market developments –  around immigration – receive a lot of focus.  The public, and readers of the MPS, deserve better analysis than that.

The Bank’s immigration analysis has also been rather tortured.  Historically, they have worked on the basis, and produced research to support, the common view that the short-term demand effects of immigration exceeded the supply effects.    There shouldn’t be anything surprising, or very controversial, about that –  immigrants (or non-emigrants) need to live somewhere, and need all the attendant private and public infrastructure of a modern economy.  Those pressures tell one nothing about the pros and cons of immigration policy.

But in the last couple of years, the Bank has been going to great lengths to try to suggest that this time things are different: this time the composition of the immigrants is so different (than in every previous post-war cycle) that, if anything, the supply effects outweigh the demand effects, and that high net PLT immigration is part of what is keeping inflation down.

It isn’t totally impossible of course.  Fly in labourers, house them in disused prisons, forbid them from spending anything locally, and employ them only in very labour-intensive roles and the supply effects might outweigh the demand effects.  But that isn’t the modern New Zealand immigration story  (and in case anyone wants to be obtuse, obviously nor should it be).

The Bank likes to illustrate their case with charts like this one, produced again in the MPS yesterday.

plt-by-age

It uses PLT net migration data to purport to show (a) record immigration, and (b) that that record influx is hugely concentrated among young people who, it is claimed, add more to supply than to demand, dampening inflation pressures.  The contrast is supposed to be particularly stark with the last big influx in 2002/03.  The Bank explicitly states “young migrants and those on student visas represent a much higher share of migration than in previous cycles”.

I’ve covered much of this ground before, especially in this post.   The limitations of the PLT data are well known, both in principle and in practice.    At my prompting, with the full knowledge of my then RB superiors, Statistics New Zealand produced a research note on the issue a couple of years ago.  In that document they showed how the PLT data had materially misrepresented the actual long-term migration inflow to New Zealand in the 2002/03 period (not wilfully –  just the limitations of the timely measure).  This was their chart.

plt-methods

So the best later estimates are that the 2002/03 influx was around 50 per cent larger than the PLT data (including the age breakdown data) the Bank is constantly citing.

We don’t have current estimates from this improved methodology for the current cycle, but one can see the point in just comparing the net PLT inflow with the net total passenger arrivals. It is a more volatile series –  things like World Cups and Lions tours help introduce volality.

migration-per-cent-population-feb-17

But you can see the big difference between the two series over 2002/03 –  and SNZ estimated that much of that difference wasn’t very short-term tourists, it was people who ended up staying longer.  Jump forward to the current cycle: contrary to the mythology the influx of people this time round, as a share of the population,  hasn’t been larger than it was then.  The peaks are around the same, and the peak this time (at least so far) was shorter-lived than it was in 2002/03.

And what of the student story?  Well, it doesn’t really hold up either.  Here is the MBIE data on the number of people granted student visas each year, as a share of the population.

student-visas-feb-17

The peak isn’t as high as it was in 2002/03, and the extent of the increase is much much smaller this time.   Foreign students add to demand –  as all exports do.  (Of course, there have been some  –  somewhat controversial  – changes in student work rules, which might have mitigated the demand effects, but curiously the Bank doesn’t invoke that effect as part of its story.)

My point here is not to argue whether my conclusion (net migration tends to boost demand more than supply in the short-term) is right, or the Bank’s (this time is different) is.   And as it happens, we see eye-to-eye right now on the current stance of monetary policy.   I’m mostly concerned that the Bank seems to just ignore inconvenient data that just isn’t hard to find or use.    There might well be good counterarguments to the data points I’ve highlighted here, but instead of making those arguments, the Bank simply ignores them.  One might, sadly, expect that sort of standard from political parties and lobby groups.  We shouldn’t expect, or tolerate, it from powerful well-resourced public agencies.  The Bank’s argument is certainly fairly politically convenient: it keeps the focus off that unemployment rate that is still above the NAIRU (a gap that might be expected to be constraining inflation) and the near-complete absence of productivity growth, which might be deterring new investment (also dampening inflation pressures in the short-run).

There are plenty of complex issues around in making sense of what is going on. I certainly don’t claim to have a fully convincing story myself. But given the level of public resources put into the Reserve Bank, we should expect a lot more from them –  not just answers, but evidence of genuine intellectual curiosity, and a desire to evaluate arguments from all possible angles.  Their current policy stance is fine, but there doesn’t seem to be a strong and robust organisation, of the sort that would underpin consistently good policy through time, judged by the strength of its analysis and its openness to debate.   Yesterday’s MPS is just one more example of that.   Turning around that weakness should be one of the key challenges for the new permanent Governor.

Alternative facts: a possible interpretation

Michael Reddell Monetary policy, Reserve Bank

A reader who is paid to, among other things, monitor the Reserve Bank got in touch to suggest that the Reserve Bank’s claim, highlighted in this morning’s post, to have “initiated an easing cycle in June 2014” was neither a typo nor a piece of carelessness (I’d assumed the latter), but something conscious and deliberate.

Recall that in this morning’s MPS, the Bank wrote that

The Bank initiated an easing cycle in June 2014, by lowering the outlook for the policy rate from future tightening to a flat track, and then cutting the OCR from June 2015

Most people, when they think of an easing cycle or a tightening cycle, think of actual changes in the OCR.  On that conventional description, the OCR was raised four times, by 25 basis points each, from March 2014 to July 2014.  Note those dates: not only was the OCR raised in the June 2014 MPS, but it was raised again the very next month.

And if one compares the crucial final few sentences in the press releases for the March and June 2014 MPSs there is no material change in wording from one document to the other, and there is nothing in chapter 2 of the June 2014 MPS (the policy background chapter) to suggest a change in policy stance.

So how might they now –  revisionistically – attempt to describe an “easing cycle” as having been commenced in June 2014?  Well, the only possible way they could do so –  perhaps hinted at in that phraseology “by lowering the outlook for the policy rate” –  is using a change in the forecast for the 90 day rate from the previous set of projections, in March 2014, to those in the June 2014 MPS.

But here is the chart showing the two sets of projections

90-day-projections

The differences are almost imperceptible.  In fact, the June track (red line) is very slightly above the blue line in the very near term, and at the very end of the period the difference is that the 90 day rate is projected to get to 5.3 per cent in the June 2017 quarter rather than the March 2017 quarter.  And recall that there were no contemporary words to suggest a change of stance.

Sure enough over subsequent quarters the Bank did start to revise down the future track, but there is no evidence that over that period they thought of themselves –  or openly described themselves –  as having begun an “easing” cycle.    That didn’t happen –  and even then they didn’t think of it as a “cycle” –  until the OCR was first cut in June 2015.   Here is the Governor talking about monetary policy in a February 2015 speech.

We increased the OCR by 100 basis points in the period March 2014 to July 2014 because consumer price inflation was increasing as the output gap became positive and was expected to increase further. Since July, the OCR has been on hold while we assessed the impact of the policy tightening and the reasons for the lower-than-expected domestic inflation outcomes.

The inflation outlook suggests that the OCR could remain at its current level for some time. How long will largely depend on the development of inflation pressures in both the traded and non-traded sector. The former is affected by inflation in our trading partners and movements in our exchange rate; the latter by capacity pressures in the economy and how expectations of future inflation develop in the private sector and affect price and wage setting.

In our OCR statement last Thursday we indicated that in the current circumstances we expect to keep the OCR on hold for some time, and that future interest rate adjustments, either up or down, will depend on the emerging flow of economic data.

Again, no sense from the Governor that he was well into an “easing cycle”, as we are now apparently supposed to believe.

Now, there is a theoretical argument that the stance of monetary policy can be summarised not just by the current OCR but by the entire future expected/intended track.  But as the Reserve Bank has often –  and rightly – been at pains to point out, projections of interest rates several years in the future contain very little information, as neither the Reserve Bank nor anyone else knows much about what will be required 2 to 3 years hence.   And it is a dangerous path for them to go down, for it invites those paid to hold the Governor to account to do so not just in respect of the actions he or she takes, but in respect of their ill-informed (but best) guesses as to what the far future of the OCR might hold.

If this is the explanation for the Reserve Bank’s words this morning –  and sadly it seems like a plausible explanation –  it is, at best, a case of someone trying to be too clever be half, and change the clear meaning of plain words (to the plain reader) in mid-stream.  At best, too-clever-by-half, but at worst a deliberate attempt to use a verbal sleight of hand to deceive readers, including the members of Parliament to whom the document is, by law, formally referred.    Sadly, it looks a lot like the “alternative facts” label –  one that should be worn with shame – might have have been quite seriously warranted.  They didn’t start easing in June 2014; at best by later that year they started slowly backing away from their enthusiasm for (a whole lot more) further tightening.

I’d hoped for better from the Reserve Bank, its Governor, incoming acting Governor, and other senior managers who may perhaps have aspirations to become Governor next March.

Lewis Carroll wasn’t intending Through the Looking Glass as a prescription for how powerful senior public officials should operate.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

 

Alternative facts: Reserve Bank edition?

Michael Reddell Monetary policy, Reserve Bank

I might have a post later on the substance of today’s Monetary Policy Statement –  or might not, since the bottom line stance seems entirely correct to me (regular readers may think this a first).   But I couldn’t let one particularly egregious misrepresentation go by without comment; a claim so blatantly wrong that one almost had to wonder whether the Bank was now taking communications advice from Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway.

In each MPS Box A “Recent monetary policy decisions” appears.  This box is one of my minor legacies to the Bank.  I banged on often enough about the statutory requirements for MPSs –  which require some retrospective assessment and self-evaluation –  that they agreed to include this box. It is rarely done well and –  in fairness –  the Act probably needs changing, to provide for reviews and assessments rather less frequently.  And the content tends, perhaps inevitably, to be rather self-serving.    But the latest version was just too much.

It begins as follows

The Bank initiated an easing cycle in June 2014

When I first saw that I assumed it was just a typo –  bad enough, but these things happen.  The OCR wasn’t actually cut until June 2015.  But no, the authors were apparently serious.  The whole sentence reads

The Bank initiated an easing cycle in June 2014, by lowering the outlook for the policy rate from future tightening to a flat track, and then cutting the OCR from June 2015

Do they really expect to be taken seriously?   For a start, their statement isn’t even true.  Here is the chart of the projected 90 day interest rates from the June 2014 MPS.

90-day-rate-track-mps-june-2014

The OCR was not only increased in the June 2014 MPS, but they projected another 200 basis points or so of increases.   By now –  March quarter of 2017 –  the OCR was projected to be still rising, and at 5.2 per cent.

And here was what the Governor had to say in the June 2014 MPS

june-14-mps-extract

There was no doubt that the Bank –  the Governor –  in June 2014 thought they would be raising the OCR a lot further, and had no thought in mind of beginning an easing cycle any time in the following few years.

I’m not sure what has gone wrong in this quarter’s Box A.    All the key players –  the Governor and his closest advisers –  were around in June 2014, and are around now.  They know what happened, and in June 2014 they were pretty confident of their tightening stance.  But they made a mistake.  It happens.     What shouldn’t happen is crude attempts to rewrite history.

I rather doubt this was deliberate on the Governor’s part –  probably some carelessness further down the organisation, and then insufficient care in reading and approving the final text.     But it isn’t a good look, and I hope they will take the opportunity to acknowledge the mistake and issue a correction.

Perhaps the FEC and/or the Bank’s Board might ask just what went on?

On Graeme Wheeler

Michael Reddell Financial stabilty, Governance, Monetary policy, Reserve Bank

Morning Report had invited me on this morning to talk about Graeme Wheeler, the change of governor, prospects for a permanent successor etc.  The death of Steve Sumner apparently changed their schedule so that interview didn’t happen, but I’d already jotted down some notes as to what I might say, so I thought I’d use them here.  Wheeler, of course, still has seven months in office, and we’ll see his next Monetary Policy Statement tomorrow.

When Graeme Wheeler was first appointed as Governor, there was generally a fairly positive reaction.  I shared that view.  Until quite late in the process, I’d assumed that Grant Spencer was the favourite for the role –  after all, successful organisations tend to promote from within, and a capable insider should always have an advantage, being constantly visible to the Board.  And so when Graeme was appointed, my initial reaction was “well, he must have been a very strong candidate to have beaten the capable internal deputy”.    And it was well known at the time that Bill English and John Key had been keen to have Wheeler back in New Zealand –  there had been well-sourced talk that the Minister had wanted him as Secretary to the Treasury, something apparently stymied by SSC bureaucracy.

With hindsight, one can only conclude that the Bank’s Board –  the key players in the appointment of the Governor –  just didn’t do a very good job in evaluating the candidates. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising –  mostly behind the scenes people themselves, they don’t have much experience in appointing someone to a position with as much visibilty and probably more untrammelled power than most Cabinet ministers.  There are suggestions that Board members were rather too easily swayed by big names Wheeler had produced as referees, and by his international connections (coming just a few years after the international financial crisis) rather than looking hard at the qualities required to do the Reserve Bank Governor job well.    Since many of the Board members then are still on the Board now, one can only hope they’ve learned from their experience.

I think Wheeler has done a poor job as Governor, both in the specific decisions he has made, and in the processes and procedures and style he has adopted.   For most of the time, he seems to have been aided and abetted –  or at least sheltered –  by the Board, who are actually paid as the public’s agents, not as associates and defenders of the Governor.

And it is not as if times have been unusually hard for him.  We haven’t had a recession in New Zealand and there has been no major flare-up of international financial stresses during his term (so far).  The terms of trade moved around a bit, but not much more so than usual.  There was no domestic financial crisis, no major domestic fiscal stresses, no change of government, and the major natural disasters of the last decade (the Canterbury earthquakes) had all happened by the time the Governor took office.   Sure, what is going on globally is a little hard to fully make sense of, but whereas most other advanced country central banks had by 2012 largely reached the limits of conventional monetary policy (interest rates very close to zero) that has not yet been a constraint here.

The Reserve Bank’s primary function –  according to the Act –  is monetary policy.  Graeme came into office with a new PTA that he was comfortable with –  in particular, with an explicit focus for the first time, on the 2 per cent midpoint of the inflation target range.  And yet over his 4.5 years in office, annual headline inflation has averaged not 2 per cent but 0.8 per cent.  Falling oil prices played a part in that, but CPI ex petrol has averaged not 2 per cent, but 1.1 per cent.  The Governor’s preferred measure of core inflation –  the sectoral factor model measure –  has averaged not 2 per cent, but 1.35 per cent.  All sorts of one-off factors that the Governor can’t be really be held accountable for influence inflation rates –  thus cuts in ACC levies have held down headline inflation in the last couple of years, while large increases in tobacco taxes have artificially boosted headline inflation throughout the Governor’s term.

There are a lot of comfortable commentators inclined to treat these inflation outcomes as a matter of indifference –  so what they imply, after all low inflation is better than high inflation.    But persistently low inflation over several years –  and especially when it doesn’t arise from surprisingly good productivity outcomes – almost invariably comes at a cost –  lost output, and lost employment.  And that has almost certainly been the case over the last few years.   Throughout the Governor’s term, the unemployment rate has been reasonably materially above estimates of the non-inflationary or “natural” level –  these days thought to be around 4 per cent.  The Governor’s choices affected the lives and options of real people –  and years lost out of employment simply can’t be got back.

My standard here isn’t one of perfection.  Central banks, engaged in active discretionary monetary policy of the sort now common around the world, will inevitably make mistakes.  Central banks try to operate on the basis of forecasts, and yet no one  –  least of all them  – knows the future.  So in evaluating the Governor, we need to look at the specific circumstances, and at the willingness to acknowledge and learn from mistakes.  Here, Graeme Wheeler doesn’t score well.

Before he came to office, the Reserve Bank had already once misjudged the need for a tightening cycle to commence, and had had to reverse itself.  At the time –  2010/11 –  they had some company internationally, and there was a fairly widespread expectation that interest rates would need to return to “normal” fairly soon.  That wasn’t the case by the end of 2013, when the Governor was not just talking about tentatively beginning a tightening cycle, but confidently asserting that interest rates would need to rise by 200 basis points.   He –  and his machinery of advisers –  simply got that one wrong.  Fortunately, they never raised the OCR by 200 basis points, but it was 18 months before they even started to reverse themselves –  and even now, to my knowledge, they have never acknowledged having made a mistake.  In so doing, they’ve unnecessarily exaggerated both interest rate and exchange rate variability, all the while leaving unemployment unnecessarily high.   Good managers and leaders recognise that human beings make mistakes, but they expect those who make them to acknowledge and learn from them.  Graeme Wheeler failed that test.

The other big part of the Reserve Bank’s policy responsibilities is the regulation of key elements of the financial system, to promote the soundness and efficiency of the system.  Graeme made that a much more prominent part of the Bank’s role with his enthusiasm for successive waves of LVR controls.   The Reserve Bank has no policy responsibility for the housing market, or for house prices, only for the soundness and the efficiency of the financial system.    And yet I see a leading commentator criticising the Governor for not doing the impossible:

Wheeler should have earlier called out the Prime Minister and Finance Minister on their tardiness in developing policy responses to counter the house price bubble. But he was late to the party.

Notably, the bank was also tardy in its own policy responses, thus earning itself a rebuke from then Prime Minister John Key, who rather cynically tried to take the focus off a Government that was running immigration hot for its own ends.

A more adept governor should have been able to persuade the politicians that slowing the boom was a job for both the politicians and the central bank. And that it was necessary for NZ’s long-run stability.

Quite how Graeme Wheeler was supposed to have changed the mind of the government on reforming supply – when no one else, in New Zealand or in many Western countries, has succeeded in doing that –  is a bit of mystery.  I have pretty high expectations of a Reserve Bank Governor, but that seems like a Mission Impossible task.  It is not that reform couldn’t be done, but against a Prime Minister determined to present high and rising house prices as a mark of success, a central bank Governor, with no detailed background in the area, no real research to back him, and no particular mandate wasn’t likely to succeed.  After all, our housing supply and land use laws have created problems, interacting with immigration policy, for 25 years, and Alan Bollard and Don Brash had made no inroads either.

As for the Bank being “tardy”, hardly.  When Graeme Wheeler took office, no one in the Reserve Bank had been keen on direct LVR controls –  they were a clear fourth preference, when assessed against the Bank’s responsibility for financial system soundness and efficiency.    But Graeme rushed such restrictions into place, at times surprising even his own senior managers, with no tolerance for any debate or dissent (there was no substantive discussion of the merits of the measures at the key relevant internal committee).  If you think LVR limits were a good thing, the last thing you can accuse Graeme of was being tardy.  I think they were ill-conceived, sold on a false promise (about how temporary they would be), are still poorly-researched, and have spawned one new set of controls (and odd exemptions) after another.  And, unsurprisingly, the real housing market issues –  mostly about land supply, not finance –  haven’t been dealt with.  Wheeler liked to fancy himself as a shrewd political player, and yet if there is a valid criticism of him in this particular area it is as much that he eased the pressure on politicians by rushing to do something/anything, at time when there was a growing sense that “something must be done”.  The appropriate response to “something must be done” is not “so anyone should do anything”.    And it remains concerning that despite Wheeler’s penchant for increased use of direct controls –  harking back to earlier decades –  there has been little or no serious analytical or research engagement with the issues around the efficiency of the financial system, and the way in which direct controls can undermine efficiency, and in the process favour insiders over outsiders, the well-connected and well-resourced over the more marginal, and so on.  The experience of the US over 2008/09 –  where Wheeler lived at the time –  always seemed to loom large, and never once has the Bank answered my challenge to consider the similarities and differences between the US and New Zealand, or to look at the experiences of countries (many of them including New Zealand) that didn’t have domestic financial crises in 2008/09 despite large house price booms.

Effective communication is a big part of what the central bank governor should be expected to do, and the more so in New Zealand where (a) all the statutory power rests with the Governor personally, and (b) where the Bank has such wide-ranging powers, and is not just responsible for monetary policy.  And yet during the Wheeler years, the Bank hasn’t done well on that score either.    The number of on-the-record speeches the Governor has made has dwindled, and those he does give don’t typically compare favourably –  in terms of quality, depth and insight –  with those of his peers in other countries.   There have been specific communications stuff-ups (speeches inconsistent with subsequent action etc), although I’m reluctant to be too harsh on those –  most central banks end up with some of those problems in one form or another, at some time or another.  But it is also a matter of accountability:   Wheeler has been very reluctant to grant serious media interviews (none at all to the main TV current affairs programmes, and only belatedly the occasional soft-soap interview to the Herald) in a way that is quite extraordinary for someone personally wielding so much power.  A Cabinet minister wouldn’t get away with it.  And in his press conferences, the Governor has often come across as embattled, defensive and weary.    Despite his past senior roles, he had no background in the public limelight, and clearly wasn’t comfortable with it.  But that was a significant part of what made him, at least with hindsight, the wrong person for the job.

Neither in my time at the Bank –  around half his term, involved in most of key policy committees –  nor subsequently have I seen any sign in the Governor of wanting to foster a climate of debate and explorations of ideas and alternative options.  I mentioned the LVR controls already, but they weren’t the only example.  In my own experience, one small example lodged in my brain.  One day a few years ago Graeme was down in a meeting in the Economics Department and there was a bit of a low key discussion about alternative policy approaches etc: the death glare I received for even mentioning, hypothetically, nominal income targeting was a pretty clear message, not just seen by me, that what the Governor wanted was support for his position, and answers to his detailed questions, not alternative perspectives or debate, no matter how non-urgent the issues were.  People respond to incentives.  In a area so rife with uncertainty as monetary policy, it is very dangerous approach.  The same goes for the ability to deal with external criticism –  a capable and intellectually confident Governor would recognise the value in alternative perspectives and relish the prospect of engaging with the alternative ideas.  Doing so is part of how people come to have confidence in the Governor.  But there has been none of that with Wheeler –  if anything he seemed to become unreasonably rattled by disagreement (his active effort to tar the messenger who drew to his attention the OCR leak last year was a sad example of that –  made worse by the cover he received for it from his Board).

I could go on, but won’t at length.  The Governor has been highly obstructive in his approach to the Official Information Act –  we still don’t have access to papers relating to the 2012 PTA for example –  and has done nothing to advance transparency around the Bank’s medium-term spending plans.  Nothing appears to have been done to prepare for the likelihood that the near-zero bound will become an issue here in the next recession.  The refusal of the Governor to engage with serious evidence of past misconduct around staff superannuation policy is a blight.  And despite the large team of researchers and analysts the Governor commands, there has been little good policy-relevant research published in the last few years, particularly in the areas of financial system regulation and macro and financial stability.  Sadly, the Reserve Bank has been living off reputational capital for some considerable time now, and one of the challenges for a new Governor should be turning that around and lifting the quality of the Bank’s outputs and its senior people.

As I’ve noted before, I give the Governor a small amount of credit for his recognition that the single decisionmaker model is past its use-by date, and should be reformed.  A committee of his own apppointees –  his two deputy governors and one assistant governor, all answerable to him – is not the right answer, but at least he was willing to start addressing the issue, unlike his predecessor.  Responsibility for the Reserve Bank governance model rests mostly with the Minister of Finance and the Treasury, but the Governor sought to get approval for legislative changes and failed.  That reflects poorly on him  –  our current model is so out of step with how countries do things and how government agencies are structured –  and is partly a reflection of his own fixation on a technocratic model, and partly of the loss of trust he incurred with the Minister and the Treasury (including around the financial regulation powers).  The Bank should have been able, by a flow of good research and analysis, to have helped shape a public debate on the appropriate future governance model.  But it failed to do that –  and now still refuses to release any of the background papers from that long-completed work programme undertaken at taxpayers’ expense (and this time, extraordinarily, they have managed to get Ombudsman cover for their refusal).

Quite who will be the next Governor is anyone’s guess.  If I had to put money on it, I’d assume it would come down to a choice between Geoff Bascand and Adrian Orr –  both of whom have their own weaknesses –  but there are other possible candidates both here and (New Zealanders) abroad.  Even though the Bank’s Board have all been appointed by the current government and have the key role in determining who will be the next Governor, quite a bit could still turn on the outcome of the election and what changes, if any, they might want to make to the Act.  In my view, whoever wins the election should focus quite quickly on sketching out a plan for governance reforms, and should look to appoint a person who will be able to carry those through and help the Bank adapt, and perform well, under a new model, under which the Governor personally would have a vital role, but a much less dominant personal role in determining monetary and bank regulatory policy.

Doing so now isn’t a reflection on Graeme Wheeler –  as perhaps it might have been seen as a year or two ago –  just a recognition that times, and the institution and its challenges, have changed,  While so much power rests with the Governor personally, it is important to appoint someone with some reasonable credibility in the subject areas the Bank is responsible for –  an effective deputy can do much of the day-to-day management of what isn’t a very large or complex organisations –  but if the new government, of whatever stripe, is seriously willing to move to a committee-based model (the more conventional approach) then the requirements for a Governor would be rather different.   Change management skills would be a key component, as part of revitalising the Bank and shaping a position for a strong chief executive who can support the decisionmakers –  rather than being both the principal decisionmaker, and the one who controls all the flow of paper, him or herself.  It might be a little more akin to the important role a Secretary to the Treasury plays in leading his organisation as advisers to the Minister of Finance.

Inflation: monetary policy works

Michael Reddell Monetary policy, Uncategorized

Next week will see the first Reserve Bank OCR announcement (and Monetary Policy Statement) for the year (and for some time, given the long summer break the Bank took).   They’ll be trying to make sense of a whole range of data, including no doubt the quarterly labour market data to be released tomorrow.  And while no one expects the OCR to be changed next week, some commentators (and markets) appear to have turned their attention to the question of when the OCR might be raised –  with some talking of that possibly happening later this year.  I’m sceptical of that: apart from anything else, whenever a central bank changes direction in a year (and it was only November 2016 when the OCR was cut to the current 1.75 per cent), it usually involves correcting a past mistake.  Perhaps last year’s OCR cuts will prove to have been a mistake.  If so, I (and, almost by definition, the Reserve Bank) will be surprised.

Inflation has picked up over the last few quarters.  But then it needed to.  Annual headline CPI inflation had been below 1 per cent for two years, and although headline inflation shouldn’t be (and typically isn’t) the focus of monetary policy, it wasn’t something that could be entirely ignored either, partly for the risk that people (households and firms) would increasingly come to treat inflation well below 2 per cent as normal –  the implicit assumption they use in economic behaviour.  As a reminder, the Governor and the then Minister of Finance made the 2 per cent midpoint of the target range the explicit focus for monetary policy in the 2012 Policy Targets Agreement.

Headline inflation isn’t the focus of policy, because it is thrown around by all sorts of things (some from the market, some from governments) that monetary policy either shouldn’t or can’t sensibly do much about.  There is no single or ideal measure of “core” or “underlying” inflation – which try to abstract from those one-offs and get at the medium-term trend in inflation.

But whichever of the many different measures one uses, there is little doubt that the medium-term trend rate of inflation was also well below 2 per cent for a prolonged period.  On some of those measures there were even concerns that underlying inflation might be falling away further, and that that process could, if things went really badly, become self-reinforcing.   In essence, that weakness in inflation was the justification for the succession of OCR cuts from mid 2015 to late last year.

Here are the six core measures I’ve used previously.

Annual inflation rate
Dec-14 Dec-15 Dec-16
CPI ex petrol 1 0.5 1.4
Weighted median 1.5 1.5 2
Trimmed mean 0.7 0.4 1.6
Factor model 1.2 1.1 1.5
Sectoral factor model 1.2 1.5 1.5
CPI ex food and energy 1 0.9 1.6
Median 1.10 1.00 1.55

At the low point, the median of these six measures was around 1 per cent, although it seems unlikely that policy was being made on that basis –  the Governor often talked of core measures being still comfortably inside the target range, and on occasion explicitly emphasised the sectoral factor model measure as his preferred indicator.  That measure is certainly the least volatile of all the underlying measures (over the whole history of the series), although it has its own limitations –  including that the series is prone to historical revision as new data about the present emerge.  But for what it is worth, here is the chart of the sectoral factor model measure.

sec-factor-model-to-dec-16The fact that this measure is not very volatile tends to mean more weight should be put on deviations from the target –  they aren’t likely to be simply “noise”.  Perhaps the latest estimates will eventually be revised up a little in time, but as it happens the sectoral factor model estimate is now around the median of the whole suite of core measures.  The medium-term trend in inflation was probably around 1.5-1.6 per cent late last year.

It is interesting that we don’t see a rise in core inflation in the other advanced economies taken as a group.  Headline inflation is rising somewhat on account of petrol prices, but exclude food and energy –  the most widely available core measure –  and here is what we find in the OECD data.

oecd-ex-food-and-energy-inflation

It is monthly data and there is a bit of month to month volatility, but no real sign of any sustained rise in this measure of core inflation.  I’d tend to put most weight on the green line –  the median inflation rate among all OECD countries.  In most countries, inflation also appears still to be below the respective inflation targets.

When the Reserve Bank was cutting the OCR last year, opponents of further cuts were sometimes heard arguing that “the case for cuts isn’t that good, and anyway, monetary policy isn’t likely to do much good [at such low interest rates/in this global climate]).  But the data suggest quite the opposite.    Here are a few measures of New Zealand real interest rates over the last five years.

real-int-rates-since-2011

Real interest rates rose in 2014 and into early 2015 as the Governor (supported by his advisers) raised the OCR by 100 basis points.  The medium term trend rate of inflation was low when the tightening phase started and, if anything went a bit lower subsequently.  It is likely that the weakness in inflation was the result of some combination of weak global inflation, the sharp fall in oil prices (spilling over into core measures) and the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy stance, which also helped drive the exchange rate up.  It is now generally accepted that the 2014 tightenings were simply unnecessary, although perhaps reasonable people can differ on the extent to which the mistake was foreseeable at the time.  But there is little doubt that the unnecessary tightenings stood in the way of inflation getting back to around the middle of the target range.

From mid 2015 the Reserve Bank was cutting the OCR.  The cuts were initially rather grudging –  the Bank was uncomfortable with recognising that they had got things wrong previously –  but in  total ended up being quite large.  A cumulative cut in the OCR of 175 basis points was needed simply to undo the effects of the 100 basis point tightening because expectations of future inflation fell quite materially, largely in response to the persistently low actual (headline and core) inflation.   Even now, real retail interest rates are not quite as low as they were when the tightening cycle began in early 2014.   The easier stance of monetary policy helped support growth in demand and activity –  although even now per capita GDP and income growth remains unspectacular.  And of course –  subject to data updates tomorrow –  there is still excess capacity in the labour market, with the unemployment rate  having been still well above Treasury’s estimate of the NAIRU.

Who knows what the outlook is from here.  If the TWI remains at current levels, the recovery in headline inflation could be shortlived.  Perhaps the medium-term trend in the rate of inflation will rise further.  We should hope so.  I wouldn’t be advocating further OCR cuts at present, but it seems to me that the best approach at present is to assume that we have little knowledge about the future, and that if an OCR change is required in the next 12-18 months it might as easily be a further cut as an increase.  Since the 2008/09 recession the Reserve Bank was twice started tightening phases that proved to be unnecessary and had to be reversed.  And in those cycles they typically had the support of market economists and financial markets.  Given that track record, the absence of any real rise in global inflation, and the difficulties of making sense of what has been going on, a prudent approach might be to wait to see core inflation actually at 2 per cent before looking to raise the OCR.   If the unemployment rate were to drop sharply further, or if per capita growth accelerated sharply, that stance might reasonably be reassessed.