No plan, but not much sign of aspiration either

Michael Reddell labour party, New Zealand economic performance

There was a not overly good article in the Financial Times yesterday marking the first anniversary of the Labour/New Zealand First (and Greens) government.   Among its odd features was the final sentence which reported the suggestion from political scientist Bryce Edwards that the Prime Minister “is now seen as an icon of good family values”.   Really?  By whom?  The FT’s journalist also claimed that the Prime Minister had achieved “near-celebrity status” abroad.   If that were true I’m not even sure it would be a good thing, but is it?  I read pretty widely internationally and I don’t see much sign of it.

But the primary focus of this blog is still economics, and what really caught my eye was this comment from a former ANZ chief economist:

“I’d give the coalition an A grade for aspiration due to their ambitious reform agenda,” said Cameron Bagrie, founder of Bagrie Economics. “But the problem is they haven’t got an economic plan in place yet.

I’d certainly agree with the second sentence (no plan).  But Cameron Bagrie seems to be far too charitable is his talk of an “A for aspiration”, let alone the puzzling talk of an “ambitious reform agenda”.

Sure, ministers occasionally run the line about building a more productive and sustainable economy, with occasional suggestions of shifting the “growth engines” of the New Zealand economy.  But after only a year it has already become nothing more than a cliche, recycled in speeches and press releases, signifying almost nothing, and with no sign of any passion or serious aspiration underpinning it.

And it really doesn’t mark them out from most of the decades of governments that have gone before them, since the problems  –  and underperformance – of the New Zealand economy first started to become apparent, back in the 1960s.  All of them talk about producing something better and then, after they’ve been in office long enough, start pretending that there really isn’t a problem after all (John Key, you may recall, resorted to talk of “quality problems” –  dreadful congestion, and unaffordable house prices.)   There is talk of a more outward-orientation to the New Zealand economy, of a stronger productivity performance, of closing the large gaps that have opened with the older OECD countries.  And then, in most cases, almost nothing happens.  Governments occupy office, and then leave it, and the fundamental failures aren’t addressed.   Housing is a more recent utter failure than productivity –  only really dating back 25 to 30 years –  and again governments talk about how things will be different, but do little of much substance, and never show any evidence that they care much.  To date, the current government doesn’t look materially different on that count.

Has anyone heard rhetoric from the Prime Minister or her ministers about getting house prices back down again –  to perhaps three times income that looks to have been a longer-term norm?   They won’t even say the words, let alone suggest that have a well-researched carefully thought out plan (economic and political) to make it happen.   There is nothing specific either to their talk of a more productive economy –  no benchmarks to which we can hold them to account, no nothing (and indeed things like the oil and gas exploration ban, and net-zero targets that will likely make it much harder to pursue such goals –  if the government were actually serious about them).   There is no sense of open alarm (which a new government could afford, responsibility for those outcomes not yet resting with them) at five years of very little productivity growth –  even though productivity growth almost alone underpins prospective improvements in material living standards –  let alone the decades of relative underperformance that has helped give the outcomes the government probably does care about more (eg child poverty), and the decades-long exodus of New Zealanders to Australia.  If there is “aspiration” –  as Bagrie suggests –  around economics it seems to involve using just enough of the right words to get and hold office.

I wrote the other day about the vacuous nature of the new Business Advisory Council (and a Herald columnist had some other criticisms which mostly rang true). The Prime Minister talked up the Council when she first launched it, but which seems more likely to be a sop to the (upper end) business community than a sign of, or source of serious ideas for, any serious commitment to a much better economic future.  There isn’t a plan –  that much is obvious.  But there is also no sign of a serious aspiration –  the sort that shapes how the government operates in its determination to give concrete form to a better future –  either.  Sadly, that doesn’t mark them out from their predecessors.

What if they really were serious?  Well, of course, then they’d have used the long years in Opposition rather better.  That is water under the bridge now.   But even now they could be looking seriously for some better, more compelling, answers.

Business leaders aren’t typically the place you would be looking to find those sorts of answers –  an economy is, in crucial ways, not like a company.   Economists, for all their faults, are much more likely to be able to help in getting to the bottom of the problem, and identifying policy measures that have a serious prospect of making a real difference.  There are stories and proposed solutions around.  I’ve been developing one, and arguing it here, for some years, but I’m not alone.  Paul Conway at the Productivity Commission has also developed sustained analysis and arguments about the productivity failure –  in some areas, his analysis overlaps with mine and in others not.  If the leadership of the key government  agencies –  Treasury and MBIE –  is beyond hope, there are still individuals in Treasury (in particular) who have thought hard about, and written on, some of these issues.  There are people like David Skilling, now based offshore but formerly at Treasury and the New Zealand Institute, and the academic Phil McCann.  There would, no doubt, be others who would invest in the hard thinking and analysis if a government were to show signs that it was really serious about New Zealand doing better.

I’ve argued for years that what is needed is a serious contest of competing narratives –  credible, well-documented, stories, well-grounded in the specifics of New Zealand’s situation and experience that explain New Zealand’s underperformance and how any policy proposals fit in to such a narrative.   Probably no one story or set of proposals will get everything right, but the active contest of ideas and arguments is a big part of the way in which we could make progress towards a deeper, and shared, sense of what has gone wrong and what could –  and should – be done in response.

But, of course, there is no sign that the Prime Minister or the Minister of Finance, or the leaders of her coalition/support parties, care.  There is no sign that they have anything like the sort of aspiration –  on matters economic (including housing) –  that the Financial Times reports Cameron Bagrie suggesting they have.   That is beyond a shame, and more like a disgrace –  like their predecessors, people who hold office and yet do little or nothing, presiding over a continued relative decline of a country once the most prosperous on earth, that once –  and not that long ago –  had affordable housing for its people.

Disagreeing with Amy Adams

Michael Reddell Reserve Bank Act reforms

Late last week, National Party finance spokesperson Amy Adams gave an interview to Bloomberg on the rather limp and half-hearted reforms underway to the monetary policy bits of the Reserve Bank Act.  The planned amendments are currently being considered by Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee.

Adams isn’t too keen on the proposed amendments to the statutory goal of monetary policy.   I agree that the wording in the bill is poor, and suggests that there is room for semi-permanent tradeoffs that simply don’t exist.  But I don’t agree with the National Party’s specific concern

Adams said National has concerns about the dual mandate because the minister will have the power to dictate which goal the RBNZ prioritizes, which could result in monetary policy being looser than it should be.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but (a) elected politicians should determine the goals of the central bank, and (b) throughout most of the previous government’s term (including the whole time Amy Adams was a Cabinet minister) there is a reasonable case to be made that monetary policy was tighter than it should have been.  After all, inflation consistently undershot the target –  the 2 per cent focal point – her colleague Bill English had explicitly added to the Policy Targets Agreement.  Current inflation outcomes – core inflation still below 2 per cent –  are largely the outcome of choices made under the rules (the PTA) set by the previous National government.

More generally, it might be nice if the National Party could point to any advanced economy at present which is having problems with consistently too high inflation.  Australia perhaps, where the RBA has a statutory goal with some similarities to what the government is proposing?  But no, core inflation in Australia has also been undershooting their target for some years now.

But my bigger disagreement with Amy Adams is over what appears to be her bigger concern.  She doesn’t seem to like the proposed Monetary Policy Committee at all.  She says she isn’t opposed in principle to a committee but doesn’t like the specifics

New Zealand’s opposition party has voiced “serious concerns” about government reforms of the central bank, saying they could undermine its independence and turn it into a political tool.

“I would hate to see the Reserve Bank becoming a little bit like the U.S. Supreme Court, where it’s all about stacking it with your people,” National Party finance spokeswoman Amy Adams said in an interview Thursday in Wellington. “It’s too important for that.”

I don’t like the specifics either, but that is because they leave far too much power in the hands of the Governor (directly or indirectly) and give the Minister of Finance astonishingly little role in key appointments.

You will recall that:

  • while the Minister appoints the Governor, he can only appoint someone recommended by the Bank’s Board,
  • in future the Minister will be able to appoint the Deputy Governor, but again only someone recommended by the Bank’s Board,
  • the remaining members of the Monetary Policy Committee are also appointed by the Minister, but he can only appoint people recommended by the Bank’s Board, and
  • the Bank’s Board members are appointed to five year terms, so for most of a new government’s first term, typically a majority of the Board will have been appointed by the previous government (and thus, in the current situation, under a different mandate and legislation).

And, of course, the Reserve Bank Governor himself sits on the Reserve Bank Board.

The Minister can, of course, propose to the Board names of people he would like to see appointed –  perhaps he is already doing that, given that the selection process is well underway, even though the Act is not close to being passed (and if so, it feeds a non-transparency about the system that isn’t ideal – but he has no ability to appoint his own person to any of the direct decisionmaking roles (only – gradually –  Board members themselves).  And this is although the Minister will –  rightly, this being a democracy –  be held to account if Reserve Bank monetary policy choices/analysis turn out to have been poor.   And that most of the Board members have backgrounds that make them ill-suited to determining who our key monetary policy decisionmakers should be, suggesting that they will mostly defer to the fulltimer –  the Governor, who has long had too much barely trammelled power.

In a democracy, key appointments should be made directly by those whom we have elected.  They can take advice, can consult etc, but the choice – and the responsibility –  should lie with those whom we can toss out.  Under the Reserve Bank bill, that still won’t be the case.

Amy Adams worries –  in a totally overblown way –  about comparisons with the US Supreme Court.  On the one hand, perhaps she could turn her attentions to our own higher courts –  where the incumbent Attorney-General (a fully political Cabinet member) gets to appoint whoever he or she wants.   And on the other, perhaps she could show signs of actually understanding quite what (little) the Monetary Policy Committee –  as being established in the bill – will be able to influence.  The US Supreme Court isn’t controversial because the President nominates and the Senate confirms, but because far too much power has been given to the Supreme Court, covering almost every sphere of American life, and the members once appointed serve for life.  The comparison with the government’s proposed MPC is so overblown as to be laughable.

And it isn’t as if the National Party spokesperson can point to other countries where monetary policy committees have ended up created the sorts of problems she worries about here.  Especially not tame ones –  majority internals, inability for members to speak openly, short terms etc.   Take Australia, for example, where all the members of the Reserve Bank of Australia’s Board –  the monetary policy decisionmaking body – are appointed (unconstrained) by the Federal Treasurer.  Or the UK where most of the MPC members are appointed directly (unconstrained) by the Chancellor.  Or the US, where members of the Board of Governors (who serve on the FOMC) are appointed by the President, subject to the advice and consent of the Senate –  just like the Supreme Court, and yet not having taken the path Amy Adams worries about here (indeed, Trump quite recently nominated a technocrat who is a registered Democrat).   Perhaps Amy Adams has other problematic monetary policy committees in mind?  If so, perhaps she could let us in on her data?

The other area where Adams expresses concern is regarding the provision in the new bill for a nominee of the Secretary to the Treasury to serve as a non-voting participant in the MPC.

Treasury Secretary Gabriel Makhlouf will take the observer role and start attending RBNZ policy meetings from the end of this month.

“Treasury have wanted more control over the Reserve Bank since Adam played fullback for the apostles,” Adams said. “It also suits the government’s agenda. It’s in the government’s interest to be able to much more strongly dictate to the Reserve Bank what they should say about government policy and its effect on the economy.”

She said Treasury would effectively be “pushing the government line” in a room of policy makers appointed by the minister who “could be inclined to want to do the minister’s bidding.”

“That is an incredible weakening of the Reserve Bank’s independent and autonomous assessment” of government policy, Adams said.

Not quite sure about her biblical imagery (the story of Adam and the record of the apostles being quite widely separated in time), but even setting that to one side, is there anything to her concerns?

Having Treasury representatives on Monetary Policy Committees isn’t extremely common, but it isn’t unknown either.  In Australia, the Secretary to the Treasury is a voting member, while in both the UK and Japan (both systems overhauled in recent decades) there is a non-voting Treasury observer.  Perhaps Amy Adams can point to examples of how those systems have run into problems because of the Treasury participant?  But I suspect not.

This is one of those issues on which reasonable people can reach different views, while recognising that the final choice probably doesn’t make that much difference.  Personally, I’ve wavered on this one, but finally concluded that a non-voting Treasury observer could, on-balance, be a useful reform –  although I took that view in the context of also favouring a much more open and independent MPC, less under the thumb of an ambitious Governor.  But to suggest – on no evidence whatever –  that it  “is an incredible weakening of the Reserve Bank’s independent and autonomous assessment” of government policy” seems so overblown as to discredit any serious points Amy Adams wants to make about the legislation.  Remember, for example, that the “room full of policymakers” will mostly have been appointed by the Governor himself and his Board.  The Minister’s participation will typically be ceremonial and – to the extent it is more than that –  hidden from view.

Having said that, one transitional arrangement announced last week does concern me.  The Reserve Bank announced a few days ago that the Secretary to the Treasury himself (not a nominee) will from now on be invited to attend the monetary policy decision and deliberation meetings, in advance of the new legislation being passed and coming into effect.  I found this a little worrying on three counts:

  • first, this is a significant time commitment for one of our most senior public servants.  What won’t he be doing while he is sitting as a non-voting member of the Bank’s internal committees, at which the Governor finally takes an OCR view?   If you think he already spends too much time, say, cosying up to Beijing or promoting vapid schemes around “wellbeing budgets” and Living Standards Frameworks, you might think this distraction was net gain for public policy. But I don’t suppose his employers quite see it that way.  (As Makhlouf’s own term expires next year, it is not even as if he is going to be involved in the new committee on an ongoing basis),
  • second, the bill envisages a nominee of the Secretary to the Treasury serving on the MPC –  perhaps a Deputy Secretary responsible for macro policy or the Chief Economist (both of whom have currently have central banking backgrounds).  Makhouf, by contrast, has no evident expertise in macroeconomics or monetary policy, and
  • third, the bill does envisage a Treasury observer, but it also provides for several external voting members, who –  so we are told, although I don’t take it very seriously –  will play an important role in the new committee, including balancing out internal perspectives.  Bringing in the Secretary to the Treasury himself now –  months before the first externals appear (and the current “external advisers” do not attend Governing Committee meetings) –  does risk creating a climate in which the Treasury perspective and presence (even though formally non-voting) is prioritised over the externals.   That risk may be able to be managed, but it needs to be, including by the appointment of strong, capable, committed externals (and, as I’ve noted before, it is not clear why good people would seek the role).

Overall, this specific announcement was a mis-step.  It was probably good for the Governor, but what is good for the Governor typically won’t be good for New Zealand (nothing personal –  it is almost a precept of institutional design that the interests of the agent are often not that well aligned with those of the principal).

It is a shame that the National Party isn’t using the opportunity of the Reserve Bank Amendment Bill to push the case for a much more open, and democratically appointed and accountable, Reserve Bank.

 

What’s happening with immigration?

Michael Reddell Immigration

It is a serious question.  MBIE’s immigration data are pretty hopelessly poor –  not published in readily usable formats, not seasonally adjusted etc.   The Migration Trends and Outlook publication for 2017/18 is still not available.  I know they have plans afoot to improve things, but it is past time they did: immigration, after all, being one of the major instruments of economic (and social) policy in New Zealand.

But from time to time, I have a look at what they do publish –  huge tables in small fonts, from which one has to transcribe numbers if you want to do anything with them.  And the other day I had a look at the latest residence approvals data, and was quite surprised by what I found.

This chart shows the number of people approved for residence in each June year.  The 2018/18 number is the annualised number based on September quarter actual data.

residence 1

The “target” rate of approvals was around 47500 per annum for a long time, lowered slightly to something centred on 45000 per annum late in the previous government’s term.  As you can see, give or take 5000 or so people, they more or less meet that target. And so last year’s drop took me by surprise.  I didn’t make anything much of it then, when the numbers finally came to light: after all, announced policy hadn’t changed much, and perhaps it was just noise.

But the early data for the current year suggest something more than noise.  If the September quarter rate of approvals was kept up only about 33000 residence approvals would be granted in 2018/19.  Perhaps there is some seasonality in the series –  did I mention that MBIE don’t publish seasonally adjusted data, or make the raw data available in a form in which I could see for myself? –  but if not, it would represent quite an undershoot relative to the official target.

I don’t usually pay much attention to the nationality of those getting residence –  my arguments about immigration are mostly macroeconomic in nature, indifferent as to whether the migrants come from Bangalore, Birmingham, Brisbane or Beijing.  But as I’d been writing about the PRC and our political parties, out of curiosity I checked the residence approvals granted to people from the People’s Republic.  And finding those interesting, I looked a bit further.

residence 2

That (the blue line) is a staggering drop-off in approvals from China.   Again, perhaps there is some seasonality –  but it isn’t obvious why there should be, given that most residence visas are granted to people already in New Zealand, initially on other visas.

The falls in approvals from India and the Philippines are also pretty large.  And yet clearly the fall isn’t across the board. So far this year approvals from the UK are running at about the same (annualised) rate as last year (as were, more or less, when I checked, those from South Africa another significant source country, and those –  much fewer –  from Singapore and Taiwan).

I’m puzzled by what is going on.  I’d taken the new government at its word when it swore that it wasn’t changing the residence approvals target, but if not it looks as if something is going on that is markedly reducing the number of eligible people (especially from China and India) applying. (In another of the huge, not user-friendly, documents MBIE puts out, it looks as though there are also fewer applications in hand now than usual.) Perhaps it has something to do with the earlier wave of foreign students studying here, but although there has been a significant drop in numbers from India those from China haven’t changed much.  Perhaps there is something in the publicity around foreign investment restrictions –  which don’t of course apply to those who have residence?

I’m puzzled.  And, of course, I’ve spent years calling for a reduction in the residence approvals target, so in one sense I’m not unhappy to see the reduced numbers.  But I also strongly favour open and transparent policy, and there has been nothing announced suggesting that we should have been expecting –  or that the government was seeking –  such a large reduction in the number of residence approvals being granted.

If any officials or industry experts have informed insights on what is going on the comments section is open.

 

What to make of the inflation data

Michael Reddell inflation, Monetary policy

The CPI data were released a couple of days ago.   There was, inevitably, a lot of commentary around higher petrol prices, although most commentators noted that the Reserve Bank was likely to “look through” what we are seeing, and not adjust monetary policy just because of higher petrol prices.  That would, indeed, be consistent with the Bank’s mandate –  and practice –  over almost thirty years of inflation targeting.

One can have all sorts of debates about what sorts of effects should be “looked through”.  We used to have lengthy discussions attempting to distinguish between petrol price effects themselves, indirect effects (eg higher airfares or courier costs directly resulting from higher fuel prices) and second-round effects –  the real worry, if changes in oil/petrol prices came to affect the entire inflation process, including medium-term expectations of inflation.   Those risks were real, and realised, back in the 1970s oil shocks, and that set the scene for much of the subsequent discussion and precautionary debate.

SNZ only has a CPI ex-petrol series back to 1999.  In this chart, I’ve shown the headline CPI inflation rate, the CPI inflation rate ex-petrol, and the Reserve Bank’s preferred core inflation measure, the sectoral factor model.

petrol price inflation

I’ve highlighted four episodes in which petrol price inflation was much higher than overall CPI inflation, and one (quite recent) when it was much lower.

In the first of those episodes –  around 2000 –  the surge in petrol prices coincided with quite a lift in core inflation.  Bear in mind that the economy was recovering from the brief 1998 recession, and the exchange rate had fallen sharply.

In the second episode –  2004 and 05 – the surge in petrol price inflation coincided with no change in core inflation.

In the next episodes –  2008 and 2010 –  the surge in petrol price inflation coincided with a fall in core inflation.  In the 2008, the Reserve Bank explicitly recognised some of this at the time, and talked of scope to cut the OCR soon, despite the high headline inflation.

And in the recent episode when petrol price inflation was very low, there was no fall in core inflation –  if you look hard enough, it may actually have increased very slightly.

There is talk that, if oil prices persist, headline inflation could get as high as 2.5 per cent before too long.  The experience of the last couple of decades suggests that will tell us nothing useful about underlying/core inflation trends, or about the appropriate stance of monetary policy.  And the preferred core inflation measure remains below the target midpoint, as it has been for almost a decade now.

Here are a couple of other series worth looking at.

other infl measures

The blue line is a fairly traditional sort of exclusions-based core inflation measure: excluding volatile items (food and fuel) and (administered) government charges (altho not tobacco taxes), and the orange line is non-tradables inflation excluding government charges and cigarette and tobacco taxes (which, you will recall, have been raised relentlessly each year, in a political non-market process).  There is no sign in either of these series of underlying inflation moving higher in the last year or two.  Core non-tradables inflation of under 2.5 per cent is not consistent, typically, with core (overall) inflation being at 2 per cent.

Having said all that the financial markets appear to have taken a slightly different view of this week’s inflation data.  Here is a chart of the breakeven inflation rate from the government bond market –  the difference, in this case, between the 10 year conventional bond rate and the 2030 indexed bond (real) rate.  I’ve highlighted the change since the inflation data were released.

IIBs oct 18 2018

At 1.4 per cent, the gap is still miles off the 2 per cent target midpoint (or than the comparable numbers in the US), but the latest change does look as if it is worth paying at least a bit of heed to.  Perhaps it will dissipate over the next few weeks, but if not it wouldn’t be a cause for concern, but some mild consolation that –  after all these years –  there was some sign of market implied inflation expectations edging a little closer to target.

What about a longer run of data?   We only have a scattering of inflation indexed bonds, in this case one maturing in September 2025 and one maturing in September 2030.  The 2030 bond was first introduced five years ago this month.    Creating a rough constant maturity 12 year indexed bond series –  the 2025 bond had 12 years to run in 2013, and the 2030 one has 12 years to run now –  and subtracting the result from the Reserve Bank’s 10 year conventional bond series produces this (rough and ready) chart.

iib constant maturity breakeve

A clear rebound from the lows of 2016, but implied breakeven inflation rates still much lower than they were five years ago.

There still seems to be quite a long way to go for the Reserve Bank to really convince investors that, over the decade ahead, they will do a better job of keeping inflation averaging near target than they have done this year to date.

Continuing to talk down the risks of the next serious recession, and the limitations of policy here and abroad to act decisively to counter such a recession and the likely deflationary risks, is cavalier and irresponsible.  It might (seem to) help confidence in the short-run, but if those risks crystallise –  and central banks should focus on tail risks in crisis preparedness –  the Bank will bear a lot of the responsibility if the economy performs poorly, and inflation ends up so low as to vindicate (and more) the evident lack of confidence among people putting real money on a view about the average future inflation rate.

 

Sluggish productivity growth and financial crises

Michael Reddell New Zealand economic performance, Productivity

There has been some interesting material around recently on how many advanced economies (in particular) have undershot over the last decade or so the trends they appeared to be on previously.  Paul Krugman had an interesting column a couple of weeks back, and then the IMF had a whole chapter in their  latest World Economic Outlook on “The Global Economic Recovery 10 Years After The 2008 Financial Meltdown”.   Martin Wolf summarised and illustrated some of that chapter in his FT column last week.  Much of this work attempts to associate (causally) subsequent disappointing economic performance with the financial crises of 2008/09, something I’ve long been a little sceptical of.    The IMF also highlights that countries that didn’t have a financial crisis have shared in the underperformance.

I might come back to the IMF material (in particular) later but reading it prompted me to check out some New Zealand data.

As context, here is some OECD data for labour productivity (real GDP per hour worked) for the G7 countries as a group.

G7 productivity

The trendline shows what might have happened if the trend growth to 2005 had continued.  The gap at the end of the period is equivalent to a productivity shortfall of around 15 per cent.    Note that this productivity slowdown was clearly underway well before the financial crises.

And here is the New Zealand data.  Here I’ve used quarterly data, all the way up to 2018q2.

nz productivity

But this time the trendline extrapolates the trend in the actual data up to early 2012.  Because up to about that time there was no particular sign of a change in the trend. (And thus between 2005 and 2012 we actually did a little better than the G7 as a whole).

Over the six years since 2012, the gap between the actual data and the trendline translates back to a shortfall of about 8 per cent.  Real GDP per hour worked now would be around 8 per cent higher than it actually is –  with all the attendant implications for wages, consumption possibilities, and even government revenue – if that pre-2012 trend had been sustained.  And the pre-2012 trend had been pretty weak –  mostly we’d still been falling behind the rest of the advanced world.

It is always possible that much of the recent productivity shortfall will be revised away –  SNZ have, over the years, delivered some significant changes in history at times.  But I’m not aware of any particular reason to expect significant revisions (in any particular direction), so we simply have to work with the data we have.

As the G7 countries didn’t have a financial crisis in 2005, we didn’t have one in 2012.  In fact, we hadn’t had a systemic financial crisis at all since the late 1980s, and the localised (severe in the sector, but small economywide) finance companies crisis had been centred back in 2007 and 2008.  For New Zealand, there simply isn’t a plausible story in which financial crises –  domestic or foreign –  can explain our dismal productivity performance over the last half decade or more.    Neither the timing, nor the stylised facts around the New Zealand financial system, fit.

There are reasons why for countries at the productivity frontier a major financial crisis could impair domestic productivity growth even in a country that did not itself have a domestic financial crisis, but that isn’t a very relevant story here, New Zealand average productivity being so far below that in the leading group of countries (where productivity is about two-thirds higher than in New Zealand).

I’m not sure I have a fully compelling explanation for why New Zealand has done so poorly since around 2012 (my standard story encompasses several decades of persistent gradual  –  cumulatively stark  – underperformance, and period since 2012 looks –  on current data –  to have been unusually bad).   Perhaps the earthquakes, and the subsequent diversion of resources to a lot of vital, but low productivity, repair and reconstruction work is part of the story (as we knew from day one, in economic terms it was a nasty non-tradables shock that wasn’t going to be helpful).  Then again, the peaks of that work are now well behind us, and productivity growth has yet shown signs of improving.  Perhaps the strong terms of trade have been part of the story –  not stimulating business investment, which has been persistently weak, but boosting incomes and perhaps crowding out other stuff.  The real exchange rate –  not an exogenous influence –  got back to pre-recession levels from about mid-2011.   And, of course, the very sharp and substantial turnaround in the net immigration numbers –  also mostly not an exogenous development –  was getting underway from later in 2012.

Whatever the full explanation, the symptoms (eg weak business investment, shrinking exports and imports as a share of GDP) should be worrying, the outcomes (productivity, and thus potential incomes) are dreadful –  building on earlier decades of underperformance –  and the explanation can’t credibly lie in financial crises, domestic or foreign.

And nothing serious is being done about addressing this failure, by the last government, by the present one.  And The Treasury –  principal adviser to the government on such matters –  seems much more interesting in its Living Standards Framework and esoteric (and sometimes convenient) concepts of “wellbeing” than in actually advising on remedying the New Zealand productivity failure.

nnn

Confucius Institutes, the PRC, and NZ authorities

Michael Reddell China, NZ politics

Some commenters here are, at times, a bit critical of the New Zealand media for not being more active in pursuing questions around the New Zealand government and its supine attitude to the People’s Republic of China (Party and government), and its penetration of New Zealand.  I’m less willing to criticise –  it was, after all, the media that broke the Jian Yang story and pursued it for a time, only yesterday Newsroom had a story about MBIE’s continued use of surveillance equipment supplied by a Chinese government-owned company against which there has been a substantial pushback in the US and Australia, and the Herald’s Matt Nippert has drawn attention to his longstanding request for an interview with the Prime Minister on these issues.  No doubt more could be done –  including, for example, hard questions of the Prime Minister in her press conferences – but resources are limited, the traditional media is in decline, and by the standards of our business and political leaders, and even much of academe, the media are veritable paragons of virtue in this area.

Stuff’s journalist Harrison Christian has also done a couple of interesting and useful articles in recent months.    There was this article about PRC Embassy sponsored rent-a-mobs harrassing peaceful Falun Gong exiles and protestors in New Zealand, and the more general attempts by the PRC to exert control over ethnic Chinese in New Zealand and Australia.  In that article Christian even managed to get an exceptionally-rare comment –  even if not much more than a no-comment –  from former PLA intelligence official, Communist Party member, and National MP Jian Yang.    As a reminder of the nature of the regime, there was this early on in the article.

It was the end of Daisy Lee’s loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party: a black and white photograph her partner had kept hidden for years.

In their apartment in the northern city of Qingdao, Lee was talking to her husband about the Tiananmen Square protests. In 1989, troops with tanks and machine guns opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators in the Beijing square, killing at least several hundred people; perhaps as many as 10,000.

Steve Ma had been a student in Beijing at the time, and Lee was scolding him for it.

“You students in Beijing did crazy things,” she said. “You smashed cars, set them on fire, made trouble and were violent towards the Beijing people!”

In response, Ma showed his wife an old photo taken with a miniature camera by one of his roommates at university. The picture was little more than an inch wide, but Lee could still make out the blood on Tiananmen Square, and a young person’s severed head.

The 1989 incident has always been a highly censored political topic. But Ma had kept that photo, if only for himself; a grim reminder of the day many of his classmates lost their lives.

“He’d been hiding it even though we’d known each other for several years,” says Lee. “The fear of Government was such that he couldn’t even trust me, his wife.”

I found it exceptionally moving, perhaps partly because I’ve come to know Daisy –  who now lives in Auckland – a little over the last year.

Do such articles make a difference?   Even if it is only person by person, raising consciousness, I suspect they do.  Just after that article appeared, with its photos of the silent protestors outside the PRC consulate, I happened to be in Auckland for a meeting nearby.  With a bit of time to spare before the meeting I walked up the road to briefly say thanks to the protestors for their efforts and wish them all the best.

Harrison Christian has another substantial article out today, this time on the Chinese government-sponsored Confucius Institutes in New Zealand, located as part of Auckland, Victoria, and Canterbury universities.  I’ve written about these institutes previously (recently here, but also here)  –  seeing them partly as PRC subsidies to university marketing budgets –  and I’m among those quoted in the Stuff article.

There are quotes from China experts

Duncan Campbell, adjunct teaching fellow at Victoria University’s School of Language and Cultures, said “huge amounts of money” were flooding in for Confucius Institutes, “whereas the university should be putting that or more into the proper study of China”.

“Six hundred-odd thousand into a university system that is strapped for cash is inappropriate,” Campbell said.

He said it amounted to “outsourcing” our understanding of China to the Chinese Communist Party.

All countries were engaged in extending their “soft power” offshore to some degree, Campbell said, but no country had an equivalent programme to CIs, which were embedded in their host universities.

“Everyone does it, but it is understood to be that – L’Alliance Française, the Goethe Institute – it’s removed, separate and autonomous. It doesn’t interfere within the framework of an existing academic institution.

“The issues with China and CIs is that we are dealing with a party state. We’re not actually dealing with a nation state.”

Campbell said he was concerned about “vast taboo areas” within the CI programme: topics politically sensitive to Beijing. Under president Xi Jinping, China had entered a new era of political censorship.

including Anne-Marie Brady

As public funds were also given to CIs, New Zealand was effectively assisting China in furthering its offshore agenda, Brady said.

“The New Zealand Government is subsidising the promotion of China’s foreign policy agenda through the Confucius Institutes,” Brady said.

“New Zealand needs to develop better China knowledge and language skills, but we should do so through New Zealand-based programmes which are free of the censorship constraints that come from Chinese-government funded programmes.”

Brady added that staff employed by CIs may not be followers of Falun Gong, Tibetan Buddhism, or pro-Taiwan independence – movements seen as a threat to the Chinese Communist Party.

The constitution for all CIs states they shall not contravene the laws and regulations of China, where movements like Falun Gong are banned.

The article also draws attention to seminars sponsored by the Confucius Institutes which –  perhaps unlike straight language teaching –  are more explicitly about advancing Chinese government agendas, under the logo of a New Zealand university.    There was one in Auckland on the Belt and Road Initiative, and another in Wellington last year at Victoria University to mark 45 years of diplomatic ties with the PRC, at which not a single sceptical or critical voice was heard.

My comments were as follows

Economist and commentator on NZ-China links, Michael Reddell, said he believed the bulk of the institutes’ work was genuinely teaching language in our schools, but “one could, and should, challenge whether the New Zealand Government should be taking foreign aid from a middle-income country”.

Reddell was also concerned about the “overly close connections between the Confucius Institutes, the foreign policy establishment and other university work”.

For example, the chair of Victoria University’s Confucius Institute, Tony Browne, is also the chair of that university’s New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre (CCRC).

Stuff understands Browne’s dual roles have caused tensions within the leadership of the research centre since it was established.

“I don’t suppose [Browne] actively suppresses any negative research on China, but his presence is likely to condition the sorts of people who get appointed to such roles, for example the director of the CCRC,” said Reddell.

Campbell described Browne’s dual roles as an “impossible situation”.

“It is hard to understand how it works. Certainly I don’t think it can be justified,” he said.

And from the fuller comments I provided the journalist

I’m probably more concerned about the overly close connections between the CIs, the foreign policy establishment and other university work.  Thus, as I’ve highlighted Tony Browne (former NZ Ambassador to the PRC) is both chair of the Vic CI, a senior advisor to Hanban, chair of the Contemporary China Reseearch Centre, and programme co-director for the Aus-NZ School of Govt annual training programme for Chinese Communist Party rising officials.  I don’t suppose he actively suppresses any negative research on China, but his presence is likely to condition the sorts of people who get appointed to such roles (eg director of the CCRC).   Rebecca Needham, ex MFAT, is both director of the CI and still on MFAT’s list of public sector China experts.  The CIs are involved in running courses for public servants (again, mostly language) and the CCRC (Browne-chaired) helps run the public sector China courses.

Harrison Christian went to the Minister of Education for comment.

Education Minister Chris Hipkins said it wasn’t his role to instruct universities on whether they establish or fund particular teaching and research centres.

“The autonomy of New Zealand’s universities is a prized, and internationally respected, feature of our education system,” Hipkins said.

Nothing seems to be a matter for the Minister of Education, in publicly-funded universities.  He was all-but silent recently on the Massey Vice-Chancellor and her refusal to accommodate speech she disagreed with.

I don’t suppose anyone thinks the government should be able to compel public universities to close Confucius Institutes, but that alone doesn’t absolve the Minister –  or his government colleages, including the Minister of Foreign Affairs –  from having a view on the activities of (heinous) foreign governments in our schools and universities, and whether such activities are appropriate.  In other countries, after all, there has been some measure of a re-think, and some Confucius Institutes have been closed.

Harrison Christian also got Tony Browne on record

However, Browne said he did not believe his roles were a potential conflict. His position as chair of the CCRC was a “management job, not a policy job”, he said.

“There’s a very fundamental and longstanding principle of academic freedom – that academics determine their areas of research.

“I don’t work for China. I’m not paid a cent by China.”

Browne pointed to an August report from the CCRC that presented a critical assessment of the potential benefits of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for New Zealand.

“My whole life has been guided by the promotion of New Zealand’s interests, not China’s interests.”

Which is fine as far as it goes but:

  • “management” and governance includes the resourcing and staffing issues.   With Browne in the chair, it seems highly unlikely that anyone very openly sceptical of the PRC would end up in the director’s role,
  • his role as senior adviser to Hanban –  the Chinese government agency that funds the Confucius Institutes, and recruits (selectively, for political and religious reliability) the Mandarin language assistants (whom Beijing provides, on top of the cash contributions in Christian’s article) – is unpaid, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t “working for China” in that role, which provides access, trips to the PRC, and benefits which enhance his other activities,
  • in a sense, much of the issue is captured by that last sentence.  I’m sure it is an accurate description of how he sees things: that apparent very close alignment (in his view) of the interests of the PRC and the interests of New Zealand, in a way that means he never ever says anything critical about the PRC, one of the most evil regimes on the planet today.  It may be no different for Jian Yang.

It is worth recalling that these aren’t Tony Browne’s only involvements.  From an earlier post

Tony Browne, the former New Zealand Ambassador to Beijing, must be a busy man.   I remembered that I had met him once.   Among his many hats is that he is co-director of the China Advanced Leadership Programme, run by the Australia-New Zealand School of Government (itself a partnership involving various Australian universities and Victoria University).

The China Advanced Leadership Program (CALP) is an annual three-week program for Chinese officials, delivered in Australia and New Zealand. The aim of the program is to develop productive relationships between high level public officials of Australia, New Zealand and China.  The program has been operational since 2011 and is delivered across multiple Australian and New Zealand cities.  The program is made possible due to ANZSOG’s relationship with the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party.   

It must be a quite a revenue-generator for the universities concerned.

Who attends

Who are our participants?

Senior and emerging Chinese public officials from central and provincial governments – Up 25 senior officials in China are carefully selected by ANZSOG’s program partner, the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. The Organization Department occupies a unique role in the hierarchy of the Chinese government – it oversees appointments of all key positions within the administration. Previous delegations have included Vice-Ministers from the Central Government, Party Secretaries, City Mayors, and Directors-General.

All, quite explicitly, CCP members.

You might suppose that being a partnership between numerous Australian universities and Victoria University, ANZSOG wasn’t of much moment in New Zealand.  In fact, the state and national governments are members.  And of the Board, three are New Zealanders –  in the chair is Peter Hughes, the current State Services Commissioner.  And what of ANZSOG’s ties with the PRC?  It isn’t just a commercial relationship involved in running that course.    Instead, ANZSOG lists as “affiliate partners” a small number of agencies including

Affiliate partners

It is all terribly cosy.  The presence of the Chinese Communist Party speaks for itself.  But CELAP describes itself as

China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong (CELAP), a Shanghai-based national institution, is funded by the central government and supervised by Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee.

Which brings me to a more general point.    Much as I disapprove of the Confucius Institutes, the (much) bigger issue is the approach of successful New Zealand governments and their bureaucracies.  Here is another quote from the comments I gave to Harrison Christian

But, take the CIs out of the picture completely and I doubt anything would be very much different.  The official cast of mind –  don’t ever say anything to rock the boat –  doesn’t arise from the CIs but from a hard-headed (probably misguided and amoral) assessment of NZ interests by NZ politicians and officials.   You note the OBOR seminar the Akld CI was involved in.  Another example, from the Vic CI, is this https://www.victoria.ac.nz/ci/courses-and-programmes/programmes/45th-anniversary-symposium-new-zealands-relationship-with-china   at which no remotely sceptical voice was on the programme.  But if it hadn’t been the CI hosting the workshop, the CCRC –  or the university politics dept –  might have done so itself, and it isn’t clear that the format would have been much different.  [MFAT itself –  represented with MBIE and NZTE on the board –  may have been involved in blocking] awkward appointments to the CCRC director role.  But again, it isn’t China doing that, but NZers acting in their (misguided in my view) assessment of NZ best interests –  given the heavy handed approach China takes at times.

It was, after all, the NZ govt which willingly and enthusiastically signed up to the OBOR MOU last year. [“fusion of civilisations” and all that].
Nature abhors a vacuum, and the extent of PRC involvement in New Zealand is perhaps what you’d expect when an evil regime finds successive local governments scared of their own shadow, in the thrall of particular business interests (and the post-politics opportunities for them and their colleagues) and all too ready to turn over and let the PRC tickle their tummy.
Confucius Institutes are an issue, and it is good that Harrison Christian is giving the issues and risks wider public coverage.  But they aren’t the main event.   That is about attitudes, self-respect, integrity, values (and the lack of them) among our elected and bureaucratic “elite”.   Active mindsets and choices of New Zealand leaders.
(On my long list of possible things to write about had been this recent article from the Australia New Zealand School of Government, chaired by our own most senior public servant, State Services Commissioner Peter Hughes.   It is about an education/”indoctrination” programme for senior Australian and New Zealand public servants in China.     Perhaps the worst of it is that way it normalises the PRC regime

The group also had discussions with Chinese officials about reforms to the education system aimed at building problem-solving capabilities and improving student welfare and school/life balance.

Participants said that the CRP had given them a better understanding of Chinese thinking and would enable them to engage better with Chinese businesses. They also gained a sense of the tension in China “between government’s role as a controller, and its reliance on social capital and community spirit to implement effective programs”.

Just another bunch of well-intentioned public servants on both sides.   Probably the rotations of the PRC counterparts through Xinjiang were carefully avoided, as trips to 1938 Berlin might have stepped around the local unpleasantness of Kristallnacht.

The CRP was initiated by ANZSOG in conjunction with the Organisation Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

The Organisation Department occupies a unique role in the hierarchy of the Chinese government – it oversees appointments of all key positions within the administration.

The CRP – the first and only initiative of its kind undertaken by the Chinese Government – and works in conjunction with the reciprocal Chinese Advanced Leadership Program, which sees senior Chinese officials visit Australia and New Zealand.

The special relationship of the our public service hierarchy with China’s Communist Party……   It should defy belief, but sadly it is all too real.  All part of the same (successful) effort by the PRC to neutralise the New Zealand government (in particular) and to relativise the perspectives of the officials who advise them. )

Looking back to the deposit guarantee

Michael Reddell Financial stabilty, New Zealand economic history, Reserve Bank, Treasury

12 October 2008 was a frantic day.  It was a Sunday, and I never work Sundays (well, two financial crises, one in Zambia, one in New Zealand, in 30+ years).  There was a call in the middle of our church service summoning all hands to the pump, to put in place a retail deposit guarantee scheme that day.   We did it.  My diary later that night records that we’d “delivered a brand spanking new not very good deposit guarantee scheme”, announced a few hours earlier.   It was a joint effort of the Reserve Bank and The Treasury.

I had recently taken up a secondment at The Treasury.  I’d been becoming increasingly uneasy about the New Zealand financial situation for some months (flicking through my copy of Alan Bollard’s book on the crisis I found wedged inside a copy of an email exchange he and I had had a month or so earlier about Lender of Last Resort options for sound finance companies, potentially caught up in contagious runs) but I hadn’t had any material involvement in the unfolding sequence of finance company failures.   But it was the escalating international financial crisis – this was four weeks after Lehmans, 3.5 weeks after the AIG bailout, two weeks after the US House of Representatives initially voted down TARP, and two weeks after the Irish government surprised everyone by announcing comprehensive deposit guarantees –  that really accelerated interest in the question of what, if anything, New Zealand should do, or might eventually be more or less compelled to do.    The initiative for some more pro-active planning came from The Treasury, but with some parallel impetus  –  including around guarantees – from the then Minister of Finance, Michael Cullen (who, a few days out from Labour’s campaign launch, was also looking for pre-election fiscal stimulus measures).

On Tuesday 7 October, there was a long meeting at the Reserve Bank, attended by both the Secretary to the Treasury, John Whitehead, and the Governor of the Reserve Bank.  My memory – and my contemporary diary impression – is that the Governor was considerably more focused on the managing the Minister’s political concerns than on any sort of first-best response.    But the outcome of that meeting was agreement to quickly work up a joint paper for the Minister which would not, at that stage, recommend introducing a deposit guarantee scheme, but which would outline the relevant issues and operational parameters, giving us something to work from if the situation worsened.

Which it quickly did, both on international markets, and with the political pressure, with the Prime Minister signalling that she wanted to be able to announce something about guarantees in her campaign launch that coming Sunday afternoon.

I and a handful of others on both sides of The Terrace scurried round for the next few days.  I see that in my diary I wondered what the best approach was: do nothing, allow some risk of the crisis engulfing us, and then pick up the pieces afterwards, or be more pro-active and take the guarantee route.  My conclusion –  and even today I wince at the parallel (but this was a late-at-night comment) – “I suspect that if the pressures really come on, the Irish approach is best”.   As relevant context, although much of the finance company sector was in solvency trouble (many had already failed) there were no serious concerns about the solvency of the banking system.   (Liquidity was, potentially, another issue.)

At Treasury we had recognised the importance of the Australian connection –  most of our banks being Australian-owned.     I’m not sure of the date, but we had taken the initiative –  at Deputy Secretary level –  of approaching the Australian Treasury to see if they were interested in doing some joint contigency planning around deposit guarantees, and had been told that the Treasurer had no interest in such guarantees and so our suggestion/offer was declined.

But even Australian authorities could look out the window and see that the global situation was deteriorating rapidly, and by late in the week that recognition was being passed back to authorities on this side of the Tasman.  Alan Bollard always kept in close contact with his RBA counterpart Glenn Stevens, and on the Friday my diary records (presumably told by some RBNZ person I was working with) “apparently Glenn S[tevens[ told Alan this afternoon that the RBA/authorities might fairly soon have to consider a blanket guarantee”.     In the flurry and uncertainty, one other senior RBNZ person –  still holding a senior position there –  told me that in his view nothing should be done here unless there were queues outside New Zealand banks.

Between a handful of people on the two sides of the street, we got a paper on deposit guarantee scheme possibilities out to the Minister of Finance on the Friday afternoon.  It was a mad rush, with some uneasy negotiated compromises (and everyone’s particular hobbyhorse concern got its own mention). I was probably too close to it to tell, and noted I wasn’t that comfortable with it, but when I got Alan Bollard’s signature he indicated he was happy with it.  I noted “lots of small details to sort out next week –  we hope only that, not implementation”.     To this point, we were focused mostly  on retail deposits, but I see in my diary that in The Australian on the Saturday there was talk from bank CEOs of a possible need for a wholesale guarantee scheme.

The full, unredacted, paper we wrote is available on The Treasury’s website.   The thrust of the advice was that (a) action was not necessary immediately, but (b) that should conditions worsen a scheme could be put in place at quite short notice.  The rest of the paper outlined the relevant issues, and the recommended features of any such scheme, and we advised against announcing a scheme until the remaining operational details had been sorted out, something we suggested could be done in the folllowing week.

These were the key features we suggested, largely accepted by the Minister.

dgs 1

One thing that puzzles me looking back now is why we were focused on guarantee options, rather than lender of last resort options.  The latter would have involved lending on acceptable collateral to institutions that we judged to be solvent, perhaps at a penal rate.  It was the classic response to the idea of a contagious run –  troubles elsewhere in the financial system spark concerns about other institutions, and people “run” –  cashing in deposits, retail or wholesale –  just in case.  A sound institution could, in principle, be brought down very quickly by such a run (empirically there are few such examples –  most actual runs end up being on institutions that prove to be at-best borderline solvent).

In the paper we sent to the Minister on 10 October we don’t seem to address that option at all.  I presume the reason we didn’t was twofold.  First, guarantees were beginning to proliferate globally.  And second, there probably is a pretty strong argument that if (a) you are convinced your banking system is sound, and (b) there are nonetheless doubts in the wider environment (in this case, a full scale global crisis, and a domestic recession), a guarantee is likely to be considerably more effective in underpinning confidence.  Not so much depositor confidence, as the confidence of bankers (and their boards).    Even if lender of last resort funding, on decent collateral, had been available without question, few bankers would have been happy to rely on that, and many would have been very keen to cut exposures, pull in loans, and reduce their dependence on the good nature of the Reserve Bank Governor.   A guarantee –  where the Crown’s money is at stake –  is a much stronger signal than a loan secured on the institution’s very best assets.   On the other hand, as the paper does note, once given a guarantee may not leave one with much leverage over the guaranteed institution.

Almost all of the subsequent controversy around the deposit guarantee scheme related in one form or another to one key choice.

All the systemically significant financial institutions in New Zealand were banks (not that all banks were systemically significant).  But they were not, by any means, the only deposit-taking institutions, and we were in the midst at the time of a finance company in which many companies were proving to be insolvent and failing.  Other finance companies appeared –  not just to the Reserve Bank, but to the market, and to ratings agencies – just fine.

Treasury and the Reserve Bank jointly recommended to the Minister that any deposit guarantee scheme include finance companies.  Why did we do that?

The simple reason was one of both fairness and efficiency.  Had we proposed to offer a guarantee only to banks (let alone only the big banks) then in a climate of uncertainty and heightened risk, there would have been an extremely high risk that such an action would have been a near-immediate death sentence for the other deposit-taking institutions, including ones with investment grade ratings, and in full compliance with their trust deeds.    We knew that finance companies (while small in aggregate) were riskier than our banks, but that was no good reason to recommend to the government a model that would have killed off apparently viable private businesses.  It still seeems, with the information we had at the time, an unimpeachable argument.  Classic lender of last resort models, for example, don’t differentiate by the size of the borrowing institution.

We weren’t naive about the risks –  including that there was still no prudential supervision of finance companies and the like –  and we explicitly recommended that risk-based fees (tied to ratings) be adopted, and the maximum coverage per depositor be much lower for unrated entities.   We included in the table an indicative fee scale, based credit default swap pricing for AA-rated banks in normal times, scaling up (quite dramatically) based on the much higher default probabilities of lower-rated entities.

We even included a indicative, totally back of the envelope, guess as to potential fiscal losses –  drawing on the experience of the US S&L crisis.  As it happens, actual losses were to be less than that number, even though the scheme as adopted by the Minister of Finance was less good than the one we recommended.  (Treasury provided some other –  but lower – loss estimates a few days after the actual announcement, but I can’t see those on the Treasury website and can’t now recall the approximate numbers.)

But all that was just warm up.   We’d been under the impression that the Prime Minister was going to announce, in her campaign launch speech, that preparatory work was underway on a deposit guarantee scheme.  That was probably her intention.  But that didn’t allow for the Rudd effect.  The Australian Prime Minister decided that he was going to announce an actual retail guarantee scheme for Australia that day –  the Sunday.  And so it was concluded that New Zealand had little choice but to follow suit.   As a matter of economics, there probably was little real choice but to follow the Australian lead.  But the timing was all about politics.  Neither economic nor financial stability would have been jeopardised if we hadn’t had a deposit guarantee scheme announced before the banks opened on Monday morning.  We’d have been much better to have taken a bit more time and hashed out some of the details with the Minister in his office in Wellington, not at campaign launches and then, as the day went on, airport lounges (at one point late that afternoon I –  who’d talked to the Minister perhaps twice in my life previously –  was deputed to ring Dr Cullen and get his approval or some detail or other of the scheme).   But I guess it might have left open a brief window in which critics might have suggested that New Zealand politicians were doing less for their citizens and their economy than their Australian counterparts.

The main, and important, area in which Dr Cullen departed from official advice was around the matter of fees.   We’d recommended that the risk-based fees would apply from the first dollar of covered deposits (as in any other sort of insurance).     The Minister’s approach was transparently political –  he was happy to charge fees to big Australian banks (who represented the lowest risks) but not to New Zealand institutions (including Kiwibank).  And so an arbitrary line was drawn that fees would be charged only on deposits in excess of $5 billion.   Apart from any other considerations, that gave up a lot of the potential revenue that would have partly offset expected losses.  The initial decision was insane, and a few days later we got him to agree to a regime where really lowly-rated (or unrated) institutions would have to pay a (too low) fee on any material increases in their deposits. A few days later again an attenuated pricing schedule was applied to deposit-growth in all covered entities.   But the seeds of the subsequent problems were sown in that initial set of decisions.

The weeks after the initial announcement were intense.  We rushed to get appropriate deed documents drawn up, dealt with endless request from institutional vehicles not covered who sought inclusion (property trust, money market funds etc), and set up a monitoring regime.  In parallel, we quickly realised that the way wholesale funding markets were freezing up suggested that a wholesale guarantee scheme was appropriate, and got something announced in a matter of weeks –  a much more tightly-designed, better priced scheme, operating only on new borrowing (but I’m biased as that scheme was mostly my baby).  As it happens, that scheme provided the leverage to actually get the big banks into the deposit guarantee scheme.  Once the government had announced the retail scheme the big banks had little incentive to get in –  they probably thought of themselves (no doubt rightly) as sound and as too big to fail –  and the scheme was an opt-in one (we couldn’t just by decree compel banks to pay large fees).   But the Minister of Finance –  probably reasonably enough –  insisted that if banks wanted a wholesale scheme (which they really did) it would be a condition that they first sign up to (and pay for) the retail scheme.  Perhaps less defensible was the Minister’s insistence that any bank signing up to the guarantee scheme indicate that it would avoid mortgagee sales of home owners in negative equity but still servicing their debt (the ability of banks to do so is a standard provision of mortgage documentation).

After the first few weeks of the retail scheme I had only relatively limited ongoing involvement, and so I’m not going to get into litigating or relitigating the South Canterbury Finance failure, and whether –  even the constraints the Minister put on –  and how that could by then have been avoided (the Auditor-General report some years ago looked at some of those issues).   The outcome was highly unfortunate, and expensive.  Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that the total cost of all the guarantee schemes – retail and wholesale – was considerably less than officials had warned was possible.  And it is simply not possible to know the counterfactual –  how things might have unfolded here had either no guarantees been offered, or if the finance companies and building societies had been excluded from day one.  Personally, I think neither would have provided politically tenable, but we’ll never know that, or how that alternative world played out.

But with the information we had at the time –  including, for example, the investment grade credit rating for SCF (which had outstanding wholesale debt issues abroad –  and actually my only meeting with SCF was about their interest, eventually not pursued, to try to use the wholesale guarantee scheme) –  the recommendation made on 10 October seem more or less right. Given the same information I’m not sure I’d advise something different now.  And once Australia had made the decision to guarantee retail deposits, there was little effective economic or political choice for New Zealand.   Had they not done so –  and there was real data, regarding increasing demand for physical cash in Australia, supporting Rudd’s action (rushed as timing was) – perhaps we could have got away with a well-designed wholesale guarantee only.   That would have been a first-best preferable world, but it wasn’t the set of facts we actually had to work with.

 

Real interest rates

Michael Reddell Immigration, Interest rates

It is a while since I’ve done a real interest rate post, so here goes.

You’ll see stories from time to time about how low the New Zealand government’s borrowing costs are.

But it is still worth reminding ourselves of New Zealand’s long track record of having among the very highest average real interest rates in the advanced world.   Here, for example, are New Zealand, Australia, and the G7 countries for the last five years (the period chosen a bit arbitrarily, but a different set of dates wouldn’t substantially alter the relative picture).  I’ve just used average bond yields and average CPI inflation, from the OECD databases, but using (say) core inflation also wouldn’t materially alter the picture.

bond yields

Among these countries, we have one crisis-ridden hugely indebted euro-area country (Italy), one country with new substantial political and economic uncertainty –  and quite a lot of debt (the UK), one with extremely high levels of public debt (Japan), and one with recklessly large fiscal deficits and rising debt (the US).  And our real long-term government bond rates have been higher than all of them.

If we look at the situation today, the picture isn’t a lot different.  Italy has gone shooting past us, which should be no consolation to anyone (crisis pressures re-emerging there).  The gap between New Zealand and US real interest rates has narrowed quite a bit, as one might expect from the sequence of Fed interest rate increases in turn driven partly by unsustainable late-cycle fiscal expansion, but a 10 year US government inflation indexed bond was trading this week at 1.04 per cent, and a 10 year NZ government inflation indexed bond is trading at about 1.25 per cent.   Even that gap is substantially larger for 20 year indexed bonds.

As a reminder, our interest rates don’t average higher than those abroad because of:

  • superior productivity growth rates (we’ve had almost none in recent years),
  • macroeconomic instability (we have low stable inflation and low stable public debt),
  • public sector credit risk (see above –  and of the countries in the chart only Australia has comparably strong public finances),
  • weak banking systems (the Australian banks and their NZ subs have some of better bank credit ratings in the world),
  • risk around high levels of external indebtedness (not only is much of the external indebtedness on bank balance sheets –  see above –  but the New Zealand exchange rate has been persistently strong, not a feature you expect to see when risk concerns are to the fore).

Oh, and of the small OECD countries with floating exchange rates, over the last five years only Iceland (recently emerged from serious systemic crisis) and Hungary (IMF bailout programme as recently as 2008) had higher real interest rates than New Zealand.

At the heart of any explanation for this persistent real interest rate gap –  which has been there, on average, for decades –  must relate to factors influencing pressure on resources in New Zealand.   At some hypothetical world interest rate, there is  some mix of more demand for investment (housing, business, government) and a small supply of savings (households, business, government) than in most other OECD countries.    That incipient excess demand on resources is absorbed by having a higher domestic interest rate than in most other countries, and a higher real exchange rate.    That mix of adjustment will then squeeze out some of the incipient excess demand.  Global evidence suggests that overall savings rates aren’t very sensitive to changes in expected real returns.  Governments tend not to be very responsive to price signals, and people have to live somewhere (so although residential investment is highly cyclical, in the end everyone gets a roof over their head).  Much of the adjustment pressure is felt around genuinely discretionary, and market sensitive, investment spending: business investment, and especially that in sectors exposed to international competition.   It is the stylised story of New Zealand: moderate savings rates (overall), quite high rates of government and residential investment, modest rates of business investment, and a tradables sector which has managed little per capita growth for decades, and where international trade shares of GDP are stagnant or falling even a period when world trade blossomed.

And that is where my immigration policy story fits in.   Savings and investment pressures are aggregates of all sorts of forces and preferences, and so one can never say that a single factor “explains” the whole picture.  But if one is looking for areas where government policy – a non-market or exogenous influence –  plays a part, then New Zealand immigration policy over decades seems likely to be a significant part of the story.  Lots more people means lots more demand for investment just to maintain existing capital/output ratios.   New people need houses, and schools and roads and so on.  If this were a country where domestic savings (flow rates) were abundant –  and domestic savings are different from foreign savings because the act of saving domestically takes some pressure off domestic resources (incomes generated here not spent here) – it wouldn’t be a particular issue.  But that isn’t so in New Zealand.  Government policy choices may have influenced those outcomes to some extent –  I certainly favour a different tax treatment of savings –  but my reading of the international evidence leaves me sceptical that reforms in that area would make very much difference to desired savings rates (if only because income and substitution efforts tend to offset).

Instead, conscious and deliberate government policy drives up ex ante investment demand (at the world interest rate), and in the process tends to drive out the sort of investment that might have enabled those of already here to achieve better material standards of living.

(In a very small sample, it is perhaps worth noting that there are four OECD countries where policy is set to favour high rates of immigration.  They are New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Israel.  It should at least prompt a moment’s reflection among the immigration champions, that not one of those countries has been a stellar OECD productivity performer –  Australia and Canada have done better than New Zealand and Israel, but are nowhere near the OECD frontier, despite the abundance of fixed natural resources those two countries have.)

Race and the Living Standards Framework

Michael Reddell Treasury

The Treasury has been at work on its Living Standards Framework for some years now (since at least 2011).  When it was first dreamed up I recall remarking to various people that it seemed like preparation for a Labour/Greens government.  And so it has come to be, with the new government embracing the framework –  a substitute for actually doing anything about New Zealand’s dismal productivity record –  and talking endlessly about their forthcoming “wellbeing Budget”, plans for which must now be well underway.

There have been numerous papers published.  Among them were several playing identity politics:

Strangely, the Pacific paper emphasises that there is a wide variety of different Pacific cultures, but the Asian one talks repeatedly of “the Asian culture”.   This was the paper Gabs Makhlouf was touting in China a couple of weeks ago, talking up the “value” of “recognition of the hierarchical orderings of relationship.”

Personally, these papers strike me as largely a waste of public money.   But then so is the whole project, and I am very uneasy about The Treasury trying to analyse policy by loose race-based “preferences” or sets of values.  It has been notable, for example, that they have made no effort (to date) to look at perspectives on “wellbeing” by religion, for example –  where any differences may well be starker than those across race-based lines. Nothing either by political affiliation or ideology.  Only race.

Treasury were the ones who set off on the race-based path.  So I was curious –  and, okay, being slightly mischievous –  about what they’d done to look at the perspectives on the issue of European New Zealanders?   I didn’t actually expect they’d have done anything –  maybe they just assumed that their British CEO could adequately represent a (or the likely wide range of) European perspective(s)?   But I lodged the OIA request, and had a response this afternoon.

This was my request

Dear Sir/Madam,
I have noticed that Treasury has recently released papers on Maori, Pacific and Asian New Zealanders” “wellbeing” and the Living Standards Framework.  This is to request any similar work on European New Zealanders’ wellbeing, and if no such work exists any explanations why, and copies of any papers/emails relevant to the decision not to prepare such a paper.
Thanks in anticipation.
and this was the response,  provided on the very last of the standard 20 working days, and certainly not (as the Act requires) as soon as reasonably practicable.
The request is being declined under section 18(e) because the document/s requested do not exist.

In other words, it seems it never even occurred to them to think about the distinctive perspectives of the largest ethnic group in New Zealand.

Telling really, about the tokenism and identity politics that seems to infest this project.

 

Makhlouf on China

Michael Reddell China, NZ politics, Treasury

In a blog post the other day, which briefly touched on the activities of the People’s Republic of China in New Zealand, former ACT MP and senior lawyer Stephen Franks observed that

Our colonial forebears gained their colonial power and wealth by suborning the elites of the peoples subjugated more often than with military violence.

I hadn’t particularly thought of it that way before, but of course once one thinks about it for even a moment he is correct about the history, and (I suspect) about the relevance of the parallel to the current situation.

In fact, the parallel came to mind in pondering the latest public speech by Gabs Makhlouf the British ring-in Secretary to the Treasury, who not only qualifies as one of the “elite” but isn’t even someone with a strong ongoing personal interest in the future of ordinary New Zealanders, or even of New Zealand institutions.  Of course, even public servants holding as high an office as Secretary to the Treasury don’t make policy –  we hold politicians to account for that –  but Makhlouf seems to be actively engaged with, and supportive of, the longrunning deference to one of the most evil regimes on the planet, and apparent indifference to the tentacles of that regime in our system and country.

It mightn’t even be quite so annoying if his pandering was supported by decent economic analysis or a compelling understanding of the economic challenges facing New Zealand.  But it isn’t.    The speech, given at the university in Beijing, is under the title “The role of the China-New Zealand relationship in raising living standards”.

He burbles on about his beloved Living Standards framework, reaching the astonishing conclusion in his final paragraph that

Green mountains and blue rivers are as good as mountains of gold and silver.

Perhaps when you have a secure government income of many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year they are, but not to most New Zealanders – the people who struggle to get by, who’d appreciate the opportunities for better housing, better medical treatment, or even a better holiday.     Of course, the environment matters (rather a lot), and greater wealth and productivity has given us cost-effective options to reduce pollution (contrast the pollution levels in London or Beijing).  Perhaps we could extend the parallel: uninhabited New Zealand 1000 years ago –  beautiful and untouched as it may have been –  as good as a reasonably prosperous country today that makes extensive use of natural resources, and which has changed the landscape?   Few will think so, but perhaps the Secretary does?     If this is the sort of economic analysis governments have been getting, no wonder there is no progress in reversing our relative productivity decline.

Makhlouf goes on at length about the value of international trade and investment, and I can go a reasonable way along that line with him.  But it is as if he is talking for a totally different country when he observes enthusiastically that

And back in 1990 the ratio of global trade to world GDP was 30 percent; by 2015 that ratio had doubled to around 60 percent.

Which is good, but in New Zealand –  the country he supposedly represents –  the total exports and imports were 52 per cent of GDP in 1990 and 54 per cent last year.    We simply haven’t shared at all in the dramatic increases in world trade.   And because he seems not to understand that, the Secretary presumably has no credible analysis for what might make a helpful difference in future.   As it is, the New Zealand story is even worse than those snapshots suggests: exports as a share of GDP peaked as long ago as 2000, and even exports of services –  where the Secretary likes to talk up tourism and export education –  peaked as share of GDP in 2002.    The services exports share of GDP is now 30 per cent smaller (three percentage points) than it was then.

Then there is one of his tired old lines, claiming that “we” (New Zealand) are “part of the fastest growing region in the world” when, as he delivered his speech in Beijing, he was closer to home in London than to his office in Wellington.

I could go on, but the weaknesses of the Secretary’s economic analysis have been documented in many earlier posts.   What appalled in this particular speech was the craven grovelling to the PRC, the total relativisation of our two countries in ways which suggest that he thinks their system, their government, is just as good as ours.  (I don’t suppose he really does, but when you are a senior official, backing your government, what you say counts  –  including no doubt to the PRC authorities. He does the kow-tow)

He begins his speech with the rather empty claim that

Yet there is so much that we have in common.

We are all human beings I guess, but it wasn’t clear what else he had in mind.   He tries, not very convincingly, to elaborate.

All of us here want open trade, thriving business, and economic growth. Those things matter for our material wellbeing. But they are only a subset of what contributes to the quality of our lives. I’m sure we share a belief in the importance of good health and education, decent housing, the support of family and friends, a clean natural environment, a safe and peaceful society. We seek that for ourselves and for future generations.

As the Secretary surely knows, the People’s Republic of China has no commitment to open trade, having a highly regulated economy, and tight restrictions on international services trade in particular, and on investment.    But what of that broader list of things he thinks we have in common?  Perhaps it is fine as far it goes, but he is talking to people in a country whose government has a million people from Xinjiang in concentration and re-indoctrination camps.  And for all the Secretary’s talk about wellbeing –  and even “social capital” –  it is notable that things like free speech, free expression, the ability to change your government, freedom of religion, and even the rule of law – explicitly disavowed not long ago by the PRC Chief Justice –  are totally absent from his list.  The things that divide free and democratic countries from the PRC regime are huge and important.  Perhaps even the sorts of things that might appear in a typical New Zealand assessment of wellbeing?  But they, apparently, don’t matter much to the Secretary to the Treasury.  He goes on the praise the Belt and Road Initiative –  under the aegis of which the previous New Zealand government committed to the (rather frightening) aspiration of “the fusion of civilisations” with the PRC.

In all that he was just warming up.  There is later a substantial section of the “NZ-China relationship”, which is almost nauseating in places.  Thus

It is a relationship that goes beyond diplomacy and trade. It’s also about the links between people, about investing in our mutual success, and about recognising our shared interests in the world.

Liberty, democracy, the rule of law for example?  I guess not.  Respect for established international borders?  I guess not.    Then again, there is this in common, that both China and New Zealand have dramatically (economically) underperformed their near neighbours over the last century of so: in China’s case, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and in New Zealand’s case Australia.

Then we get this

It hasn’t all been one-way traffic. New Zealander Rewi Alley helped establish the Gung Ho movement in the 1930s and dedicated 60 years of his life to improving the living standards of Chinese workers.

You mean the active member of the Chinese Communist Party and unashamed apologist for its evils  (I have one of his books sitting on my desk, co-authored with the dreadful Communist fellow-traveller Wilfred Burchett, written towards the end of the Cultural Revolution celebrating the quality of life in the PRC).    Then again, when we have a Chinese Communist Party member in our Parliament what might one expect from our elites?

The Secretary moves on to celebrate PRC foreign investment in New Zealand.  He notes, without further comment, that

Over half of the 25 largest Chinese investors in New Zealand are state owned enterprises including Huawei, Yili and Haier.

as if this is a good thing (Treasury not being known for its enthusiasm for SOEs in New Zealand), as if he cares not about the national security threat various allied governments have determined Huawei represents –  and note that Huawei likes to represent itself as a private company –  and as if he is unaware (or cares not a bit) about the PRC law under which companies (private and public) are required to operate in the interests of the partt-State, at home or abroad.  In the best of circumstances, state ownership (and murky ownership) is a recipe for weakened capital allocation disciplines etc, and the Secretary to the Treasury really should know that.

The Secretary goes on

I believe one of the main reasons the China-New Zealand relationship is so close and constructive is because we both recognise the importance of diplomacy.

A line so vacuous it can only mean that New Zealand knows when (almost always) to rollover, never upset Beijing, and so on.   And who would want a “close and constructive” relationship with such a tyrannical regime anyway –  unless money is now all that matters (surely not so, especially in the Secretary’s wellbeing world.   Do these people have no shame?

Channelling the government, the Secretary touches on the Pacific, where the PRC is increasingly active, and in ways that look quite damaging not just to our interests, but to those of the ordinary citizens (although, again, not necessarily the “elites) in those countries.  Here is his final line.

We believe it is in everyone’s interest in the region – including New Zealand and China – to encourage sustainable economic development, good governance, respect for sovereignty and the rule of law.

I guess that is really a timid suggestion to the PRC, but they are quite open that they have no time for the rule of law (unless, of course, in their own interests), good governance (surely you’d practice what you preach), let alone “respect for sovereignty” –  ask the neighbours in the South China Sea, or Taiwan, the peaceful independent productive democracy.

We believe it is in everyone’s interest in the region – including New Zealand and China – to encourage sustainable economic development, good governance, respect for sovereignty and the rule of law.

Sounding like his countryman, Neville Chamberlain –  who did finally come to his senses –  we apparently don’t believe in right and wrong, or standing by those who are threatened.  The Secretary –  and his government –  just want to be “honest brokers”.  It is a shameful stance.

Perhaps you think I’m being a little unfair to Mr Makhlouf.  He is after all just a (very senior) public servant, channelling government policy.  But no one forces him to parrot these sorts of lines, and to make public speeches re-emphasising New Zealand’s deference and subservience, all under the mask of “mutual benefits”.  Sure, he can’t run an alternative, more challenging, perspective in public, but it is entirely his choice to attach his name to these lines.    He is one of the guilty, sacrificing our values, our institutions, while giving cover to the evils of the PRC regime, all for what?   A few more dollars for a few more big institutions.  In the Secretary’s case there isn’t even the shameful, feeble excuse about political parties “needing” to fund themselves.

Sacrificing our values?  Well, in his speech Makhlouf also talked about his living standards framework and how Treasury had gone out to do some weird race-based consultations about what mattered to people. I haven’t read these papers yet but he reported that of their consultation with Asian New Zealanders (emphasis added)

There is a strong belief in the value of collectivism, diligence, responsibility, frugality and recognition of hierarchy in relationships.

Surely, if there is any traditional New Zealand value –  and as I noted earlier in the week, I’m not fan of values-test – it is the polar opposite of “recognition of hierarchy in relationships”.  But probably Makhlouf, MFAT, and the political elites of all parties would prefer we all knew our place and left all this to them; another deal, more donations, and a refusal to ever stand for the values the Prime Minister sometimes talks about if it might even create even a little awkwardness in Beijing.

Sometimes, moments of hope arise in the strangest places.  I’m no fan of Donald Trump, and could only agree with the right-wing US columnist who the other day declared Trump the single most unsuited person to be President in all of US history.  And yet the other day, his Vice-President Mike Pence gave a speech on the Administration’s policy towards the PRC that came as distinctly refreshing after reading the Makhlouf effort.  I’m not going to excerpt it at length, but for anyone interested I suggest you read it.  I was pleasantly surprised by much of it, and have seen fairly positive commentary on it from various Democrtic-leaning China commentators.

But I come before you today because the American people deserve to know that, as we speak, Beijing is employing a whole-of-government approach, using political, economic, and military tools, as well as propaganda, to advance its influence and benefit its interests in the United States.

China is also applying this power in more proactive ways than ever before, to exert influence and interfere in the domestic policy and politics of this country.

Pretty much what Anne-Marie Brady (I’m pretty sure no right-wing Republican) has been saying here, although you will never hear such honesty from our politicians.

Previous administrations made this choice in the hope that freedom in China would expand in all of its forms -– not just economically, but politically, with a newfound respect for classical liberal principles, private property, personal liberty, religious freedom — the entire family of human rights. But that hope has gone unfulfilled.

Gabs Makhlouf claims to believe we have so much in common with the PRC.

Beijing is also using its power like never before. Chinese ships routinely patrol around the Senkaku Islands, which are administered by Japan. And while China’s leader stood in the Rose Garden at the White House in 2015 and said that his country had, and I quote, “no intention to militarize” the South China Sea, today, Beijing has deployed advanced anti-ship and anti-air missiles atop an archipelago of military bases constructed on artificial islands.

Blunt, but unquestionable.  And thus utterly unacceptable in New Zealand.

At the University of Maryland, a Chinese student recently spoke at her graduation of what she called, and I quote, the “fresh air of free speech” in America. The Communist Party’s official newspaper swiftly chastised her. She became the victim of a firestorm of criticism on China’s tightly-controlled social media, and her family back home was harassed. As for the university itself, its exchange program with China — one of the nation’s most extensive — suddenly turned from a flood to a trickle.

While in our universities, Confucius Institute advance PRC interests, and our multi-university Contemporary China Research Centre is chaired by someone who chairs a Confucius Institute, advises the PRC on Confucius Institute, and has a range of other interests that could be severely disadvantaged if the PRC were ever upset.

I don’t have any confidence in the Adminstration’s willingness to stick to anything, or in Trump’s temperament in handling a crisis.  But at least the US government is willing to call a spade a spade in this area.  Ours are determined to see never ill, say nothing ill, while their party leaders (sickeningly) praise the regime, and the party donations keep flowing in.

Sadly, there is a yawning vacuum where courageous and honest political leadership, standing for our system, our values, and (to the extent we can) for the rights and freedoms of people in China, might be.   As Stephen Franks put it, it is the elites we have to worry about.

And, in closing, I noticed this link this morning on Anne-Marie Brady’s Twitter account

The article it links is (or at least I found it so) a little difficult to make your way through, but it represents the efforts of some ethnic Chinese New Zealanders not content with successive New Zealand governments’ supine approach to the PRC.