Back in 2020 and 2021, in and around the straight economics and economic policy posts, there were quite a few on aspects of the Covid experience in New Zealand, particularly in a cross-country comparative light.
More recently, you see from time to time suggestions that New Zealand’s experience may have been so good that in fact excess mortality here since Covid began might actually have been negative (in which case, fewer people would have died than might have been expected had Covid never come along.
A couple of alternative perspectives on that caught my eye in the last couple of months, both from academics, one from a physicist and one from an economist.
The first was a very very long Twitter thread from Professor Michael Fuhrer at Monash in Melbourne. His thread starts with this tweet
and after reviewing the evidence, and granting that
he concludes that
All of which sounded plausible, at least having read the entire thread.
For New Zealand, one of the biggest things that changed over the first 2.5 years of the Covid era was a dramatic slowing in the population growth rate, not because of Covid or other deaths but because net migration went from a hugely positive annual rate to a moderately negative rate. Pre-Covid – and probably again now – migration is the biggest single influence on the year to year change in New Zealand’s population. He includes this chart
Here is Gibson’s abstract
It is a short paper, and easy enough to read, so I’m not going to elaborate further, and will simply cut and paste the final page.
It is a shame he hasn’t labelled all the other countries, but his text tells us that the countries to the right of New Zealand on that bottom chart are Luxembourg, Canada, the Netherlands, Iceland, Israel, and Australia. Note too that several countries just to the left of New Zealand have estimated excess mortality barely different from that estimated for New Zealand.
Across the entire grouping of countries New Zealand still rates fairly well (there are many other things we might reasonably hope to be in the best quartile for but are not; this one we are), but as he notes for the three years to the end of 2022 even in New Zealand there does appear to have been positive excess mortality in the Covid era.
I have no particular point to make, but found both Fuhrer’s thread and Gibson’s note interesting notes, providing some useful context to thinking about the New Zealand experience. Since one still sees claims (including reportedly from David Seymour just a couple of days ago) that there have been no excess deaths in New Zealand over the Covid period, is it too much to hope that some media outlet or other might give some coverage to what appears to be careful work by, in particular, Gibson, a highly-regarded New Zealand academic?
Way back in 1990 Parliament formally handed over the general responsibility for implementing monetary policy to the Reserve Bank. The government has always had the lead in setting the objectives the Bank is required to work to, and has the power to hire and fire if the Bank doesn’t do its job adequately, but a great deal of discretion has rested with the Bank. With power is supposed to come responsibility, transparency, and accountability.
And every so often in the intervening period there have been reviews. The Bank has itself done several over the years, looking (roughly speaking) at each past business cycle and, distinctly, what role monetary policy has played. These have generally been published as articles in the Bank’s Bulletin. When I looked back, I even found Adrian Orr’s name on one of the policy review articles and mine on another. It was a good initiative by the Bank, intended as some mix of contribution to debate, offering insights that were useful to the Bank itself, and defensive cover (there has rarely been a time over those decades when some controversy or other has not swirled around the Bank and monetary policy).
There have also been a couple of (broader-ranging) independent reviews. Both had some partisan intent, but one was a more serious effort than the other. When the Labour-led government took office in 1999 they had promised an independent review, partly in reaction to their sense that we had messed up over the previous few years. A leading Swedish academic economist Lars Svensson, who had written quite a bit about inflation targeting, was commissioned to do the review (you can read the report here). And towards the end of that government’s term – monetary policy (and the exchange rate) again being in the spotlight – Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee did a review.
When the monetary policy provisions of the Reserve Bank Act were overhauled a few years ago this requirement was added
It made sense to separate out this provision explicitly from that for Monetary Policy Statements (in fact, I recall arguing for such an amendment years ago) but the clause has an odd feature: MPSs (and the conduct of monetary policy itself) are the responsibility of the MPC, but these five-yearly longer-term reviews are the responsibility of “the Bank”. In the Act, the Bank’s Board is responsible for evaluating the performance of both management and the MPC, but the emphasis here does not seem to be on the Board. It seems pretty clear that this is management’s document, and of course management (mainly the Governor) dominates the MPC. Since the Board has no expertise whatever in monetary policy, it is pretty clear that the first of these reports, released last week, really was, in effect, the Governor reporting on himself.
And although plenty of people have made scathing comments about that, there isn’t anything necessarily wrong about a report of that sort. After all, it isn’t uncommon (although I always thought it odious and unfair given the evident power imbalance) for managers to ask staff to write about notes on their own performance, as part of an annual performance appraisal, before the manager adds his/her perspective. The insights an employee can offer about his or her own performance can often be quite revealing. And it isn’t as if the Bank’s own take on its performance is ever going to be the only relevant perspective (although, of course, the Governor has far more resources and information at his disposal than anyone else is going to have). The only real question is how good a job the Bank has done of its self-review and what we learn from the documents.
On which note, I remain rather sceptical about the case (National in particular is making) for an independent review specifically on the recent conduct of monetary policy. Some of those advocating such an inquiry come across as if what they have in mind is something more akin to a final court verdict on the Bank’s handling of affairs – one decisive report that resolve all the points of contention. That sort of finality is hardly ever on offer – scholars are still debating aspects of the handling of the Great Depression – and if there was ever a time when choice of reviewer would largely determine the broad thrust of the review’s conclusions this would be among them. Anyone (or group) with the expertise to do a serious review will already have put their views on record – not necessarily about the RBNZ specifically (if they were an overseas hire) but about the handling of the last few years by central banks generally. There is precedent: the Svensson review (mentioned above) was a serious effort, but the key decision was made right at the start when Michael Cullen agreed to appoint someone who was generally sympathetic to the RB rather than some other people, some of equal eminence if different backgrounds, who were less so. It would be no different this time around (with the best will in the world all round). A review might throw up a few useful points and suggestions, and would probably do no harm, but at this point the idea is mostly a substantive distraction. Conclusions about the Reserve Bank and about its stewardship are now more a matter for New Zealand expert observers and the New Zealand political process (ideally the two might engage). Ideally, we might see some New Zealand economics academics weighing in, although in matters macroeconomics most are notable mainly by their absence from the public square.
That is a somewhat longwinded introduction to some thoughts about the report the Bank came out with last week (120 pages of it, plus some comments from their overseas reviewers, and a couple of other background staff papers).
I didn’t think the report presented the Bank in a very good light at all. And that isn’t because they concluded that monetary policy could/should (they alternate between the two) have been tightened earlier. That took no insight whatever, when your primary target is keeping inflation near the middle of the target range and actual core inflation ends up miles outside the range. Blind Freddy could recognise that monetary policy should have been tightened earlier. When humans make decisions, mistakes will happen.
The rest of the conclusions of the report were mostly almost equally obvious and/or banal (eg several along the lines of “we should understand the economy better” Really?). And, of course, we had the Minister of Finance – not exactly a disinterested party – spinning the report as follows: “It is really important to note that the report does indicate that they got the big decisions right”. It should take no more than two seconds thought to realise that that is simply not true: were it so we would not now have core inflation so far outside the target range and (as the report itself does note) pretty widespread public doubts about how quickly inflation will be got down again. It would be much closer to the truth to say that the Reserve Bank – and, no doubt, many of their peers abroad – got most of the big decisions wrong. It has, after all, been the worst miss in the 32 years our Reserve Bank has been independent, and across many countries probably the worst miss in the modern era of operationally independent central banks (in most countries, after all, monetary policy in the great inflation of the 1970s was presided over by Ministers of Finance not central banks).
But there is no sense in the report at all of the scale of the mistake, no sense of contrition, and – perhaps most importantly in my view – no insight as to why those mistakes were made, and not even any sign of any curiosity about the issue. The focus is almost entirely defensive, and shows no sense of any self-critical reflection. There are no fresh analytical insights and (again) not even any effort to frame the questions that might in time lead to those insights. And no doubt that is just the way the Governor (who has repeatedly told us he had ‘no regrets’) would have liked it. And here we are reminded that this is very much the Orr Reserve Bank: the two senior managers most responsible for the review (the chief economist and his boss, the deputy chief executive responsible for monetary policy and macroeconomics) only joined the Bank this year, and so had no personal responsibility for the analysis, preparation and policy of 2020 and 2021 but still produced a report offering so little insight and so much spin. Silk, in particular, probably had no capacity to do more, but the occasional hope still lingered that perhaps Paul Conway, the new chief economist, might do better. But these were Orr’s hires, and it is widely recognised that Orr brooks no dissent, no challenge, and in his almost five years as Governor has never offered any material insight himself on monetary policy or cyclical economic developments. Even if they had no better analysis to offer – and perhaps they didn’t, so degraded does the Bank’s capabilities now seem – contrition could have taken them some way. But nothing in the report suggests they feel in their bones the shame of having delivered New Zealanders 6 per cent core inflation, with all the arbitrary unexpected wealth redistributions that go with that, let alone the inevitable economic disruption now involved in bringing inflation a long way back down again. It comes across as more like a game to them: how can we put ourselves in the least bad light possible with a mid-market not-very-demanding audience (all made more unserious as we realised that the Minister of Finance had made the decision a couple of months ago to reappoint Orr, not even waiting for the 120 pages of spin).
At this juncture, a good report would be most unlikely to have had all the answers. After all, similar questions exist in a whole bunch of other countries/central banks, and if the Reserve Bank has the biggest team of macroeconomists in New Zealand, there are many more globally (in central banks, academe, and beyond) but it doesn’t take having all the answers to recognise the questions, or the scale of the mistakes. In fact, answers usually require an openness to questions, even about your own performance, first. And there is none of that in the Bank’s report.
Thus, we get lame lines – of the sort Conway ran several times at Thursday’s press conference – that if the Bank had tightened a bit more a bit earlier it would have made only a marginal difference to annual inflation by now. And quite possibly that is so, but where is the questioning about what it would have taken – in terms of understanding the economy and the inflation process – to have kept core inflation inside the target range? What is it that they missed? (And when I say “they” of course I recognise that most everyone else, me included, also missed it and misunderstood it, but……central banks are charged by Parliaments with the job of keeping inflation at/near target, exercise huge discretion, carry all the prestige, and have big budgets for analytical purposes, so when central banks report on their performance, we should expect something much better than “well, we acted on the forecasts we had at the time and, with hindsight, those forecasts were (wildly) wrong”.) The question is why, what did they miss, and what have they learned that reduces the chances of future mistakes (including over the next year or two – if your model for how we got into this mess was so astray, why should the public have any confidence that you have the right model – understanding of the economy and inflation – for getting out of the mess? At the press conference the other day the Governor and the Board chair prattled on about being a “learning organisation” but you aren’t likely to have learned much if you never recognised the scale of the failure or shown any sign of digging deep in your thought, analysis, and willingness to engage in self-criticism. We – citizens – should have much more confidence in an organisation and chief executive will to do that sort of hard, uncomfortable, work than in one of the sort evident in last week’s report.
With hindsight one can make a pretty good case that no material monetary policy action was required at all in 2020. One might be more generous and say that by September/October 2020 with hindsight it was clear that what had been done was no longer needed. But that wasn’t the judgement the Reserve Bank came to at the time – and it is the Bank that has been tasked with getting these things right. Why? (And, of course, the same questions can be asked of other central banks and private forecasters, but the Reserve Bank is responsible for monetary policy and for inflation outcomes in this country.)
I may come back in subsequent posts to look at more detail at a number of specific aspects of the report (including a couple of genuinely interesting revelations) but at the big picture level the report does not even approach providing the sort of analysis and reflection the times and circumstances called for (in some easier times a report of this sort might have not been too bad, although you would always look for some serious research backing even then).
And if you think that I’m the only sceptic, I’d commend to you the comments from the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada. On page after page – amid the politeness (and going along with distractions like the alleged role of the Russian invasion) – he highlights just how relatively weak the analysis in the report is, how many questions there still are, and a number of areas in which he thinks the Bank’s defensive spin is less than entirely convincing.
New Zealanders deserved better. That we did not get it in this report just highlights again that Orr is not really fit for the office he holds. In times like those of the last few years – with all the uncertainties – an openness to alternative perspectives, willingness to engage, willingness to self-critically reflect, and modelling a demand for analytical excellence are more important than ever.
One good thing about the Reserve Bank is that they do report their balance sheet in some detail every month, and yesterday they released the numbers for the end of August. August was not a good month for the government bond market: yields rose further and the market value of anyone’s bond holdings fell. And thus the Reserve Bank’s claim on the government, under the indemnity the Minister of Finance provided them in respect of the LSAP programme, mounted.
This is the line item from the balance sheet
A new record high at just over $9bn.
And that doesn’t seem to be quite the full extent of the losses the Governor and the MPC have caused. A while ago the Heraldreported on an OIAed document from The Treasury.
I wasn’t sure quite what to make of that, but we know that from July the Bank has begun selling its bonds back to The Treasury. Over July and August they had sold back $830m of the longest-dated bonds (ie the ones on which the losses will have been largest) and presumably collected on the indemnity when the Bank realised the losses on those bonds at point of sale.
Presumably all the numbers will eventually turn up in the Crown accounts, but for now it seems safe to assume that Orr and his colleagues (facilitated by the Minister of Finance) have cost taxpayers around $9.5 billion dollars – getting on for 2.5% of New Zealand’s annual GDP (or about 7 per cent of this year’s government spending).
These are really huge losses, and to now the Governor’s defence seems to amount to little more than “trust us, we knew what we were doing”, accompanied by vague claims that he is confident that the economic benefits were “multiples” of the costs. But there is no contemporary documentation in support of the former claim (eg a proper risk analysis rigorously examined and reviewed before they launched into this huge punt with our money), and nothing at all yet in support of the latter claim.
Central banks should be (modest) profit centres for the Crown. Between their positions as monopoly issuers of zero-interest notes and coins and as residual liquidity supplier to the financial system there is never a good excuse for a central bank to lose money, and certainly not on the scale we’ve seen here (and in other countries) in the last couple of years – punting massively on an implicit view that bond yields would never go up much or for long (as they hadn’t much in the previous decade when other central banks were engaging in QE).
There are plenty of things governments waste money on, and plenty of big programmes that (rightly) command widespread support (through Covid you could think of the wage subsidy scheme). But this was just little more than a coin toss – low expected value, but with at least as high a chance of big losses as of any substantial gains. And seemingly with no accountability whatever. Orr has not apologised for the losses, nor have the other MPC members. No one has lost their job – but then this is the New Zealand public sector where hardly anyone ever does – and not a word has been heard from those charged with holding the Bank to account (the Board or the Minister of Finance).
Back when I was young the Bank ran up big (indemnified) foreign exchange losses in the 1984 devaluation episode. Searching through old papers I can’t find the precise number the Crown had to pay out, but between what I could find and my memory it may well have been of a similar order (share of GDP) as the LSAP losses. But the responsibility then rested directly with the Minister of Finance – the Bank was not operationally independent, and defending the fixed exchange rate under pressure was government policy. It was a rash policy – the Bank advised the government not to do it – and the large losses added to the obloquy heaped on Muldoon for his stewardship in his last couple of years on office. But the public got to vote Muldoon out, while there still appears to be a serious possibility that Orr – having cost New Zealanders perhaps $1800 each – will be reappointed (with just six months of his term to go if he is not going to be reappointed it will need to be announced soon to enable a proper search process for a replacement to occur). The LSAP losses may not even be the Governor’s worst failing, but no one directly responsible for that scale of taxpayer losses – on risks he simply did not have to take – should even be considered for reappointment, at least if accountability is to mean anything ever.
Of course, there have been bigger losses in New Zealand government history. I’ve just been reading John Boshier’s Power Surge on the Think Big debacle of the 1980s. As a share of GDP, total economic losses to the taxpayer from that series of projects were far greater than the LSAP losses, but I’m not sure that losing less in one punt than the worst series of discretionary public sector projects ever in New Zealand history should be any consolation or mitigation. And, for what it is worth, Boshier’s book suggests there was typically more advance risk analysis undertaken for the Think Big projects than we have yet seen evidence of for the LSAP.
I’m sure gambling appeals to some people, and I wouldn’t want to stop those minded punting on the bond market, the fx market, Bitcoin, equities or whatever. But if that is the sort of thing that takes Orr’s fancy – and it probably isn’t judging by his past financial disclosures – he could at least do it with his own money, not ours. And having rashly done it with our money, and lost heavily, have the decency to apologise.
The Governor of the Reserve Bank must have been feeling under a bit of pressure recently about the LSAP programme. Losses have mounted and some more questions have started to be asked – by more than just annoying former staff – about value for money.
And thus on Thursday morning “Monetary Policy Tools and the RBNZ Balance Sheet” dropped into inboxes. It was an 10 page note setting out to defend the Bank and the MPC over the bond-buying LSAP programme and the inaptly-named Funding for Lending programme, the crisis facility under which the Bank is still – amid an overheated economy and very high core inflation – lending new money to banks.
Of course, the Monetary Policy Statement had been out the previous day. Had the Governor been serious about scrutiny and engagement, he’d have released his note a day or two before the MPS (or even simultaneous to the MPS). Then journalists could have read the paper and asked questions about it in the openly-viewed press conference. The Bank’s choice not to do so revealed their preferences. Oh, and then the note was released less than an hour before the Finance and Expenditure Committee’s hearing on the MPS, and since FEC no doubt had other things to consider it is unlikely any of the members had read the note before the hearing. That too must have been a conscious choice by the Bank (one that didn’t go down well with the Opposition members).
I noted earlier that the paper was 10 pages long, but there wasn’t a lot of substance. We still have nothing but the Bank’s assertions for their claims that the LSAP programme was worthwhile, and while we are told that they hope to provide some more analysis in a review document at the end of the year, attempting to kick for touch for another four months frankly really isn’t good enough. And, of course, we’ve heard nothing at all from the three non-executive MPC members who share responsibility for the programme. As it is, the 10 page note does not even provide a serious attempt at a rigorous framework for evaluating costs, benefits, and risks – there is more handwaving, and attempts to blur any analysis, than serious reasoning.
There are two separable strands. I am going to focus on the LSAP rather than the Funding for Lending programme (FLP), but it is worth making a few points on the latter:
the Bank claims that the FLP was necessary because banks were not yet operationally capable of managing a negative OCR, but the FLP was only finally launched in December 2020, and the Bank has separately told us that by that time banks’ system were in fact capable of coping with a negative OCR. Sure, the FLP had been foreshadowed over the previous few months and probably had some impact on retail rates then, but then the possibility of a negative OCR had also been foreshadowed,
the FLP was misnamed from the start (creating of lot of unnecessary controversy at the time about housing finance), with the name feeding an entirely fallacious mentality that shortages of settlement cash were somehow a constraint on bank lending. I am pleased to see that in this document the Bank (now that it suits) explicitly states “there is little evidence that higher settlement cash balances resulting from these programmes have directly impacted bank lending”. Paying the full OCR on all settlement cash balances – a Covid novelty that continues – will also have that effect.
it remains extraordinary that the Bank is still undertaking new lending under the FLP until the end of this year. It was a crisis programme, launched belatedly when crisis conditions had all but passed anyway, and there has been no clear justification for continuing new loans for at least the last year (recall the Bank wanted to raise the OCR last August). Arguments about predictable funding streams just fall flat, when the entire economic and financial climate was so uncertain, and when banks like everyone else recognise that circumstances have moved on from where they were two years ago. The Bank’s claim – that somehow banks would not future bank commitments seriously if they terminated early – deserve little more than to be scoffed at. And although the Bank will tend to play this down, we can tell that the FLP is relatively cheap funding – if it were not, banks would not still be tapping the facility. Similarly, arguing (as they do) that the OCR can offset the FLP is to concede the point: increases in the OCR should be leaning against real inflation pressures, not counteracting other lingering stimulatory crisis interventions.
But enough of the FLP, daft as it is still to be running it, the costs and risks are fairly small.
Not so the LSAP, where costs and risks are demonstrably high (now conceded by the Bank) while the alleged benefits are hard to pin down (not helped by the Bank making no serious public effort so far), and the water is being deliberately muddied by the Governor’s bluster and absence of careful delineation of the issues and arguments.
On financial costs, this from the Bank’s document is clear and straightforward (and I would hope might finally silence those who keep trying to claim they aren’t “real” costs, are all “within the Crown” or whatever). The Bank is clear that the financial losses themselves are real.
The best estimate of the net cost of LSAP is measured by the value of the Crown’s indemnity – unrealised losses based on current market valuation, reflecting a higher OCR – and losses realised by RBNZ upon the sale of the Bonds.
As to quantum, the claim under the indemnity fluctuates each day, and some of the Bank’s claim has now been paid by Treasury, but the Bank’s Assistant Governor was happy at FEC to use a ballpark $8bn figure. $8bn is roughly $1600 per man, woman, and child in New Zealand.
In the rest of this post, I am drawing on three sources of Bank comment: the 10 page document itself, the Bank’s appearance at FEC on Thursday (comments from Orr, Silk, and Conway, the chief economist), and the Governor’s full interview with the Herald (linked to in this article). Orr has made stronger claims orally than what is in the formal document, asserting twice that the wider economic gains of the LSAP programme were “some multiple” of the financial losses, following up to add that in his view it wasn’t even close. “Some multiple” must mean at least two, so at minimum the Governor is asserting (and recall there is no evidence advanced and not much argument) that the LSAP resulted in real economic gains of at least $16bn. At minimum, he is claiming a benefit of about 5 per cent of GDP at the time the LSAP was first launched. These are really huge claims, and you’d think he’d have at least some disciplined framework to demonstrate their plausibility (even just as ballpark estimates).
Instead, we are offering not much more than handwaving, and lines that at best veer close to outright dishonesty.
There seem to be three broad strands to whatever case Orr is trying to make:
there is the “least regrets” rhetoric,
there is talk (especially in the Herald interview) of the gains from bond market stabilisation back in March 2020, and
there is lots of talk (even the chief economist went down this line at FEC) about how much stronger than forecast the economy has been than was being forecast in 2020.
As Orr now tells it, “least regrets” meant the Bank would run monetary policy in such a way that it would prefer to see a grossly overheated high inflation situation (actual outcome) than a deep depression and entrenched deflation. Perhaps many people might share that preference if it was the only choice. But it wasn’t, and we’d be better off sacking and replacing all involved if they really want us to believe it was. Go back to 2020 and then when they were first talking about “least regrets” it was the much more reasonable framing (eg here) that, at the margin, and given that inflation had undershot the target for 10 years, they might be content with (core) inflation being a little above the target midpoint for a while rather than jump on things too early and risk keeping the unemployment rate higher than necessary for longer than necessary. Not everyone would necessarily have agreed with them on that, but it would have commanded pretty widespread assent (I wasn’t unhappy myself)….and in any case was entirely hypothetical at the time since, as I’ve documented in recent posts, actual inflation forecasts (Bank and private) were well below the target midpoint even as the Bank added no more stimulus beyond that (from OCR, LSAP, FLP or whatever) already embedded in the economic and inflation forecasts. So don’t be fooled by Orr rhetoric suggesting we should smile benignly on their handling of things because “the alternative was some Armageddon”. We pay him and his offsiders a lot of money to help ensure that those aren’t the choices.
Back when the LSAP programme was first announced – 23 March 2020 – there was a twin (related) motivation: generally to ease monetary conditions, and specifically to underpin the functioning of the government bond market. Global government bond markets were then in a mess, reflecting primarily US-sourced extreme illiquidity and flight to cash (at the time stock markets had been falling very sharply too). For those interested, here are a couple of links to what was going on at the time (here and here). Government bond rates were rising (even as policy rates had been cut): the disruption was real enough and it was getting very difficult to place paper. I’ve even gone on record here in the past stating that, even allowing for the moral hazard risks, I had no particular objection to some stabilising interventions, especially in the Covid context.
But here is a chart of US and NZ 10 year government bond rates for the month of March 2020 (with the US rates lagged a day to line with the NZ ones – changes in NZ bond rates in the morning are usually mostly a reflection of what has happened in the US overnight (the previous day for them).
You can see yields rising in that third week of the month even though both central banks had cut policy rates sharply that week (and the Fed had announced restarting of bond purchases). The NZ market is less liquid at the best of times than the US one. But yields in both countries peaked on 19 March (NZ).
As did the gap between New Zealand and US rates. Days before the Reserve Bank did anything or even announced their own LSAP (although they had foreshadowed that one might be coming).
And if the Reserve Bank announced its LSAP on 23 March, on the same day (but remember the time difference) the Fed greatly expanded its own bond-buying programme. Almost immediately New Zealand long-term bond yields were back down to around 1 per cent.
Simple charts of yields – of the most liquid part of each market – don’t directly get to the illiquidity in other markets, but all indications are that the worst (globally) was already over by the time the Reserve Bank made its announcement, and given the US-sourced nature of the shock, it seems far more likely that the US actions were the more decisive policy contribution to stabilising markets. I don’t want to begrudge the Bank its small part in domestic market stabilisation (and they had some other interventions, including thru the fxs swaps market – but remember it is the LSAP they are defending), but even if we run through to 10 April, total bond purchases by the RBNZ to that point was only $3.6bn. Sure, a willingness to go on intervening offered a bit of cheap insurance to market participants, but if Orr wants to make much of what those earlier operations contributed (and it really can’t be much, given lockdowns, extreme economic and policy uncertainty etc) it relates to less than a 10th of the risk the Bank eventually exposed the taxpayer to through the LSAP.
(And if you want to note that over the month New Zealand bond yields did not fall as much as those in the US, recall that at the start of much US policy rates had much more room to fall than NZ ones did – and expectations of future short rates are the main medium-term influence on bond yields).
The third broad strand of Orr’s defence now appears to rest on how unexpectedly strong the economy (and inflation) proved to be.
From the 10 page report
His new chief economist tried the same line at FEC, with less nuance, and Orr himself when asked by Nicola Willis what evidence there was of the net benefits of the LSAP responded succinctly “the economy we live in today”.
It really is borderline dishonest. After all, all those dismal 2020 sets of forecasts – the Bank’s, the Treasury’s, and the myriad private sector ones – all included the effects of the policy stimulus (including the LSAP), and views on the path of the virus itself, so the resulting massive forecast error (for which I am not particularly blaming anyone) logically cannot be proof – or even evidence – of the effectiveness of a single strand of monetary policy (LSAP), or even of macro policy taken together. Since Orr and Conway are smart people, and know this point very well, it must be a deliberate choice to continue to muddy the waters as they do. They never even address the probability – high likelihood in my view – that most economists simply got wrong the extent of the adverse demand shock. At very least any serious analysis would have to unpick the various elements.
Instead, in none of their written material, or the comments of Orr and his offsiders, has there been any attempt (even conceptually) to think about the marginal effects of the LSAP programme itself. It was a discretionary (and last minute) addition to the toolkit. And even if we granted them a free pass for the first $3.6 billion or so of purchases (see above) all the rest was their choice. We know the financial costs (that $8bn or so of losses) but the alleged huge gains (Orr’s “multiples”) are unidentified – no effort has even been made. As just one small example, when the Herald’s journalist asked Orr whether, for example, they could have done less LSAP and instead cut the OCR to zero (which as even the Bank notes has no material market risk), Orr simply avoided answering the question.
I’ve run through previously the various reasons to be sceptical that the LSAP had much useful macro effect (those vaunted $16bn of gains Orr would need to show). In particular, even if the impact on longer-term bond rates was as large as Orr has claimed (again numbers that have never been documented), it isn’t at all obvious how that would have translated to large useful macro gains. It is commonly understood that the most important element in the interest rate bit of the New Zealand transmission mechanism is the short-end. Short rates (1-2 year bond rates) shape most retail lending rates, and are themselves largely influenced by expectations of the future OCR. Had the Bank been interested, say, in managing down a 3 year bond rate – as the RBA was – it could have done that directly, at very little financial risk. But instead they focused their bond buying at the longer end of the yield curve. Government borrowing costs may have been a bit less than otherwise as a result, but monetary policy isn’t supposed to be about getting cheap finance for the government but about macro stabilisation. Few private borrowers take borrowing at long-term fixed rates.
The Bank also claims that the exchange rate may have been lower than otherwise as a result of the LSAP. Perhaps, but (a) it depends on the counterfactual (they could have lowered that OCR further instead but chose not to) and (b) in most models the real economic effects of exchange rate moves take quite a long time to be felt, and even the Reserve Bank argues (contrary to quite a lot of literature) that the impact of the LSAP was decaying over time.
And it is worth pointing out that, as their document notes, they used the LSAP because of issues around operational readiness of banks for negative OCRs, but whose responsibility over the previous decade had it been to have ensured that banks were operationally ready? The taxpayer was exposed to the massive financial risk from the LSAP – without, it appears, any robust prior risk analysis – because of the Bank’s own failures. Just maybe there were some macro gains, but in a better world we’d have got those without the huge financial risk (and $8bn of losses). (A former colleague noted to me the other day that if we’d wanted to throw around an extra $8bn we’d almost certainly have gotten more macro bang for the buck by just giving $1600 to every man, woman and child and setting them free to spend – probably would have seemed a bit more equitable too.)
Oh, and did I add that if the last big macro policy tool deployed – the LSAP – was really as potent as the Governor seems to claim, then given how overheated the economy has been and the fresh ravages of high core inflation, it might have been much better (and lower risk) if the keys to the ill-prepared drawer marked LSAP had never been found and the instrument left untouched. We pay central bankers to do (materially) less badly than this, even (especially?) in difficult and uncertain times.
Bottom line: there has so far been no serious attempt by the Reserve Bank to frame an analysis that looks at the marginal impact of the LSAP programme, whether numerically or conceptually. Until there is, everything else they utter on the subject is really just defensive bluster. The public deserves better from senior officials of such a powerful institution. But as so often with the Bank, the question again arises as to why those paid to hold the Governor and MPC to account seem utterly uninterested in doing so.
In yesterday post, the first in this series, I tried to review and assess the Reserve Bank’s preparedness and its policy response to the Covid economic shock in the first 2-3 months (January to April 2020). They weren’t very well prepared, as it turned out, and this probably contributed to them rushing (and rushing The Treasury and the Minister) into some elements of the response that bore financial risks that were grossly proportionate to the likely economic or financial returns. But on the information they had at the time, and the way most other forecasters and commentators were thinking about the likely economic implications of Covid (and associated other policy responses), there wasn’t much doubt that a significant monetary policy response – easing monetary conditions – was well-warranted at the time. But there were mistakes – some perhaps not that consequential as it turned out (the pledge not to change the OCR, up or down, for a year come what may, but others (the LSAP, concentrated at the long end of the yield curve) much more so (in a variety of ways), and to a considerable extent foreseeably so on the information available at the time. And, as usual (but potentially mattering more in high stakes times) the Bank wasn’t very transparent.
A point I didn’t make explicitly yesterday, but should have, is that a stylised central bank (and among advanced countries there has never been one in recent decades) focused exclusively on inflation would have had no cause to have done anything different, given the data and the beliefs about (a) how the economy would behave, and (b) how the various possible monetary policy instruments would work.
Today I want to focus on the following year or so. Over that period, there weren’t a huge number of monetary policy initiatives (they really didn’t change the OCR at all, up or down, although did ensure that banks could cope with a negative OCR should the inflation outlook require such a rate in the future.
There were two significant policy announcements:
the extension of the LSAP (and the associated Crown indemnity) to a potential $100 billion of bond purchases, and
the establishment of the Funding for Lending scheme.
Inflation targeting has long been recognised as relying heavily on forecasts of inflation. Why? Because monetary policy actions don’t affect inflation anything like instantaneously. Prudent policy today will typically (but not always) be substantially informed by best view available on the outlook for inflation some way ahead. The lags matter.
Quite how long those lags are is a matter for some debate. The old phrase was “long and variable”. I had a quick look at the Monetary Policy Handbook the Bank likes to boast of, and which is supposed to give readers a good sense of monetary policy as the Bank sees it. The word “lags” appears only once, and that referring to implementation lags in fiscal policy. I also checked the Discussion Paper in which the Bank’s calibrated economic model, NZSIM, is described, and was a bit surprised to find this chart
which seems to suggest very short lags (compare the 90 day and inflation charts), shorter than most practical discussion assumes. It is likely that the length of lags depends a bit on the shock, and a bit on the circumstances, but most pundits seem to think of the biggest impact of monetary policy on inflation as taking perhaps 12-18 months.
(Note that if the lags were as long as is sometimes rhetorically asserted – two years or more – the June quarter 2022 inflation outcomes (most recent we have) would have been substantially influenced by shocks to monetary policy in the June quarter of 2020, and since there were few/no dissenters then on the information available then, most questions of holding the RB now to account for recent inflation outcomes would be rendered largely moot. But few if any observers act, or consistently speak, as if the lags – for the largest effects – are that long.)
Implicitly or explicitly, all forecasts of inflation (and especially those that incorporate recent or prospective monetary policy changes) have a view on the length of lags, and when the Bank or officials ever discuss lags you also get the impression they have something like 12-18 months in mind.
So what did the Bank’s forecasts look like during this period? (Here, for the record, I an going to assume – I hope uncontroversially – that the published numbers were the Bank’s – or MPC’s – best view at the time.)
Here are the Bank’s inflation forecasts for the three successive MPSs, May, August and November 2020
Note that Reserve Bank published inflation forecasts almost always come back to 2 per cent eventually – it is the goal set for the Bank, and the default way the models are set up is for monetary policy to adjust endogenously to the extent required to get inflation back to target.
But note that these forecasts appear to have embodied views about the shocks monetary policy was leaning against that were severely disinflationary. Even with endogenous monetary policy, in all three of these sets of forecasts the inflation rates 12-18 months ahead were around 1 per cent, the very bottom of the target range and well below the 2 per cent successive governments required the Bank to focus on achieving. By the February 2021 MPS – not shown – the inflation outlook 12-18 months ahead was for outcomes around 1.4 per cent.
The Bank usually has OCR forecasts, but during this period (a) they had pledged not to change the OCR, (b) they believed the OCR could not yet be taken negative, and (c) they believed (or said they believed) that the LSAP was doing, and would do, a lot of the adjustment . So they published forecasts of what an “unconstrained OCR” would look like if a hypothetical OCR were to be doing its usual job.
Here were those projections (the paths in the May and August MPSs were identical)
So each of the published sets of projections through this period – but particularly those in 2020 – implied inflation well undershooting the target midpoint, even with substantial monetary stimulus (whether coming from the LSAP – which the Bank believed to be effective – or the OCR or – later – the Funding for Lending programme).
On their numbers it was pretty clear cut. The case for an aggressively stimulatory monetary policy was strong, whether considered against some pure inflation target or the Remit the MPC was charged with working towards.
I haven’t mentioned the unemployment or output gap estimates. These were the unemployment rate forecasts, that take into account actual and endogenous future monetary policy
I don’t want to make much of them (in shocks like this most of the information is already in the inflation picture) but their best view through 2020 was the unemployment into 2022 would still be 6 per cent or thereabouts (well above any credible NAIRU estimate). By the Feb 2021 MPS there was a big revision downwards, but they reckoned then that this week’s unemployment number would be about 5 per cent (best guess a day out, something like 3 per cent).
The forecasts were, of course, wildly wrong. But (a) there is no reason to suppose they were anything other than the best view of the MPC/Governor at the time, and (b) on those forecasts, the purest of inflation targeters would have taken a similar view on how much monetary policy stimulus was required (arguably – it was an argument I made at the time – the projections argued for more).
It isn’t very satisfactory that an organisation we spend tens of millions of dollars a year on, and set up a flash new statutory committee to make the decisions, did that poorly. There is no getting away from the fact that they had the biggest team of macroeconomists in the country, and access to every bit of private or public data they would have requested.
But, they weren’t the only ones doing forecasts, putting their money and/or reputations on the line. Long-term bond yields, for example, were barely off their lows in early November 2020, when the Bank was finalising the last projections of 2020.
What were the published forecasts of other forecasters showing. Conveniently, NZIER each quarter publishes a collection in their Consensus Forecasts. Those numbers include projections from the five main retail banks, NZIER itself, the Reserve Bank and The Treasury. There are limitations to the comparisons – they report numbers for March years (as distinct from rolling horizons) – and each institution’s forecasts are finalised at different dates (and Treasury publishes numbers only twice a year). The data are slightly biased against the Reserve Bank, which typically finalises forecasts in the first or second week of the second month of the quarter, while the compilation is published in the middle of the final month of the quarter (so some will probably have updated their forecasts after the Reserve Bank publishes its MPSs).
But for what it is worth here are the comparisons for forecasts done in late 2020 and the first quarter of 2021.
In the September 202 comparison, the Reserve Bank’s numbers for both inflation and unemployment are very much middle of the pack (just a little less inflation and a little less unemployment than the mean response (NB: note to NZIER: medians are probably better)).
By the final quarter of 2020, the Reserve Bank had the lowest March 2022 inflation forecasts,,,,,,but not by much. 1.1 per cent – the mean response – was still a very long way below the target midpoint.
And in the March 2021 comparison – where those focusing on the Reserve Bank’s failures might have hoped to find them at odds with their peers, on the wrong side – the Bank’s inflation and unemployment forecasts sit right on the respective means (and the least-wrong forecaster – credit to them – still proved to be off on inflation by just less than 5 percentage points).
I think it is no small defence of the Reserve Bank, in making the monetary policy that was driving core inflation outcomes now, that it had very much the same sets of views as its local forecasting peers. There are other forecasters (eg Infometrics) but it isn’t obvious anyone doing and publishing forecasts was doing much better than the Bank when it mattered. If you disagree that it is “no small defence”, all I can really offer is “well, they’d be really culpable if the central tendency of private forecasters – each with fewer resources – had been materially less bad than them”.
Another comparison is with the NZIER’s Shadow Board exercise, which for each monetary policy review invites six economists (and a few others) to offer their views on what the Bank should (not “will”) be doing. Several of the bank chief economists are in the Shadow Board panel, as are Viv Hall (retired macro academic, and former longserving RB Board member), Prasanna Gai, macro professor at Auckland (and former overseas central banker/adviser), and Arthur Grimes (former chief economist of the RB and the National Bank).
Shadow Board members used to just be asked for an OCR view, with probability distribution, and given the chance to make comments (some take regularly, some occasionally, some hardly at all). So I look through each release starting with the June 2020 (non MPS) review. The question was posed about the degree to which respondents thought the RB should use (a) a negative OCR, and (b) further QE (ie an expansion of the announced QE programme) at each of (a) the upcoming meeting and (b) the coming 12 months.
In June 2020, of the six economist respondents two thought there was a strong chance that a negative OCR would eventually be required. Arthur Grimes thought there was a near-zero chance. Four of the six strongly favoured an eventual expansion of the QE programme. Prasanna Gai put that chance at 50 per cent. Arthur Grimes again assigned a near-zero probability. Sadly, neither Prasanna nor Arthur offered any comments in elaboration, so we don’t know whether they felt the LSAP would be ineffective, they had a more robust macroeconomic (inflation and/or unemployment) outlook, or what.
By the next review, enthusiasm for more stimulus had begun to fade somewhat (although Arthur – again with no comment – modestly increased his very low probability on more QE being appropriate.
By the September review the LSAP programme had been significantly expanded, but respondents views about the future hadn’t changed much. A couple thought a negative OCR quite likely to be required, but no one was keen on a further increase in the LSAP programme. Nothing much had changed in respondents’ views going into the November MPS (and one of the comments suggest a robustly different macro outlook).
By the February 2021 exercise, the question had changed. Respondents were now asked about the likely need for “tighter policy”, now and in the coming year. There was growing sense that a tighter policy stance would be required over the coming year, but only one respondent – Grimes – was confident that an immediate tightening was warranted.
Ah, you say “see, an academic who doesn’t even do monetary policy stuff these days bests the Reserve Bank”. Except for the awkward fact that this was the time Grimes chose to make comments and explain his stance. His explanation?
The RBNZ loosened monetary policy too much through 2020, causing soaring house prices (as well as other asset prices) which is very damaging for disadvantaged New Zealanders and for the next generation…..The tightening should continue until such time as house prices return to a much more affordable level provided the goods market does not enter deflation.
In other words, whatever the merits of Grimes’s stance may or may not be, he wasn’t at all focused on the outlook for the CPI. Instead he favoured using monetary policy to target house prices, with the explicit proviso that deflation might be a risk for general consumer prices. But – whatever merits or otherwise there may be to his argument – the target he was proposing was not the one the government had charged the Bank with pursuing.
(To look ahead, in the April survey Grimes again focuses on house price inflation but does talk about a need to “head off incipient goods market inflation pressures).
Again, maybe someone to point to some other commentators who did better, but from among the usual range of suspects there was little or nothing marking out the Bank’s overall view on inflation or monetary policy in the second half of 2020 or even early 2021. What there had been of course was a huge kerfuffle over house prices – where at times the Bank didn’t help itself (the chief economist once suggesting rhe higher prices were good ands helpful), but where mostly I agree with Governor: house prices were not something the monetary policy arm of the Bank was supposed to focus on (construction costs are) and that it would be an inferior approach to monetary policy to make house prices a focus of monetary policy. It is not irrelevant that no other central bank does.
So there was massive forecasting failure, and a widely shared one. The good side of that was that the economy got back to capacity much faster than expected/feared. The (very) bad side is that the economy grossly overheated and substantial core inflation pressures compounded – in headline CPI terms – various one-off price levels shocks that orthodox monetary policy generally encourages central banks to “look through”. It wasn’t a forecasting mistake unique to New Zealand. it was, it appears, about how Covid, the resulting stimuli etc would work out – something for which neither central banks nor private forecasters had many useful precedents.
None of that means that there were not significant mistakes made by the Bank during the period in this post.
If – as the forecasts suggested – more monetary policy stimulus was warranted in August and November 2020, there was still no good reason for a massive expansion of the LSAP programme, still focused at the long end of the yield curve (where little borrowing occurred), still boosting the level of settlement cash (in a way that had next to no macroeconomic significance, given the settlement accounts paid a full OCR interest rate, but which fed a frenzy around “printing money” – from both several journalists on the left, and a few economists on the right. The Bank had the option of cutting the OCR further – 25 points isn’t nothing, even if perchance a modestly negative OCR might have created a few residual systems problems for a few banks. Sure, some weren’t keen in the abstract on negative rates, but the beauty of conventional monetary policy (the OCR) is that it comes a little or no financial risk to the taxpayer. Massively expanding the LSAP programme – when even the Bank will acknowledge uncertainty about the strength of transmissions mechanisms – opened the way to potential for further massive losses to the taxpayer, with no sign still (months on, crisis passed) of serious risk analysis or indications of the losses taxpayers might face in the worst case, if things went bad and bond yields (and then the OCR) rose sharply.
(A common excuse (I even used it once or twice myself) is “well, it doesn’t matter too much if the economy is so much stronger”, except that (a) there is little serious evidence (and the Bank has published none) that the LSAP was what produced the strength, and (b) things have so overheated, that if the LSAP did contribute much there are now two strikes against it. At worst, the Bank should have been much for focused on managing yields at the 2 and 3 year parts of the yield curve, where any potential good would have come at much less financial risk.)
And then there is the Funding for Lending programme. There have serious issues around the fact that that crisis scheme is still lending now, but that is an issue for the next post.
Again, given the macro forecasts (see above, very similar to those of private forecasters), it isn’t unreasonable for the Bank to have been seeking to ease monetary conditions a bit further. And that is what the Funding for Lending programme did – helped (mostly in the announcement effect, more than in actual lending) to lower term deposit rates relative to the OCR. It was conceived at a time when the Bank thought the OCR could not go negative, but was only finally put in place by a time when (so the Bank told us) those issues had largely been sorted out.
I wrote a post about the launch of the Funding for Lending scheme in November 2020 (“Funding for lending and other myths”). I stand today by everything in that post. The scheme wasn’t harmful, didn’t carry material financial risks, and probably helped ease conditions a bit (the Bank has claimed it is latterly equivalent to one 25 basis point OCR cut, which sounds plausible). But by the time it was deployed it simply wasn’t necessary – adjustments could have been made simply to the OCR (if the Bank had not been dogmatically wedded to the ill-advised March 2020 pledge not to change the OCR come what may). And, if you refresh your memory, the scheme fed narratives that somehow banks were settlement cash constrained (they had never been), and led to loud but futile arguments about whether access to the funds should be tied to expansions of particular favoured types of lending (when banks were more opportunity-constrained, were never cash constrained, and where if such access rules had been put in place the scheme would not have worked to the limited extent it did. The Bank itself was a significant part of the problem – it was the party that devised the misleading name, presumably in same wish by the Governor to be seen, again, “doing stuff”.
I’m going to stop this post here, and am not going to attempt a summing up except perhaps to suggest that in the broad thrust of monetary policy (stimulus provided) this period the Bank did no worse than anyone much else (and if that isn’t saying much, so many people inside and outside of government and of New Zealand misread how the economy would behave). Lags are a problem. A mechanical inflation targeter with that not uncommon view of the world might reasonably have counselled more. Where the Bank is more culpable during this period – both with hindsight and with perspectives available at the time – was in its use of unconventional instruments.
After last week’s posts on the Reserve Bank’s handling of monetary policy, I thought it might be worthwhile to stand back and attempt a series of posts this week on how the Reserve Bank has handled things (mainly monetary policy) over the two and half years since, in late January 2020, Covid became an economic issue for New Zealand. In today’s post, I will look at the Bank’s preparedness and their responses over the first three months or so. In a second post, probably tomorrow, I will look at their handling of policy over the following year or so, and a third post will look at the more recent period. If it seems worthwhile, I might attempt a final post bringing it all together.
It is hardly a secret that I do not have a high regard for the Governor, but in this series I will be seeking to offer both brickbats and bouquets as fairly as I can, and to distinguish as far as possible between perspectives that were reasonably open to an informed observer at the time and those which benefit from hindsight. Both have their place. Even though every country’s circumstances differ, what was going on in other countries and central banks is not irrelevant to a fair assessment of the Reserve Bank’s handling of things. People with more time and resources are better placed to assess the variety of responses in other advanced countries, but I will draw on comparisons where I can and where I think it would be helpful. Finally, while my focus is on the people who mattered – the Bank and the MPC – I’m always conscious that I wrote a lot in real-time about how monetary policy was being and should be handled. Inevitably I’ve had to reflect on what I got right and wrong, and why.
One area in which the Bank does not score well throughout is transparency. The Bank often likes to boast about being very open and transparent – the Governor was at it again in his press release last week reacting last week to the Wheeler-Wilkinson paper – but it is anything but, and the gaps were more evident than usual over the Covid period. The Bank has been less willing than the government generally to release relevant background documents, nothing at all has been heard from most members of the MPC (despite it being one of the most difficult times for monetary policy in a decades), and there have been few serious and relevant speeches and little or no published research. In challenging and uncertain times when no one has any sort of monopoly on wisdom the stance the Governor has chosen to take – echoing the biases of successive Governors – is a poor reflection on the Bank. We are told that Bank staff are beavering away on their own review, but the Bank will not even commit to having that material available to the public before their consultation on the five-yearly review of the monetary policy Remit closes (and there is no sign, for example, of any sort of ongoing engagement with alternative views going on). Here it is always worth bearing in mind that the Reserve Bank has far more resources available to it (including the largest team of macroeconomists in the country) than any other relevant party in New Zealand. We should expect better. And the Governor’s assertion a couple of months back to Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee that he regrets nothing is neither true to the limitations of human knowledge/understanding, nor exactly reassuring that we are dealing here with an open and learning organisation.
Preparedness
When the first news of Covid cases emerged from China at the very end of 2019, the OCR was 1 per cent and the Bank had been struggling for some years to get (core) inflation up to the 2 per cent that successive governments had told them to focus on. By the end of 2019, they were not far away, but equally the economy was pretty full employed, the growth phase had run for 8 or 9 years, and prudent central bankers needed to be thinking about how they’d cope with the next recession. The effective lower bound on the nominal OCR really wasn’t that far away and in typical recessions perhaps 500 basis points of interest rate cuts had been required.
In a couple of respects, the Bank doesn’t score too badly:
as long ago as 2012, then outgoing Governor Alan Bollard had set up a working group (I chaired it) to think about how we would handle the next serious downturn. That group recommended, and there was no dissent from senior management, that steps be taken to ensure that the Bank’s systems and those of the banks could cope with modestly negative interest rates (which had already become a thing abroad),
in 2018, shortly after Orr took office, the Bank published a survey of options for what they referred to as “unconventional monetary policy”, citing the need to have thought through the issues in case the need arose in New Zealand (I discussed the article here).
well into 2019 the Governor gave a substantive interview in which he expressed his view that a negative OCR was preferable to using large-scale asset purchases in a future serious downturn. They seemed to have been thinking about the issue quite a bit.
The problem was that it didn’t seem to have occurred to them until very late in the piece to check if their preferred option was workable. Documents released under the OIA confirm that it wasn’t until December 2019/January 2020 that they thought to check, and pretty quickly the feedback from banks told them that – for many if not all banks – there were systems problems (both computer systems and documentation) that meant negative interest rates could not be implemented in short order.
(To be honest, I am still mystified on two counts: the first is how the Bank never checked over all those years, but the second is how the banks – often part of banking groups with operations in countries/markets that had dealt with negative rates elsewhere over the previous decade – were sufficiently remiss as not to have prepared either. How insuperable these obstacles really were in still hard to tell, but what matters is that the Reserve Bank and the MPC treated them as so, and were foreced into last minute changes of plan.)
The Bank was pretty slow off the mark to recognise the potential severity of Covid. By late January, some New Zealand exporters of luxury food products to China (notably crayfish) were reporting real problems. At the very end of January, New Zealand temporarily closed the border to arrivals from China (China have already restricted outflows from China), threatening both tourism and foreign students, and lockdowns were a thing in one of the world’s largest economies. But through February, the Bank took a fairly relaxed approach (which, in fairness to them, seems to have reflected a fairly relaxed approach across much of government – the Secretary to the Treasury sits on the MPC, and there is no sign that she injected any great sense of urgency to the deliberations on the February MPS, and published papers reveal no urgent whole of government effort to get ready for what might be coming). I was among those calling for a precautionary (Covid) OCR cut in February – at the time, there was no doubt that the Covid effects we were experiencing were, from a New Zealand perspective, pure adverse demand shocks. The Bank didn’t act, but what surprised me more was a couple of weeks later when they took to social media to talk up economic prospects for 2020 (an OIA request revealed that this wasn’t some rogue social media person, but was initiated/cleared by the Bank’s chief economist).
The global situation deteriorated into March, and not much was seen or heard of the Bank. But then on 10 March the Governor delivered a speech to an invited audience on monetary policy at very low interest rates. The Governor was keen to stress that this was all in abstract, there were no immediate plans to use any of them, but also
There was an indication that they would shortly be publishing background technical papers on each option (papers which, if they existed, never actually were published).
Note the preferred order. Note the date.
A couple of days later the Herald briefly reported some comments by the chief economist also downplaying the potential of asset purchase options.
On Monday 16 March, the deteriorating situation (virus, markets, economic dislocations), finally prompted the Bank to act. The centrepiece of the day’s announcements was that the OCR was cut by 75 basis points immediately (other central banks were making similar moves). But there were other elements to the day’s announcements, notably:
a year’s delay in the commencement of the higher bank capital requirements,
a move to pay the OCR interest rate on all settlement cash balances (previously each bank had a quota – linked loosely to daily interbank settlement requirements – above which only below market rates were paid).
Both moves made sense.
The Bank also indicated that it had discovered – 6 days on? – that banks could not operationally cope with a negative OCR, and issued a pledge that seemed strange and inappropriate at the time and seemed only more odd later: no matter what happened, the OCR would not be changed for the coming year. It simply made no sense. On the one hand, even if a negative OCR wasn’t really technically feasible, there didn’t seem to be any obstacle to an OCR of zero (or 1 or 10 basis points). And in an environment that was moving so fast and was so uncertain (that, for example, emergency unscheduled MPC announcements were needed) how could anyone pretend to the level of confidence in the economic and inflation outlook implied by a pledge that, come what may, the OCR would not be changed – up or down – for the coming year? Since the Bank won’t release the relevant documents and has never really engaged on the issue, it is hard to know what was going on in their minds, or what issues/risks they were thinking about (or not).
All that said, on the day the broad thrust of the moves was fairly widely welcomed (as just one example, here is the “Whatever it takes” (and “more will be necessary”) press release from the NZ Initiative. This was the day before the government’s own first significant Covid fiscal package (which I described at the time as, at best, good in parts).
The Covid situation deteriorated rapidly over the following week, with New Zealand’s “lockdown” (not envisaged in either fiscal or monetary announcements the previous week) announced and implemented. Economic activity was clearly weakening, as (eg) domestic travel dried up. Global equity markets were very weak and pressures spilled over into bond markets, initially in the US, but increasingly globally. Cash was king and bonds could be sold.
And on 23 March, the Bank announced that they had lurched to launching a $30bn large-scale asset purchase programme. Read the statement and it is clear that there were two separate considerations: one about the immediate pressures in the government bond market (yields were rising) and the second – more important – about the deteriorating economic situation. In their words
The negative economic implications of the coronavirus outbreak have continued to intensify. The Committee agreed that further monetary stimulus is needed to meet its inflation and employment objectives.
The following day – the “lockdown” having been announced by then – the Reserve Bank, the government and the retail banks had a further announcement (not primarily about monetary policy) : a six month mortgage holiday for those with severe Covid income disruptions, an (ill-fated) Business Finance Guarantee Scheme, and (from the RB, and with monetary policy implications) an easing in the core funding ratio requirement on banks.
There were various other announcements over the following days/weeks, but perhaps the last in the initial wave (and I’d forgotten it came a month later) was a 21 April announcement that the Bank was planning to remove LVR restrictions for 12 months.
It seems to me that the Bank’s broad approach over the period from mid-March to late April 2020 was consistent with a pretty widely held view of severe downside risks to both economic activity and inflation – widely held among informed observers in New Zealand and those overseas (looking at their own economies). Of course everyone recognised that (for example) ordering people to stay at home for weeks on end represented a reduction in the economy’s capacity to supply (good and services) and that the liberal wage subsidies would maintain immediate purchasing power (at least for wage and salary earners), but that there were good reasons to suppose that adverse demand effects would outweigh supply reductions. If so, downside risks to inflation and inflation expectations were very real (risks to expectations soon became apparent in survey measures) and, well, inflation and inflation expectations were what we wanted the monetary policy arm of the Reserve Bank to focus on.
What sort of demand effects might we see? Examples included:
schools and universities unable to receive foreign students (significant export industry), and uncertain when those restrictions might ease,
tourism itself was a net export earner for New Zealand,
the borders being closed meant few if any new migrants could arrive (the demand effects of new migrants typically outweigh supply effects over the short-term horizons relevant to monetary policy,
the previous recession had seen a material fall in nominal house prices (despite much larger interest rate reductions) and between (a) reduced immigration, (b) limited interest rate cuts, and (c) significant reductions in business income (not protected by wage subsidies) house price falls and consequent reductions in building activity seemed likely (for those fond of wealth effects, them too)
big fiscal outlays upfront meant higher taxes later. That, together with lost GDP, meant we were actually/prospectively poorer, and might less keen on future spend-ups
huge additional risk and uncertainty had been added to the economic environment ( no one knew when normality would return, what it would look like, how many disruptions – or deaths – there would be in the intervening months/years. A standard prediction would be that heightened perceptions of risk and real inescapable uncertainty would mean firms and households would respond by deferring spending, and particularly (very cyclical) investment spending,
and if all this happened globally then our export commodity prices could be expected to fall (even as headline inflation was lowered by oil prices briefly approaching zero).
I held many/most of those sorts of views. So did many/most forecasters in those early days. A fairly aggressive macro policy response was warranted on those sorts of scenarios. If inflation and inflation expectations were to fall sharply it could prove very hard to get them back up again. against that sort of troubled economic backdrop. I am not aware of many (if any) mainstream commentators or forecasters taking a drastically different view in those early days (even as everyone recognised the huge uncertainty).
That doesn’t mean an automatic tick for everything the Bank did. For me
the big OCR cut, if a little late coming, was quite the right thing to do (including against a backdrop of significant fiscal income support and some other stimulus)
making available additional liquidity if required also made sense,
as did the easing of the core funding ratio, which helped enable lower term deposit rates relative to the OCR,
but the pledge not to change the OCR further for a year made no sense then, and makes no sense now. The Bank knew it was entering a climate of extreme uncertainty, it knew it might need all the monetary support it could get. No one else anywhere in the economy had any certainty at all about anything, and yet the Bank pretended to.
the move to pay the OCR on all settlement cash balances made little sense if the Bank was really serious about delivering as much stimulus as it could (that floor stopped market rates drifting lower) [UPDATE: altho it did support a more precise control of very short-ter market rates at/near the OCR itself, that might have been impaired otherwise if the Bank was injecting more liquidity. This was probably the intention, althoguh a little later in ended up impairing one channel through which the LSAP might have worked].
My focus is on the remaining two strands of the package.
Perhaps one can mount a decent case for a week or two of stabilising intervention in the government bond market in late March 2020. The pressures would have sorted themselves out anyway (after Fed intervention) but if the RB wanted to do its little bit that in isolation probably did little harm (if reinforcing future moral hazard risks). But the case for the sustained LSAP itself (initially $30bn) was never, and has never compellingly, been made. The Bank was right, just a few weeks earlier, to be wary of what the LSAP could offer outside the white-heat of financial crisis. It seemed to have been too readily swayed by some mix of a need to be seen doing stuff (having ruled out more on the OCR), and false parallels with choices some other central banks had made over the previous decade. The Bank rushed into the LSAP mainly purchasing long-term government bonds with ever, it seems, addressing either the fact that very little borrowing in New Zealand occurs at long-term fixed rates (so even if they affected those rates a bit, so what?) and with no serious financial risk analysis at all (if any such document existed it would surely have been released by now). This latter failure has cost the taxpayer very dearly, and any serious risk analyst (in the Bank or The Treasury – who seem quite culpable here, as advisers to the Minister on the indemnity)) would have identified those downside risk scenarios. It was a failure of controls that, in a private bank, would rightly alarm a supervisor. (While my view on the LSAP still seems to be something of a minority view in New Zealand, it is quite consistent with that of Professor Charles Goodhart, a UK monetary economist that the Bank has drawn on over the years, writing – in a Foreword to a book on QE completed just prior to Covid “the direct effect on the real economy via interest rates, whether actual or expected, and on portfolio balance, was of second order importance. QE2, QE3 and QE Infinity are relatively toothless”). I absolve the Bank of claims that the LSAP was later to do much to influence asset prices or the CPI, but that was on grounds that it was a gigantic speculative punt in the bond market, at taxpayers’ risk, for an expected economic return that was always derisorily small.
If I have a minority view on the LSAP – simply was not appropriate even at the time as a monetary policy tool – I may also have on the LVR restrictions. I see numerous people commenting, including on my Twitter feed, that “well, maybe the Bank had to do something with monetary policy in March 2020, but why do they do anything with LVRs- that really was inexcusable”.
And on that I simply disagree. I have never been a fan on LVR restrictions and in that sense would always – including now – welcome their removal, but even on the Bank’s own terms suspension of the restrictions was the sensible thing to do back then (ideally a few weeks earlier). LVR restrictions were intended to lean against reckless lending against rapidly rising collateral values, and in discussions inside the Bank in the early days on LVRs the mentality was that sensibly controls would be lifted if asset prices were to be falling, or otherwise the controls would exacerbate falls and potential illiquidity in the market, while doing little/nothing for financial stability. In this particular (Covid) crisis there was a further factor, cited by the Bank in its announcement: a six month mortgage holiday for those severely affected by Covid could have run smack hard into LVR restrictions had the latter been left in place [UPDATE: since interest deferrals in particular would have amounted to an extension of further credit to the borrower, at a time when collateral values – which in principle would need to be reassessed at any fresh credit extension – appeared to be (and were expected to be) falling.] One might quibble that the mortgage holidays really did pose increasing financial stability (loan loss) risks down the track, but the banks were already amply capitalised. Between early indications that house prices would fall – as they did for the first couple of months – and tightening bank credit standards anyway (something the Governor regularly inveighed against) suspending the LVR restrictions was definitely the right call with the information, and the (widely shared) economic outlook the Bank had at the time.
This has, almost inevitably been a long post. I’m going to stop here, with just one final brief observation. When, as is often done, people now talk about high inflation being a problem almost everywhere, it is sometimes (and fairly) pointed out that it isn’t quite all (advanced) countries: Japan and Switzerland being two examples of countries with much more moderate inflation. They were also two countries that didn’t do anything much with monetary policy in 2020. However, that doesn’t really tell as anything about what was right to do, with the information at the time, in early 2020. After all, both Japan and Switzerland went into Covid with policy rates already negative, and unable to do very much more with monetary policy. Had they been able to do more perhaps they would have done so. Or perhaps not. But we have no easy way of knowing. In early 2020 countries (central banks) like NZ, Australia and the US were openly quite glad to have the leeway they did, to take the steps they did, in a climate in which many argued “just do whatever it takes”.
It is two years today since my first post about pandemics (and the economy). Rereading it, and another the following week, over the weekend and it was interesting to reflect on what issues had (and hadn’t) sprung to mind. But back then, however fearful people might or might not have been initially, few would have supposed that two years on we’d be labouring under new, and even more onerous, restrictions, and that for the best part of two years few of us would have been able to travel.
I was quite supportive of the need for restrictions, especially at the border, for quite a long time. Even last year, when the government was so slow to roll out the vaccine, doing everything possible to keep the virus out would have seemed appropriate (ie more than the government actually did). As for domestic restrictions, in both 2020 and 2021 the government clearly overshot, imposing (and renewing) some restrictions that seemed more about asserting power and showing who was in control than about public health, and others that failed all tests of decent humanity. (None, of course, were ever justified by any sort of cost-benefit analysis – an abdication of any sort of decent policy analysis that I hope one day our politicians and senior officials look back on in shame.)
But that was then. Since late last year, the government’s approach has increasingly lost any coherence. Despite high vaccination rates, we’ve had extreme coercion used on those reluctant to get vaccinated, and we’ve lurched down a path of “papers please” where those who refuse to show their government papers are prohibited (either by law directly, or enabled by it) from undertaking many of the normal activities of life. All this as (a) it was clear that the biggest risk posed by the unvaccinated was to themselves, and (b) that lots of vaccinated people were getting Covid anyway, apparently often/mostly from other vaccinated people. Government guidelines as to when it would ease restrictions were repeatedly ignored by the government itself. The government meanwhile had confirmed that it had given up on elimination some time ago.
And then, of course, came Omicron – two months ago in other parts of the world. The experience of Omicron so far seems to be that it is highly highly infectious, partly as a result waves don’t last long, and among the vaccinated (even more so the boosted) the rates of serious illness and/or death seem remarkably low. In some places – the UK is the most obvious example – even with a lot of cases, numbers in hospital ICU care did not even increase during the Omicron wave (but there is a variety of experiences, depending in part on starting points). Nowhere, it seems, is there evidence of the spectre of “overwhelmed health system” having been realised (although you might expect, even hope, that systems would be put under some pressure).
As for our government, first it seemed that they shut down for the holidays. In normal times, no one would begrudge them that, but this was something more akin to “wartime” – a major threat unfolding, inter alia, just across the Tasman. You might have thought that all hands would have been on deck, led by the Prime Minister, with planning (and public consultation on those plans) advancing rapidly. And vaccination centres operating night and day to get vaccinated many more of those eligible for a third dose. Oh, and the child vaccination programme might have got going before Christmas too. But no, this was the government of complacency – we still don’t have their “plan” (apparently something is coming on Wednesday) – and now controls.
Even on what we have seen, policy is all over the place. Last week, they stopped allocating MIQ rooms for ordinary New Zealanders, but that was (a) done with no ministerial announcement, and (b) to affect arrivals a couple of months hence (when who knows what the environment will be). They keep telling us (sensibly, rightly) that Omicron will spread in the community, but then on Friday the government quietly put in place much-extended isolation requirements – of the sort that perhaps might make some sense (if complied with) in an elimination model, but which make no sense now – the more so as they will powerfully deter some from even getting tested.
And then yesterday we got the new general restrictions. From both the PM and the Director-General we were told they were still aiming to “stamp out” the outbreak, but even (especially?) they must know they are just making things up now – a Level 4 lockdown in August didn’t stamp out that outbreak (or wasn’t pursued long enough to), and this lot of restrictions is nothing like Level 4. The more realistic rhetoric/spin seems to be about “slowing the spread” – there are big adverts in the papers this morning enjoining us to get with the team, play our part.
But why do we want to “stop the spread”? I don’t. We are already two months behind much of the world – two months of repressive domestic restrictions and onerous border controls – and for what? Various other places are coming out the other side now, not having had particularly bad health experiences – England, Ireland, the eastern states of Australia, South Africa – while Ardern and her colleagues – apparently with little opposition from National – seem to be determined to try to slow the incoming tide. They’ve provided no supporting analysis, no cost-benefit analysis, there are no end-point dates for these controls (which may not do much “good” anyway, while disrupting lives), and no published criteria – not that on the past record they would ever stick to them – for getting controls off, getting our lives back to normal, binning the “papers please” regime, and opening the border (even just for New Zealanders).
Events are being cancelled all over the place, and whereas (say) we watched the Ashes test in Hobart a couple of weeks ago with large local crowds in attendance (in the middle of a not-small Omicron outbreak) the government is going to condemn us to the grim spectre of test matches with no crowds at all.
Of course, it could be worse. The government could – and may yet – resort to more onerous restrictions (have they done anything to prepare the public for several weeks of 30-40 deaths a day?) but it is unclear what they are trying to achieve, and how their cobbled-together policies fit a strategy. We hear talk about “flattening the curve” but that seems like a recipe for months and months of controls – the sort of restrictions that may appeal to public health professors and some left-wing politicians, but which should generally be anathema in a free and open society. There is talk, always talk, about getting our booster rate up – but (a) whose fault is it they weren’t offered earlier?, and b) even now, because of the delay, the percentage of our population with boosters is already higher than (say) the Australian share 6 weeks ago when their outbreak was getting underway.
People oriented to controls can always dream up reasons for delays – and I might have had a touch more sympathy if the government had shown itself ever willing to get rid of controls that were no longer self-evidently necessary – but they never attempt to show an overwhelming case. In an interesting Newsroom article over the weekend, on preparing for Omicron, Prof Michael Baker justified his case for more restrictions on the basis that “several hundred people” might die if we just let Omicron sweep through. Quite possibly – if one takes the Australian numbers as a guide – but 34000 people a year die in New Zealand, and that number fluctuates (easily plus or minus 1000) from year to year. It simply does not justify restrictions without limit, and lives lived – unable to sensibly plan – at the whim of politicians.
And, of course, we are rightly reminded of the limitations of the public health system. It was a reasonable argument two years ago, but not now, when the government has done little or nothing to boost capacity over two years, and now wants to put us under their (somewhat half-hearted) controls anyway. Sure, there would be likely to be some weeks of extreme pressure on the system, but it is hard to conceive of any serious cost-benefit analysis – that value freedom at all – justifying society-wide restraints, indefinitely, to avoid a few weeks difficulty (and even some otherwise avoidable loss of life).
Now, of course, Omicron will be disruptive even if the government does nothing. Baker, in that same article, seemed to use that as justification for “oh well, we might as well just have lockdowns then”. But there is a big difference between government controls – backed by the coercive power of the state – and individuals and firms taking their own precautions, calibrated to their own individual risk and risk tolerance. I’m pretty sure no one would put off a quiet swim at a deserted beach, or a driving lesson for their child, except the state compelled them,
(And I say all this as someone who is almost 60, and hasn’t had the best of health in the last couple of years. There are risks to life, and – fully vaccinated and soon boosted – I’m quite happy to run those modest risks. I’m not happy seeing events cancelled willy-nilly at government fiat, or governments still stopping people travelling (indefinitely), and so on.)
There are lots of things the government could and should have done much better re Covid over the last 12-18 months. Had they been done we might be in a slightly better position now, but it is water under the bridge now, and nothing about the government or Ministry of Health gives any reason for confidence that we should put up with indefinite restrictions on their say so. They have the power of course, but they abuse and misuse it (down to and including the arrogant disdain evident in the way the government refuses to even put out case/hospitalisation data at a fixed time each day – a simple thing in some ways, but one that simply reveals their indifference and, quite possibly, incompetence).
Better to (a) scrap the vaccine pass system (which simply institutionalises repression, of the sort that should be alien to this country, for no significant public health benefit), (b) open the border to NZ citizens, and (c) cut the isolation requirements to something like those in the US and UK, with a view (d) to following the English lead and looking to remove all Covid restrictions by, say, 31 March (subject to renewal only by vote of Parliament, not arbitrary ministerial fiat with no consultation or transparency).
Oh, and release all the relevant Cabinet papers and ministerial briefings within two days of decisions having been made. These are our lives, our freedoms. We are not supposed to be just playthings of the government. The smallest regulatory changes in normal times have to go through proper (if often faux) consultative processes. Sometimes in emergencies needs must, but this was Omicron – they had the best part of two months to be prepared; do the analysis, test it in public, consult. Instead, perhaps we’ll see a “plan” on Wednesday, perhaps we’ll see the papers and analysis (if any exists) six months from now.
A standard way of estimating those losses is the mark-to-market valuation of the Bank’s very large LSAP bond portfolio. As of the latest published Reserve Bank balance sheet, for 31 October, those losses were about $5.7 billion. When the 30 November balance sheet is out, probably next week, the total losses will be lower (bond rates fell over November), but with a very large open bond position still on the books taxpayers are exposed to large fluctuations in the value of the position (up or down), with no good basis for supposing that the expected returns are likely to compensate for the risk involved. If there was a case for putting on a large open bond position early last year – I doubt it, but take that as a given for now – there is no case for one now, in a fully-employed economy with rising inflation, and with the conventional instruments of monetary policy – which expose taxpayers to no financial risk – working normally and effectively.
I didn’t watch the whole 2 hours (link to the video above) but from exchanges with various people I think I have seen all the questions and answers relevant to the LSAP issues.
First, at about 43 minutes in, National’s Andrew Bayly asked the Minister of Finance (a) why, when Crown indemnity was approved the Minister did not then require a plan for unwinding the position (the Bank is currently talking about having a plan early next year, almost two years on), and (b) why there was no limit to the indemnity.
I’m not sure either question was that well-targeted, and the Minister had no real trouble responding. As he noted, the LSAP programme had been initiated in the middle of a crisis, time was short etc. And although there isn’t a limit on the indemnity itself there is a limit of how many bonds can be bought, and the government determines which bonds are on issue which amounts to much the same thing. That said, both responses take as more or less given that the idea of an LSAP had never occurred to anyone on any corner of the Terrace/Bowen St triangle until late March 2020. We know the Bank had been (rather idly) talking about the option for several years, including saying they’d prefer not to use it, but it seems they had not done the hard ground work, and neither had The Treasury nor the Minister insisted on it, well in advance. There is no sign any cost-benefit analysis for something like the LSAP was ever done, no analysis of likely Sharpe ratios, no analysis of potential peak taxpayer losses and so on. The Bank should be held accountable for that, but…the Minister is primarily responsible for holding them to account, and The Treasury is the Minister’s principal adviser (and the Secretary is a non-voting member of the MPC).
After the Minister left, Bayly returned to the LSAP (at about 68 minutes), supported by National’s new finance spokesman Simon Bridges. Bayly asked the Secretary to the Treasury whether an increase in the OCR would increase the liability for the Crown for the indemnity. The Secretary responded that the indemnity was net neutral from a whole of Crown perspective. What followed was a slightly confused discussion with Bridges ending up suggesting that the Secretary was “plainly wrong”. I don’t think the Secretary answered well, and she certainly didn’t answer in a way designed to help clarify the issues around the LSAP, but she is correct that the indemnity itself does not affect the overall consolidated Crown financial position (the claim the Bank currently has on its balance sheet is fully offset by an obligation the (narrowly defined) central government has on its balance sheet. It is quite likely that without the indemnity the MPC would have been very reluctant to have run a large-scale LSAP programme (the Bank’s own capital would not support the risk), but once the programme was established what determines the financial gains or losses is, in short, just the movement in market interest rates. The indemnity just reallocates any losses within the wider Crown accounts. In that particular exchange, The Treasury made none of this clear, and Secretary herself seemed a bit confused when the discussion got onto the different ways the bond position might eventually be unwound (there is little or no indemnity if the bonds are held to maturity, but that doesn’t mean there are no costs to the taxpayer). And thus (reverting to Bayly’s initial question) an increase in the OCR – particularly one now expected – doesn’t itself change the Reserve Bank’s claim under the indemnity
About 25 minutes further on, Bridges returned to the fray and a rather more enlightening conversation followed. Bridges asked whether the LSAP did not represent a significant increase in Crown financial risk. The Secretary agreed and both she and one of her colleagues explained – as I have here repeatedly – that what had gone on was that the Bank had bought back long-term fixed rate bonds, effectively swapping them for the issuance of settlement cash, on which the interest rate is the (variable) OCR. Unfortunately some of the discussion still got bogged down in matters of Crown accounting (the difference between the purchase price of the bonds and the face value, which is of no economic significance), and the Secretary was very reluctant to allow herself to be pushed into acknowledging that the position of the LSAP portfolio – implemented with her support – is deeply underwater. As a simple matter of analysis, she was never willing to distinguish between the mark-to-market loss to now, and the potential gains, losses, and risks on continuing to hold a large open position from here on. One is a given – now a sunk cost – and conflating the two (in the hope “something will turn up”) obscures any sense of accountability, including for the choices to keep running the position. She and her staff wouldn’t accept that sort of explanation from any other government agency running large financial risks.
Were the position to be liquidated today – as, at least in principle (crisis having passed, economy full-employed) it should be – a large loss for the taxpayer would be realised. At a narrow financial level it is as simple as that. If the position continues to be run – in the limit through to maturity, finally in 2041 – what will matter is where the OCR averages relative to what is currently priced into bond yields, but it won’t change the fact that the portfolio is starting behind – the OCR is already much higher than was expected at the time most of the bonds were bought. And if the portfolio is let continue to run, taxpayers are exposed to ongoing large risk for no expected return (there is no reason to suppose the Bank is better than the market at guessing where the OCR will need to go over the next 10-20 years).
(The current agreement between the Minister and the Bank requires that if the Bank looks to sell the LSAP bonds it do so only to the Treasury itself. Such a sale, of course, changes nothing of economic substance (purely intra-Crown transactions don’t) – the high level of settlement cash balances would still be there, earning whatever OCR the macro situation requires – but from a political perspective it would be convenient, as there would no longer be monthly updates on the Bank’s website as to the extent of the losses caused by the MPC’s rash choices (backed by The Treasury).
Treasury officials did chip in a couple of caveats. First, the Secretary noted that in assessing the overall LSAP programme one had to look also at the (any) macroeconomic benefits. In principle, of course that is correct, but (as I’ve argued previously) any such gains are unlikely to have been large:
the LSAP was designed to lower long-term bond rates, but these are a very small element in the New Zealand transmission mechanism,
it is hard to see much evidence here or abroad of sustained effects of LSAP-like programmes on long bond rates (eg movements beyond what changing expectations of future OCR adjustments themselves would simply),
the Bank always had the option of cutting the OCR further (on their own telling, to zero last year, and lower still since the end of last year), at no financial risk to the taxpayer, and
if there is a macro effect, perhaps it was modestly beneficial last year, but must be unhelpful now (recall that the literature suggests it is the stock of bonds that matters, not the flow of purchases, and we now have an overheated economy with above-target inflation.
And one of her deputies chipped in noting that there might have been some savings to The Treasury from having been able to issue so heavily at such low rates last year, the suggestion being that without the LSAP the Crown might not have been able to get away so many bonds so cheaply. There is probably something to that point, in an overall accounting, but (a) the effect is unlikely to have been large relative to the scale of the subsequent rise in bond yields, and (b) especially with hindsight a better model would have been for the Bank not to have been purchasing bonds and the Crown to have been issuing fewer.
The Select Committee discussion ended with the offer that National MPs could lodge a follow-up question for written response by the The Treasury. I hope they avail themselves of that offer.
The Treasury could be, and should be, much clearer and more upfront about the analytics of the LSAP issues, but it isn’t clear – given their involvement all along – that their incentives are in this case that well-aligned with the interests of the public in scrutiny, transparency, and accountability.
Earlier in the week I did a post that included economist (and former Victoria University academic) Martin Lally’s sketch outline of an approach to thinking about applying cost-benefit analysis techniques to Covid vaccine “mandates”. In that post I included a few suggestions, questions, and thoughts on aspects of Lally’s note and the wider issue of coercion in a Covid context.
Since then, Lally has extended his note into a fuller short paper. I offered to make it more widely available here
Covid-19 vaccine mandates for the general population must trade off the rights of those who object to being vaccinated against the costs that the unvaccinated impose upon the vaccinated, most particularly the increased risk to vaccinated people of death by covid-19. This paper provides a methodology for doing so. It is then applied to the case of New Zealand. It reveals that even if the adverse impact of penalties on vaccine objectors (at least some of whom may have rational grounds for objecting) is as small as a reduction in their quality of life of 1% per year for a period of five years and the existence of unvaccinated people is entirely responsible for covid-19 infections amongst the vaccinated, the number of additional deaths amongst the vaccinated resulting from not adopting a vaccine mandate is too few to justify a policy of mandating. However, unlike the general population, health workers come into frequent and close contact with large numbers of sick people, who are prime targets for covid-19, and therefore the vaccine mandate may be justified for these workers.
The paper largely speaks for itself. Lally lays out his assumptions (and sources) quite clearly, so anyone who disagrees can identify where (specifically) their disagreement arises and what alternative assumptions/approaches they would use.. As per the Abstract, he concludes that cost-benefit analysis does not support vaccine “mandates” in general, but one of the extensions of the earlier note is to explore the specific case of health care workers where his numbers suggest a cost-benefit analysis for compulsion may stack up. There is also a section at the end exploring the risks and incentives facing the young and the old faced with the offer of the vaccine.
To me, the most interesting part of the paper was his attempt to estimate how many lives (among the vaccinated) would need to be saved by coercing part of the population to be vaccinated to make such a policy pass a cost-benefit assessment. On his numbers (you can read the reasoning in the paper)
So, vaccine mandating would be warranted only if failure to do so leads to a pool of unvaccinated people who thereby induce at least 5,200 additional deaths from covid-19 amongst the vaccinated.
And how likely is that?
I now consider whether at least 5,200 additional such deaths amongst the vaccinated could occur. The worst case scenario for the 90% of the over 12s who vaccinate without mandating (4.2m*0.9 = 3.8m) is that they are all infected as a result of the existence of the unvaccinated people who might be induced into vaccinating. In the absence of an effective vaccine, the proportion dying is the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR). Recent surveys suggest figures of 0.3 – 0.4% for Europe and the Americas (Ioannidis, 2021, page 10), and 0.70% for Europe and 0.58% for the Americas (Meyerowitz-Katz and Merone, 2021, Figure 2). The midpoint is about 0.5%, which implies 3.8m*0.005 = 19,000 dead. However, this IFR relates to the entire population rather than only those over 12, and the latter IFR would be higher because the IFR is monotonically increasing with age. Correction for this raises the IFR for the over 12s to about 0.60%.[1] This implies 3.8m*0.006 = 23,000. The vaccines reduce the risk of death by 85% to 88% on average over the first six months but rapidly wanes beyond that point (Nordstrom et al, 2021, Table 2 and Table 5). If a booster is used at that point, the average reduction in the death rate would then be at least 85%. This implies 23,000*(1 – 0.85) = 3,400 deaths amongst the vaccinated.
This is the worst case. It is inconceivable that all of the 3.8m vaccinated would be infected. Amongst those infected, it is inconceivable that all would be infected as a result of the pool of unvaccinated people, i.e., some of the vaccinated would be infected even if there were no unvaccinated people because the vaccine does not eliminate the risk of its recipients transmitting the virus and therefore vaccinated people could be infected by other vaccinated people. In fact, all of the vaccinated might become infected even if the unvaccinated pool did not exist, through the virus transmitting through the vaccinated. Amongst those vaccinated who were infected as a result of the unvaccinated pool, some would be infected as a result of the vaccine objectors who will not succumb to the penalties, and a mandating policy cannot eliminate this group. Taking account of all three of these points, the additional covid-19 deaths amongst the vaccinated in the absence of vaccine mandating would be significantly less than 3,400.
[1] Steyn et al (2021, page 14) cites age-related IFR data from Verity et al (2020, Table 1) and matches it to the New Zealand population proportions by age groups, which implies an IFR of 0.95%. The same data can be used to estimate the IFR for the 12+ group, at 1.13%. Both figures are unreliable because they are based upon IFR data from March 2020 from only one paper (Verity et al, 2020) rather than from recent surveys of the literature (as with Ioannidis, 2021 and Meyerowitz-Katz and Merone, 2021). However, the increase of 19% (0.95% to 1.13%) can be applied to the preferred IFR estimate for the entire population of 0.5%, to yield 0.6% for the 12+ group.
It is quite simple, but illuminating, reasoning.
My point in running this post, and hosting Lally’s paper, is not to endorse all his reasoning or his conclusions. But it seemed like an interesting attempt to look at the issues rigorously – in a way that there is no sign officials and ministers have – which deserved to be available to a wider audience.
A few weeks ago I wrote a fairly discursive post on the losses the Reserve Bank had run up on its Large Scale Asset Purchase programme. I know some readers found the basic point a little hard to grasp (no doubt a reflection on my storytelling), so today I’m going to do a very stylised representation of what has gone on.
But first, as I noted in that post, as market interest rates rise losses mount. The Bank has now released its end-October balance sheet and this is the line item representing their claim on the Crown (the Minister of Finance indemnified the Bank for losses incurred).
So the losses have now reached $5.7 billion (roughly 1.6% of annual GDP). Market interest rates fluctuate each day, but as of yesterday’s rate current losses are likely to be very similar to those as at 31 October. Perhaps Covid has inured us to big numbers, but these are really large losses, which were quite avoidable.
Now I want to step you through a very stylised illustration of roughly what has gone on.
A severe shock hits (call it Covid, but it could be anything) and the government determines that it needs to run a large fiscal deficit. Say that (cash) deficit totals $70 billion. The government finances that deficit prudently by issuing (selling) long-term bonds, issuing $70 billion at par, and thus raising $70 billion in cash.
Once the government has borrowed and spent, its bank account balance (at the Reserve Bank) isn’t changed. And after recipients of the deficit spending and purchasers of the government bonds have all made their transactions, the aggregate balances held by banks in their settlement accounts at the Reserve Bank also haven’t changed.
But now assume the Reserve Bank enters the fray, deciding that it will launch a large scale bond purchase programme, in which it buys $50 billion of long-term government bonds (for simplicity, assume the same bonds the government just issued on market). The Bank pays for those bonds by issuing on-call liabilities (settlement cash balances), on which it pays the OCR interest rate.
What does the Crown’s overall debt exposure look like under those two stages?
Financing the fiscal deficit
Floating rate debt held by the private sector (settlement cash) $0
Long-term government bonds held by private sector $70bn
Add in the effect of the LSAP
Floating rate debt held by the private sector (settlement cash) $50bn
Long-term government bonds held by the private sector $20bn
The total amount owed by the Crown (government plus Reserve Bank) is $70 billion in both cases, but the risk to the Crown is substantially different.
The emergency having finished (by assumption in this stylised example), the Reserve Bank now has two choices. It can hold the bonds it purchased to maturity or it can sell them back to the market. One choices closes out the risky position they chose (rightly or wrongly) to run during the emergency, while the other leaves it running (for years).
Now assume that market interest rates rise sharply, across the curve (so long-term bond yields rise but so – perhaps gradually – does the OCR itself.
When market interest rates rise, the market value of a portfolio of long-term bonds falls. That is what has happened in New Zealand over the last year or so, reflected (in respect of the LSAP portfolio) in the chart at the start of this post.
If the bonds were sold back to the market, the Reserve Bank (and Crown as a whole) would realise less on the sale than they paid for the bonds. On present rates, a lot less. Selling the bonds back to the market would, however, restore the balance sheets as under the “Financing the fiscal deficit” scenario above. The private sector would hold no floating rate government debt (settlement cash) but lots of long-term bonds. All the risk would be with the private sector, although the Crown would have crystallised the large loss it let the Reserve Bank run up.
But what if, instead, the Reserve Bank just stuck the bonds in the bottom drawer and held them to maturity (last maturities not for 20 years)? The bonds would mature at par, and there might be little or no claim under the indemnity (depends on the initial purchase price relative to the face value). But, if things play out as current market prices envisage, the OCR would rise by quite a lot and (on average) stay much higher over the remaining life of the portfolio. Since the Bank is still holding the bonds, settlement cash would also stay high, and the Bank pays the full OCR on all settlement cash balances. Under that scenario, the Reserve Bank – having issued lots of floating rate debt, and having no matching floating rate asset – will be up for much higher interest costs.
Either way, the Crown (the taxpayer) has lost a great deal of money. If market rates play out as the yield curve currently predicts, either there will be a large payout under the indemnity, or the Reserve Bank’s future dividends to the Crown will be reduced. But the loss has already happened, it is just a matter of how it ends up being recorded/realised. $5.7 billion dollars of it. The Crown could probably have funded quite a few ICU beds for quite a few years with that sort of money…..but it has gone.
You’ll notice that I bolded some words in the previous paragraph. Even if the best estimate of future short-term rates is something like what the market currently prices, that is a very weak standard, and it is exceptionally unlike that actual short-term rates will follow exactly that path. They could be lower, but they could be higher (perhaps quite a bit higher or lower).
If the Reserve Bank sold the bonds it holds back to the market we (taxpayers) wouldn’t need to worry. The overall Crown would be back to having funded itself with long-term debt, and fluctuations in rates wouldn’t affect us (at least unless/until the bonds need rolling over years down the track).
But if the Reserve Bank keeps the bonds, we (taxpayers) keep the risk. Having had them drop $5.7 billion of our money so far, they keep the position open. From here, they could make us a bit of money, or they could lose a bit of money (well, actually “a lot” in either direction). But there is no obvious reason to have some bureaucrats speculating on bond markets – because that is what the LSAP portfolio now purely is – at our risk. It isn’t even as if these people – the MPC – have some demonstrated track record of generating attractive Sharpe ratios (returns relative to risk) for their punts. And if as individuals we do want to take punts, the market already has products for us.
Perhaps the key point here is that the $5.7 billion has already gone – that is what mark-to-market accounting measures – but the risk remains. From here we could lose another (say) $5.7 billion, or make a great deal of money, but there seems to be no effective accountability, for activities which – at this point, well beyond the crisis – is simply not a natural business of government. Monetary policy in a floating exchange rate system like ours normally involves next to no financial risk to the taxpayer.
Are there caveats to all this, or alternative approaches?
One possibility is that the government chooses to neutralise the risk the Reserve Bank continues to run. They could do that relatively easily, by issuing new bonds on market with the same maturity dates as those the Bank holds. All else equal that would eliminate the future floating rate exposure. They could probably do something similar (but hedging less effectively) with interest rate swaps. But it doesn’t seem terribly likely, or terribly sensible (including because it would simply further inflate balance sheets).
Since this is an entirely stylised exercise, I’ve been able to dwell in the simplified air of “sell” or hold”, as if “sell” was akin to selling a single excess car or house. But the Bank has more than $50 billion in bonds and it would not make sense to offload them all at once (doing so would be likely to push the price unnecessarily against the Bank/Crown). So when I say “sell” what I really have in mind is a steady pre-announced programme that would unwind the entire portfolio over 1-2 years. That means assuming quite a lot of risk in the menatime, but unfortunately that is the hole Orr and his colleagues dug for us.
Observant readers will have noticed that so far I’ve not mentioned at all any macroeconomic effects of the LSAP programme. The LSAP was launched with the intention of having stimulatory macroeconomic effects. I’ve always been sceptical there was much to the story, especially in the New Zealand context. The proceeds of the bond purchases were fully sterilised (that is what paying the OCR on all balances does), short-term rates were held low by (a) the OCR itself, and (b) some mix of RB statements and market expectations about the economic/inflation outlook, and long-term rates just don’t matter much to the transmission mechanism in New Zealand. But remember that the LSAP was explicitly sold as a substitute for the Bank last year not having been able (so it said) to take the OCR negative. It is now quite clear – even if it wasn’t at the time – that any such need had dissipated by this time last year. This year, inflation and unemployment have been overshooting and the OCR has begun to be raised. So even if you think – with the Bank – that the LSAP had a useful macroeconomic effect, any useful bits must have been concentrated in a few months last year. And it simply isn’t credible that any such gains were as large as the 1.6 per cent of GDP of our money that the Bank has….. lost. (Note that the literature on LSAPs suggests that any beneficial effects come from the stock of bonds hold not the flow of purchases, but the Reserve Bank continued its purchase programme well after it was clear the OCR itself could take any slack and now – when looking to tighten conditions – refuses to reduce risk to the taxpayer by making a start on reducing the Bank’s bond holdings.)
And all this from a weak and not very transparent, or accountable, institution. As per yesterday’s post, two of those responsible – MPC members – are moving on, and the Minister has to make various new appointments shortly. One of those most responsible – the MPC member responsible for monetary policy and financial markets – has just been given a big promotion. But none of them – internal, external, Governor or more specialist expert – has given any sort of adequate accounting for the public money they have lost.
(Where does the Minister himself fit into all this? I’m not particularly sympathetic to Robertson, who seems the epitome of a minister uninterested in holding anyone to account, but realistically on the dawn of a crisis, no Minister of Finance was likely to have turned down the Bank’s request for an indemnity, at least if The Treasury was onside with the Bank. No, the substantive blame here rests first and foremost with the Governor, the MPC, secondarily with the Bank’s Board and the Secretary to the Treasury, and only then with the Minister of Finance. But it is the Minister who is accountable to Parliament and the public, and who had failed to ensure that the Reserve Bank was fit for purpose (people, preparedness) going into a crisis like Covid.)
UPDATE: For those who have pointed out, or noticed, that I did not discuss here issues around actual settlement account balances over the last 20 months (or developments in the Crown account), they are discussed in the earlier post linked to above.
croaking cassandra 