After the 1996 election, and as a small part of the deal whereby New Zealand First went into government with National, the Policy Targets Agreement governing monetary policy was amended.  The first section now read, adding the text I’ve underlined.

1. Price Stability Target

Consistent with section 8 of the Act and with the provisions of this agreement, the Reserve Bank shall formulate and implement monetary policy with the intention of maintaining a stable general level of prices, so that monetary policy can make its maximum contribution to sustainable economic growth, employment and development opportunities within the New Zealand economy.

Going into that election, New Zealand First had campaigned for material changes to the way monetary policy was run.  What it got was an increase in the target range (from 0 to 2 per cent, to 1 to 3 per cent) and those new words.   Inside the Bank, we never paid any attention to the words ever again.   They never came up in policy deliberations.   They were seen as some mix of political rhetoric and a statement of the obvious –  from our perspective, pursuing price stability was the best and only contribution monetary policy could make to those other worthy things.  Note that in negotiating the drafting, Don Brash even got the crucial word “sustainable” in.

In the new Policy Targets Agreement signed yesterday, this is how the equivalent paragraph reads.

1. Monetary policy objective

a) Under Section 8 of the Act the Reserve Bank is required to conduct monetary policy with the goal of maintaining a stable general level of prices.

b) The conduct of monetary policy will maintain a stable general level of prices, and contribute to supporting maximum sustainable employment within the economy.

All but equivalent I’d say.   Curiously enough, I didn’t see the parallel drawn in the material Treasury released (including the RIS) on the new formulation of the monetary policy objective.

To be sure, as I noted in yesterday’s post on the PTA, the new PTA does include a couple of other references to employment.  Employment is added to the list of things where the Reserve Bank Governor is supposed to seek to avoid “unnecessary instability”.  However, this is the clause the Reserve Bank has been relying on in the last few years to defend its belated and reluctant response to core inflation outcomes persistently well below the target midpoint.  And the Bank will be required to discuss, in each Monetary Policy Statement, how current OCR decisions are contributing to supporting maximum sustainable employment.   The Minister has attempted to suggest that this provision will give bite to the new employment focus.  If he really believes that, then –  despite all the time he spent on FEC  in Opposition –  he obviously hasn’t looked at all carefully at how the Reserve Bank complies with the current statutory provisions governing Monetary Policy Statements –  formulaic at best.  As I noted yesterday, it is easy to predict the formulaic language now –  brand new recruits could write the words, (and may well do so).

I’ve been a bit ambivalent about changing the statutory (or PTA) goal for monetary policy.   Active discretionary monetary policy exists for output and employment stabilisation reasons, and in principle it is worth recognising that.   Since day one of the current Reserve Bank Act, that focus has been implicit in the way Policy Targets have been constructed.  It is not a new thing.    On the other hand, there has been a suspicion that Grant Robertson was more interested in things looking a bit different –  like that wording Winston Peters had introduced in 1996 – than in things actually operating differently, and thus on occasion I’ve suggested this change was more about political positioning and “virtue-signalling” than anything else.

And that might be fine if the Reserve Bank had been doing a superlative job in the last decade, but somehow there was still debate in some quarters as to whether output/employment stabilisation was a legitimate objective at all.  But they haven’t.   Core inflation has been persistently below the target midpoint –  the focus of the PTA –  for years, and even on their own (diverse) estimates –  see their chart below – the unemployment rate was above the NAIRU for almost all the decade.

That combination just shouldn’t have been.    Monetary policy – again on the Bank’s own reckoning –  works much faster than that.  Instead, through some combination of forecasting mistakes and biases towards tighter policy –  recall Graeme Wheeler’s repeated hankering for “normalisation” and his actual ill-judged tightening cycle –  they allowed the economy to run below capacity for years, more people than necessary to stay unemployed for longer, and didn’t even come close to deliver inflation averaging around 2 per cent.

And yet when –  as he was on Radio New Zealand this morning – the Minister of Finance is asked what difference the new PTA (and proposed statutory amendment) will make he flounders, and won’t even refer to the experience of the last decade.    His officials seem to be as bad.  In the Regulatory Impact Statement section on the proposed new objective, here is what The Treasury had to say

The main non-monetised benefit is to ensure that monetary policy decision-makers continue to give due regard to the short term impacts of monetary policy on the real economy. This is intended to improve the wellbeing of New Zealanders by ensuring that monetary policy seeks to minimise, or does not exacerbate, periods of economic decline.

The new Governor’s comments yesterday were along similar lines –  just recognising how things are done already.

So the experience of the last decade is just fine is it?   If so, the proposed law change really must be just about political rhetoric and positioning.

To be clear, there are limits to how much any new words themselves could have changed the Reserve Bank’s approach to monetary policy.  And, as everyone recognises, in the longer-term, monetary policy can only affect nominal variables (inflation, price level, nominal GDP etc) not real ones (employment and output).   But the government –  supported by advice from The Treasury –  appears to have chosen the weakest formulation possible, with little or no effective buttressing elsewhere in the Policy Targets Agreement.   There is, for example, no requirement to publish estimates/forecasts of “maximum sustainable employment” or associated concepts such as the NAIRU, and no requirement to account, look backwards, for how monetary policy has done in effectively minimising cyclical deviations in employment/unemployment.

Individuals and organisational culture matter a lot.   Arguably they matter more, at the margins, than precise wording in documents like the PTA.    The Reserve Bank’s culture appears over the last decade to have backward-looking, constantly fighting the last war –  surprisingly strong inflation in the years running up to 2008 –  insular, and –  as has been the case for decades –  not really much interested in labour market outcomes at all.  In all that, they’ve been backed by the Reserve Bank’s Board.

Adrian Orr is a strong character, and has an incentive –  all those Stage 2 review battles to fight –  to at least sound different than his predecessor Graeme Wheeler.  Then again, he emerged through a selection process undertaken by the Board –  which was explicitly happy with what had happened in the previous decade –  and his Minister has given no indication that he is anything other than happy with the actual past conduct of monetary policy.  A pessimist would suggest that, to the extent we see change, it will be cosmetic more than substantive.  Cosmetics have their place, but substance –  avoiding repeats of situations where at the same time core inflation is well below target and unemployment is well above a NAIRU, including in the next recession – matters rather more.

It is interesting to ponder how the new Governor –  single decisionmaker for now –  will address the question of what “maximum sustainable employment” is.      I’m expecting something reasonably vacuous and circular –  “since we (again) forecast inflation getting back to target in a couple of years time, by definition – by construction of our model –  employment must be close to the sustainable maximum”.    Doing so will be easier because the employment rate has no public resonance in the way that the unemployment (or even underemployment) rates do.

But here is a chart of HLFS employment rates since the survey began in 1996.

Female employment rates have been trending upwards, as one might expect as part of social changes.   However, male employment rates (73.4 per cent) are still well below where they were in 1986 (77.2 per cent).   In plain English senses, there is little reason to suppose we are anywhere near maximum sustainable employment rates for the economy as a whole.  I’m sure the plain English sense isn’t intended, but still.

And those male employment rates aren’t just about more young people being in tertiary education –  who are, in any case, outweighed by more old people working.  Here are the three prime-age male employment rates

For all three groups, employment rates now are materially below those thirty years ago, in a more deregulated labour market.

It just reinforces my sense that in making changes they’d have been better off using unemployment rates as a reference point, and requiring the Bank to produce a richer array of labour market analysis.   The actual new wording will easily translate to nothing if that is what the Governor wants.

And, finally, almost in passing, there has been coverage of former Reserve Bank chief economist Arthur Grimes’s criticisms of the change in the monetary policy objective, in which he talked of a “disastrous route”, a “crazy target”, the potential for the changes to destabilise the economy and so on.  He went on to assert that most episodes of financial instability in the world have flowed from the the United States, and a lot of that has been caused by their dual objective system.

I’m not quite sure which episodes Arthur has in mind with that latter comment, although I assume that the 2008/09 crisis is the principal one he is thinking of.   It is perhaps worth remembering that our Reserve Bank itself has produced research suggesting that the way it was reacting to incoming data in the decade or two prior to 2008 was very similar to the way the Federal Reserve and the Reserve Bank of Australia were reacting.   That isn’t surprising. In practice, whatever the precise wording of the respective mandates, all three were functioning as flexible inflation targeters.  It hasn’t been easy to rerun the model for the last decade –  since for a prolonged period the Fed was at an effective interest rate floor.       The way the two Antipodean central banks have conducted policy have still been fairly similar and thus –  even though neither reached the effective interest rate floor –  both countries have had below-target inflation in the context of labour markets that haven’t exactly been overheating (the RBA still thinks unemployment there is above the NAIRU).

Of course, these comments are a bit of a double-edged sword.  I think Arthur Grimes is quite wrong in his suggestion that our changes are very damaging and dangerous.  On the other hand, they are also a reminder that individuals and institutional cultures (and blindspots) often matter more than precise specifications of statutory objectives.  Changing the statutory mandate here, in deliberately vague ways, won’t make any helpful difference –  other than perhaps in political marketing –  unless the new Governor is about to lead some material culture change, and bring a fresh focus on avoiding prolonged periods of unnecessarily high unemployment.

It is his first day, so only time will tell.  For now, the signs aren’t encouraging.  But perhaps there will pleasant surprises in store.

The last ever Policy Targets Agreement was released this morning, signed by the incoming Governor and the Minister of Finance.  With it came the decisions the government has made on reforms to the legislative framework governing monetary policy (decision makers, governance, transparency etc).  We are now finally getting past the year in which first the outgoing Governor was a lame-duck, and then the period when there was no lawful “acting Governor” or lawful “Policy Targets Agreement” –  and even if you did regard both as lawful, they were no better than caretakers.   With the government’s planned reforms such an unfortunate hiatus should never happen again (as it doesn’t happen abroad).

The Policy Targets Agreement is the key document in short-term macroeconomic management in New Zealand: it is the mandate for the Governor in his role as single decisionmaker on monetary policy, and monetary policy is the active tool for short-term economic stabilisation.   This one isn’t expected to have a long life.  Once the new legislation is in place –  scheduled for next year –  the Policy Targets Agreement will be replaced by a mechanism in which the Minister of Finance unilaterally sets the operational objectives for monetary policy (the UK system), although only after receiving (published) advice from the Reserve Bank and the Treasury.   That is a welcome change –  not only does it put responsibility for goal-setting firmly where it belongs (with elected ministers) but it removes the awkward aspect of the current system, in which an incoming Governor has had to agree targets (sometimes dealing with quite technical points) before being appointed, and often with only limited staff advice.   It was also a necessary change once a committee, with evolving membership –  rather than a single individual –  was made responsible for monetary policy.

The new (shortlived) Policy Targets Agreement has a few changes, although mostly not of great substance.

• there is an even longer statement of the government’s political aspirations (‘inclusive economy”, “low carbon economy”, an economy that “reduces inequality and poverty”) none of which has anything to do with monetary policy.  Closer to economic policy, there are worthy aspiration (“a strong diversified export base”) which monetary policy can’t do anything about, and government policy isn’t doing anything about.
• the substance of the document has been shortened a bit, but mostly not in a good way.  For example,
  • if I welcome the deletion of the reference to asset prices added in 2012, I’m uneasy about removing the explicit expectation that in monitoring inflation the Bank shouldn’t just look at the headline CPI.
  • And perhaps it isn’t of much substance, but I’m interested that they chose to remove “average” from the requirement that policy “focus on keeping future inflation near the 2 per cent mid-point”.
  • And I am a little uneasy about the removal of the list of the sorts of event/shocks that might justifiably warrant inflation being away from target, and the removal of the requirement to explain, when inflation is outside the target range, what they are doing to ensure that future inflation remains consistent with the target.  At the margin, it slightly weakens formal accountability (weak enough in practice anyway) and –  in the current climate –  may weaken the impetus to get core inflation back to 2 per cent (after so many years),
• there are several changes relating to the new employment aspect of the objective (which, contrary to Arthur Grimes, I consider neither ‘disastrous’ nor ‘crazy’, and which risk being more feeble and virtue-signalling in nature than anything else).
  • at a high level there is an expectation that “the conduct of monetary policy will….contribute to supporting maximum sustainable employment”,
  • adding “employment” to the list of in the provision requiring the Governor to seek to avoid “unncessary instability”, and
  • a requirement to explain in Monetary Policy Statements how “current” monetary policy decisions contribute to “maximum levels of sustainable employment”

Quite what, if any difference, these provisions make will really depend on the new Governor’s assessment.   His press release suggests no difference at all

Mr Orr said that the PTA also recognises the role of monetary policy in contributing to supporting maximum sustainable employment, as will be captured formally in an amendment Bill in coming months.

In other words, just formalising what is already there.  An approach that, not incidentally, delivered us an unemployment rate materially above the NAIRU –  on the Bank’s own numbers –  for most of the last decade.   At present, we can probably expect lots of rhetoric –  repeated references to the contribution the Bank is making –  and nothing of substance, although in fairness it may be hard to tell for some time (since the unemployment rate is now closer to a true NAIRU than it has been for some considerable time).  It will be interesting to see the Governor’s first MPS and the associated press conference.

Personally, I’d have preferred that the new requirements were specified in terms of unemployment –  explicitly an excess capacity measure. There probably isn’t a great deal in the issue, except that the current formulation tends to treat high rates of employment as a “good thing”, when there is little economic foundation to such a proposition. By contrast, minimising (sustainably) the rate of unemployment is more unambiguously a “good thing”.

Perhaps more disappointingly, it is fine to require the Bank to explain how current monetary policy decisions are contributing to maximum sustainable employment.  But that is the sort of obligation an undergraduate student of economics could meet without difficulty and without much substance.  It is unfortunate that the Bank is not being required to:

• explain how past monetary policy decisions have actually contributed to maximum sustainable employment,
• explain how its future monetary policy plans will do so (the Act requires the Bank to explain policy plans for the (rolling) next five years),
• publish estimates of the maximum sustainable level of employment.

Finally, with the OCR at 1.75 per cent and the current economic expansion having run for eight or nine years, it is disappointing that the Minister and incoming Governor have not signalled anything about the importance of preparing for the next recession, and reducing the extent to which the near-zero lower bound (inability to take the OCR below about -0.75 per cent) could severely limit the capacity of the Reserve Bank to maintain price stability (or contribute to maximum sustainable employment) in the next recession.  That recession  –  timing unknown of course –  remains much the biggest threat of unnecessarily high unemployment.  And yet it still doesn’t seem to be being taken seriously.

I’ll do a separate post on the planned legislative reforms.   For now, suffice to say that if it is a small step in the right direction, it is a big win for the Reserve Bank establishment.

On Tuesday Adrian Orr will take up the office of Governor of the Reserve Bank and thus become, for a time, the most powerful unelected person in New Zealand.  In some respects he will in fact be more powerful than the Prime Minister, albeit over a much narrower range of functions, because it is much easier to oust a Prime Minister (see Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd) or to vote her down in Cabinet than it is to constrain, or oust, a Governor.

It is a statutory requirement that a Policy Targets Agreement, governing the conduct of monetary policy, be agreed between the Minister of Finance and any person he is considering appointing as Governor before that person is appointed.  It is less than ideal that, three days out from Orr taking office, 3.5 months on from the appointment being announced, there is still no Policy Targets Agreement.   Have Treasury and the Minister lost sight of the merits of predictability and certainty, and the fact that markets (and individuals and firms) operate on a forward-looking basis?     But, apparently, the PTA will finally be signed/released on Monday, just a day before Orr takes office.   One can only hope that there will also be a pro-active release of the background papers relating to this major component of New Zealand macroeconomic policy.  If not, I will immediately be lodging OIA requests.

We are also told that information on decisions the government has made about “the new decision-making structure at the Bank” and other material on Stage 1 of the review of the Act (focused on monetary policy) will be released on Monday. If the government has done the right thing, before too long Orr will be stripped of much of his personal power, to become primarily an agency chief executive, and perhaps primus inter pares on one or more committees.   That would be a long overdue reform.  Perhaps the Independent Expert Advisory Panel –  which, thus far, has operated totally in secret – might open themselves to questioning?   Perhaps too we might get some hints as to what Stage 2 of the review –  content as yet undefined –  will cover?  You can expect there will be several posts on these issues next week.

As for Orr himself, only time and experience will tell what sort of job he will make of being Governor.  Today’s Herald has what can only be described as a puff-piece profile –  they managed preferential access to the previous Governor (notoriously media-shy), and presumably are targeting ongoing good relations more than serious scrutiny.  After having had monetary policy a bit too tight for most of this decade, we can only hope that their cartoon –  the new Governor appearing to keep money securely locked away –  isn’t inadvertently prophetic.

There was another, rather more interesting, piece –  from BusinessDesk –  offering some  thoughts from various economists on Orr taking up his new role.

Hawkesby likened Orr to UK politician Boris Johnson. “The stereotype of a central bank governor is someone whose communication is cautious, reserved and dry. Adrian is more like Boris, with communication that appears more spontaneous and witty,” he said.

TD’s Beacher warned, however, “there is the risk that his ‘good clear communicator’ reputation means he could make a poor choice of words on occasion when explaining the bank’s stance on policy settings.”

I greatly enjoy a good Boris Johnson newspaper or magazine column, but a comparison to Boris Johnson seems a backhanded compliment at best.    My own thoughts on Orr, and some of the opportunities and risks were in these two posts –  here and here.).

But the main prompt for this post was an interest.co.nz column from a day or two ago by my former Reserve Bank colleague, and now consultant on things to do with financial regulation, Geof Mortlock.  That website often runs to long headings for their articles.  This one is headed

Ex-RBNZ and APRA official, Geof Mortlock, argues the RBNZ’s regulation of the financial sector is so inadequate this responsibility should be passed on to a new agency

The article is well-worth reading for anyone interested in New Zealand financial system regulation and supervision, or in the governance and conduct of the Reserve Bank.

A few weeks ago I outlined the case (and here) for splitting the Reserve Bank in two, and shifting the regulatory and supervisory functions into a new agency, perhaps called the Prudential Regulatory Agency.   Various other people have supported that sort of change, one senior business figure commenting that, if starting from scratch, structural separation would seem like a ‘no-brainer’.     My case for that reform was summarised this way

In favour of that position is that:

• it is the more common model in advanced countries today (including Australia),
• the synergies and overlaps between the various functions of the Reserve Bank are pretty slight (and probably no greater than, say, those between fiscal and monetary policy),
• structural separation would allow for clearer lines of accountability, and
• structural separation would allow for the creation of stronger, more effective, cultures  –  with appropriately skilled chief executives –  in each of the two successor institutions.

And so I welcome the fact that Geof Mortlock is also calling for structural separation

In my assessment, the best way to achieve the needed changes is to remove the financial regulation functions from the Reserve Bank and move them to a new, separate agency. I am sceptical of the willingness or ability of the Reserve Bank to change its cultural DNA.  Moving financial regulation out of the central bank was done in Australia with great success. Likewise, this has been done in many other countries, such as Canada, Germany, Japan, Sweden and Switzerland.

At present, we don’t even know whether the government is open to considering this option –  since nothing is yet identifiably included in the proposed Stage 2 of the review –  but they should.  It would be likely to make possible –  although there are no guarantees – a better monetary policy agency and a better regulatory one.

The bulk of Mortlock’s artice is actually about the Reserve Bank’s conduct of its regulatory responsibilities.  On some counts I strongly agree with him, and his observations and criticisms echo points I’ve made here on various occasions

The Reserve Bank’s approach to policy formulation and consultation on regulatory initiatives is deficient. Too often, the Bank has allowed far too short a period for affected parties to make submissions on regulatory proposals. All too often the Bank has often given the strong impression that it has little interest in the submissions it receives – i.e. that it is consulting for the sake of appearance and has no intention of modifying its approach in light of submissions. It generally provides inadequate responses to submissions and insufficient justifications for any decision to reject points raised in submissions. The argumentation for policy proposals is often poorly developed. Cost/benefit analysis is typically provided to justify the Reserve Bank’s preferred option, rather than being objectively and rigorously developed at an early stage in the policy formulation process. There is very little substantive independent assessment of the Reserve Bank’s cost/benefit analysis. In stark contrast, the Australian system provides for much more rigorous independent assessment of all regulatory proposals.

All of these deficiencies need to be rectified by imposing on the Reserve Bank much stricter requirements on consultation and cost/benefits analysis, and by bringing much stronger external scrutiny to the process. Similar arguments can be made for other regulatory agencies.

One could add that the Bank’s regulatory impact statements are typically a joke, with no independent internal or external review –  and thus simply serving to provide support for whatver a particular Governor has chosen to do.

One could also add that the Reserve Bank remains highly averse to public scrutiny of its regulatory role, regularly falling back on statutory provisions –  which themselves should be reviewed and refine –  designed to protect commercially-confidential information obtained in the midst of a crisis, but used much more broadly than that.  Thus, the Reserve Bank recently refused to release any of a consultant’s review of the director attestation regime –  a central element in the prudential system. The utter lack of transparency around the Westpac capital models issue, or the stuff-up around the Kiwibank capital instrument are other examples.    Perhaps more than some other government agencies, the Reserve Bank tends to treat the Official Information Act as a nuisance that really shouldn’t applied to them, rather than as an intrinsic part of our democratic system, and a normal part of being a government agency.   The “but we are different” mindset is a hard one to break.

Quite a bit of the rest of the article –  on the Reserve Bank’s regulation/supervision activities and rules –  I disagree with.   It is nearer territory Geof spent has most of his time on than it is for me.  Then again, Geof has been a regulator for a long time, and appears to make his living in part from providing advice on fitting in with international frameworks and standards.   Of itself, that doesn’t invalidate his views, but it is worth remembering the old maxim that

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

And there isn’t much sign of any cost-benefit analysis in his proposals for spending quite a lot more money (or so it would appear) on these functions.  I’m certainly sceptical of governments and bureaucrats wanting to spend more of our money on ‘financial literacy’ (as Geof suggests).  ‘Physician heal thyself’ comes to mind –  as Geof notes, the Reserve Bank will not even produce decent cost-benefit analyses for most of what it imposes on us.

I don’t doubt that the Reserve Bank could do some things quite a bit better –  process and culture included. I have also argued for removing some of the regulatory powers back to the Minister of Finance, and for more standardisation of the regime applying to all deposit-takers.   But I’m more sceptical that even more supervision is likely to be the answer to anything much.  A fair chunk of the global enthusiasm for more regulation, more supervision, over the last decade has been about backside-covering by politicians and regulatory agency officials after the crisis of 2008/09, with little attention to the inevitable limitations of regulation/supervision, including the incentives and constraints that face officials in regulatory agencies.  Action was demanded, and action was delivered, but the analytical basis for much of that action was often thin, and not well-grounded in serious sceptical scrutiny of the causes of the crisis.

And it is perhaps worth bearing in mind that New Zealand’s track record of financial stability has been pretty good.  Geof argues that

The Reserve Bank is also not well placed to proactively identify and resolve emerging problems before they become obvious or the financial institution is about to fail. The recent failure of CBL Insurance is an example of this. In earlier years, the Reserve Bank was slow to detect and respond to problems in DFC (which failed in 1989) and BNZ (which came close to failing in 1990).

I‘m not sure this is very persuasive.  On the one hand it is worth bearing in mind that it appears the Reserve Bank was onto the CBL problems well before the market was –  including bankers lending CBL new money –  and the DFC/BNZ failures were almost 30 years ago, under different legislation in the earliest days of the Bank having any prudential responsibilities and in the immediate aftermath of far-reaching financial liberalisation (followed by booms and failures in various other countries including Australia and the Nordics).   And on the other hand, we could note the crises and failures/near-failures (of regulated institutions or indeed the system) of the last decade in countries as various as the United States, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and so on.  In many of those countries, the IMF had previously provided a tick in its FSAP reviews.  Several of those countries will have –  and did –  prided themselves on their regulatory agencies, on-site or in-depth detailed scrutiny and all.     Neither New Zealand nor Australia (nor Canada, nor Norway for that matter) ran into such problems.    APRA may like to flatter itself that Australia‘s avoidance of crisis was down to their fine supervision –  I’ve heard senior people run that line – and that New Zealand, free-riding on fine Australian supervision, was in the same boat.   My response to that claim would be, at best, ‘case not proven’.

It is also worth bearing in mind that the Reserve Bank isn’t the principal in this business, but the agent.  It hasn’t been –  and isn’t –  funded for more intensive regulation and supervision, and that is a choice successive Ministers of Finance –  advised by Treasury over the years –  have made.  In a sense, the Reserve Bank has done what Parliament  –  and Ministers –  asked it to do, and in that sense that question isn’t just about the Reserve Bank’s competence and capability but about choices our political system makes regarding the intensity of regulation.

All that said, if we might differ in emphasis, and in our confidence as to what value regulators and supervisors can add, we seem to be at one in favouring structural separation.  A good part of the case for such a reform is the ability to build a culture dedicated to doing excellently, and only, the regulatory and supervisory functions Parliament delegates to the Bank.  It is telling that, for a function that now bulks so large in the Reserve Bank‘s mandate, recent Reserve Bank Governors have had little background in banking or of financial system regulation (certainly true of Bollard and Wheeler, and to a lesser extent for Adrian Orr).  At best, financial regulation and supervision is a part-time focus for the Governor.  And the new Head of Financial Stability –  an appointment made by Graeme Wheeler as he was leaving, without advertising the position –  has no background in those areas at all.  We can and should do better.  That ball –  structural reform and separation –  is now clearly in the Minister of Finance‘s court.

In 20 days time, 27 March, Adrian Orr is scheduled to take office as Governor of the Reserve Bank.  I say “scheduled” because he can’t be appointed until he and the Minister of Finance have signed a Policy Targets Agreement consistent with the statutory objective for monetary policy set out in section 8 of the Reserve Bank Act.

We can assume there will such a Policy Targets Agreement.  After all, the current (unlawful) acting appointment of Grant Spencer ends on 26 March, and all the powers of the Reserve Bank are vested in the Governor personally.

But given that (a) Orr’s appointment was announced three months ago, and (b) the changes in focus for monetary policy that the new government has foreshadowed, it isn’t very satisfactory that we still have no Policy Targets Agreement, and that whatever is being cooked up is being done in secret.   Perhaps I get repetitive in making the point, but as I’ve noted previously the Policy Targets Agreement is the main instrument of macroeconomic management, signed up for five years at a time, and then with all the powers delegated to a single individual (who hasn’t even been inside the Reserve Bank before signing up to his new mandate). against whose decisions there are no rights of appeal.

There is also a review of the Reserve Bank Act underway at present.  When the Terms of Reference were announced  –  four months ago today – we were told that as regards the first part of the review, dealing with monetary policy goals and governance,

A Bill to progress the policy elements of the review, including on the details necessary to introduce a potential committee for monetary policy decisions, will be introduced as soon as possible in 2018. This will give greater certainty on the direction of reform in advance of the appointment of the next Reserve Bank Governor, currently scheduled in March 2018.

The clear suggestion was not just that a report might have been provided to the Minister of Finance, but that a bill would have been introduced to Parliament before the new Governor took office.   The decisions in that legislation would, it was implied, inform PTA negotiations.   That phrasing was repeated when the Independent Expert Advisory Panel was appointed in December.

At the time we were also told that

The Panel will also be responsible for a report to the Minister that sets out their views on the Treasury’s policy conclusions and recommendations for phase 1. This will be delivered to the Minister at the same time as the Treasury’s recommendations for phase 1, which is planned for the second half of February.

Treasury’s dates seem to have been slipping.  The web page for the review now says

For Phase 1, please provide any submission to us by 19 February 2018 if you would like your input to be considered before initial advice is provided to the Minister.

If submissions were only due by 19 February, it didn’t give much time for (a) Treasury to reach its conclusions, and (b) for the independent panel to reach and write up their views on the conclusions, all by “the second half of February”.

When this review was initially announced the dates seemed tight but, if observed, ones that might allow some external discussion before the new Policy Targets Agreement was set, especially around the proposed wording of any change to the statutory objective of monetary policy.   As things stand now, we seem most likely to be shortly presented with some sort of fait accompli.

It isn’t a good way to make policy.  The details of the legislation will, in time, be subject to select committee review (and the publication of associated submissions) but the Policy Targets Agreement itself –  including the extent to which it aligns with the proposed new legislation – will have legal force almost right away.   There is no good reason why a more open process could not have been adopted.  At very least, I hope that the Minister of Finance will instruct the Reserve Bank and Treasury to pro-actively release all the papers relating to the forthcoming PTA (it took several years after the event to extract those relating to the 2012 PTA).

And when the Minister sits down to decide what he wants in the Policy Targets Agreement, I would urge him to take much more seriously –  than there is any sign his predecessors, or officials, did over the last few years –  the next serious recession.  As a reminder, in typical recessions short-term interest rates fall (or are cut)  by 500 basis points or more, and at present –  with inflation below target midpoint –  the OCR is at only 1.75 per cent.   I talked yesterday to a journalist who asked how this might be done.   I don’t think it is a matter of changing the inflation target itself at present – that might be appropriate at some point but should be a last resort –  but there are at least three items which could be included either in the Policy Targets Agreement (preferably, since it is an agreement) or in the Minister’s non-binding letter of expectation to the Governor.

• The Reserve Bank should be required to prepare and provide to the Minister (preferably disclosing the bulk of such a report) a report on practical options that could be put in place early to alleviate or remove the near-zero lower bound on nominal interest rates.  The Reserve Bank’s forthcoming Bulletin article on digital money –  now apparently delayed –  (which they told me about when they refused to release any of their work in this area) may be one input to such work,
• In conducting monetary policy, and without derogating from its obligation to act to keep inflation within the target, the Reserve Bank should be required to have regard to the desirability of there being as much effective policy capacity (or at least rather more than at present) as possible to respond to the next serious recession, and
• consistent with that, the Minister could indicate that he would be more comfortable if core inflation over the next few years fluctuated in, say, the 2.0 to 2.5 per cent part of the target range, than if core inflation continued to fluctuate around 1.4 per cent as it has now for a number of years.

It might also be desirable to require the Governor to publish a substantive statement, perhaps within a month of taking office (or at the next MPS), outlining his interpretation of the new Policy Targets Agreement.  We should not have to rely on discovering the meaning of a major instrument of macro policy  solely by revealed preference.

Our Reserve Bank isn’t the only one facing a change in the way its objective is specified.  Just recently, a new objective was set down for the Norwegian central bank, the Norges Bank.   It was the culmination of a two-year process, of which the Ministry of Finance observed

The Ministry has placed emphasis on ensuring a transparent process

The new specification lowers the inflation target –  from 2.5 per cent to 2 per cent.  The initial 2.5 per cent target, adopted in 2001, had been justified on the basis of Balassa-Samuelson types of effects –  as the oil wealth flowed, Norway might have expected to see high non-tradables inflation rates.  Norway is now, on their own reckoning, past that phase.

Here is the bulk of the (notably short) new mandate

Section 1 Monetary policy shall maintain monetary stability by keeping inflation low and stable.

Section 2 Norges Bank is responsible for the implementation of monetary policy.

Section 3 The operational target of monetary policy shall be annual consumer price inflation of close to 2 percent over time. Inflation targeting shall be forward-looking and flexible so that it can contribute to high and stable output and employment and to counteracting the build-up of financial imbalances.

Section 4 Norges Bank shall regularly publish the assessments that form the basis of the implementation of monetary policy.

The second sentence of section 3 is new –  explicit references to “high and stable output and employment” and also to ‘counteracting the build-up of financial imbalances’.  The latter provision is completely new, while the output and employment reference replaces the current objective of “contributing to stable developments in output and employment”.

What I liked was two things:

• firstly, the deliberate and transparent process used to make the change, and
• secondly, the public exchange of letters betweeen the Ministry of Finance and the Norges Bank explaining the change and (from the central bank’s side) explaining how the Bank envisages implementing the mandate.  Thus, on the financial imbalances point they note:

The regulation and supervision of financial institutions are the primary means of addressing shocks to the financial system. To some extent, monetary policy can contribute to counteracting the build-up of financial imbalances and thereby reduce the risk of sharp economic downturns further ahead. How much weight this consideration will be given in the conduct of monetary policy will be situation-dependent and must be based on an overall assessment of the outlook for inflation, output and employment.

I don’t think the Norges Bank specification is the appropriate one for New Zealand.  If it were adopted it would be a sign that the government wasn’t really serious about a greater focus on employment outcomes and minimising deviations of unemployment from an (unobservable) NAIRU.   But the open and deliberate process looks like a good example to follow.

In the New Zealand context, one legislative change that should be made is that future Policy Targets Agreements (or mandates from the government, if that were the chosen model) shouldn’t be developed before a new Governor takes office.  (Among other reasons, because no new Governor appointed since the early 1980s has had any recent practical experience with monetary policy).  The target should instead be set, say, every five years (with potential for changes more frequently than that  – eg in the event of a change of government), with a requirement that prior to any new PTA there should be a period of public consultation.  The Reserve Bank has to do that when, eg, it wants to impose new LVR limits.  Governments typically have to do that when they want to legislate (select committees).  For such a major instrument of macroeconomic policy, it seems fitting that a similar sort of process should apply.