Suchergebnisse

An article in this morning’s Post, reporting comments from Paul Conway, chief economist of the Reserve Bank, prompted me to go and listen to the Governor’s MPS press conference. I’d largely given up watching them. This was the most interesting bit of the article although it was followed with more comments trying to reframe what … Continue reading Underwhelming

After my post yesterday I had a few people get in touch, spanning the positions from what one might call extremely dovish to extremely hawkish. My key chart in that post was this one. Pretty much any way one looked at real interest rates they (a) had been rising, and (b) on the Bank’s forecasts … Continue reading Excess demand and the Reserve Bank

The Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Statement yesterday seems to have caught the market on the hop. Such things would be less likely if (a) we had a better MPC, and (b) they actually communicated (speeches and the like). A steady flow of supporting empirical research might help as well. But immediate market surprises aren’t really … Continue reading A puzzle

The Reserve Bank doesn’t do independent fiscal forecasts so there is no news in the fiscal numbers in today’s Monetary Policy Statement themselves. The last official Treasury forecasts don’t take account of whatever the government is planning in next week’s Budget, and as the Bank notes they will need to update their assessment in light … Continue reading Reading the MPS numbers thinking about the fiscal situation

This is really just a quick information post. The Reserve Bank's website has a complete set of Monetary Policy Statements from and including December 1996 onwards, but for some reason they have not put online the first few years of Monetary Policy Statements (which began being published, under the provisions of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand … Continue reading Some old documents (of no immediate interest)

I got curious yesterday about how the Australia/New Zealand real exchange rate had changed over the last decade, and so dug out the data on the changes in the two countries’ CPIs. Over the 10 years from March 2014 to March 2024, New Zealand’s CPI had risen by 30.3 per cent and Australia’s CPI had … Continue reading Two central banks

In my post last week on The Treasury’s recent note on productivity, I highlighted that the weak labour productivity growth evident in New Zealand over the last decade wasn’t something we’d shared with the OECD countries that were around our level of average productivity. This chart was from that post. But as I also noted, … Continue reading Productivity growth: 4 Anglos

When I wrote yesterday morning’s post, highlighting how poorly both New Zealand and its Anglo peer countries have been doing in respect of productivity in recent times (ie, in the case of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada even worse than usual), little did I know that the Prime Minister was about to announce a bold … Continue reading Words and (in)actions

Late last week The Treasury released a new 40 page report on “The productivity slowdown: implications for the Treasury’s forecasts and projections” (productivity forecasts and projections that is, rather than any possible fiscal implications – the latter will, I guess, be articulated in the Budget documents). In short, if (as it has) productivity growth has … Continue reading The Treasury and productivity

Thomas Coughlan has a column in the Herald this morning, under the heading “Nicola Willis is just the right amount of Tory”. To this centre-right voter it isn’t obvious Willis is (or sees herself) as any type of Tory, but what Coughlan seems to be suggesting is she is just right if the aim is … Continue reading Tougher than that

I was away last week so have been rather late in getting to the Budget Policy Statement and associated material released last Wednesday. It does not make for pleasant reading, at least if one cares at all about governments not borrowing to pay for the groceries. Once upon a time – still not that long … Continue reading Not very bothered by deficits

Almost all government agencies are in cost-cutting mode at present, under instructions from the incoming government. All sorts of things they, or the previous government, thought were nice to have and some things perhaps they thought were really rather useful indeed seem to be going by the wayside. But at the Reserve Bank they are … Continue reading A government agency planning more nice-to-haves

The Productivity Commission closes its doors on Thursday and goes out of existence. There have been a couple of recent articles on the demise of the Productivity Commission, and the chair (Ganesh Nana) has even put out his own statement (not exactly compelling) on productivity, and policy options for improving New Zealand’s dismal performance. There … Continue reading Goodbye to the Productivity Commission

I’ve used here before the snippet from older books that in the decades before the Second World War it was generally accepted that New Zealand had the highest value of foreign trade per capita of any country.  Estimates of historical GDP per capita suggest we also had among the very highest levels of real GDP … Continue reading Once were a trading nation

I’ve been rather tied up with other stuff for the last few weeks (including here) which is why I’ve not previously gotten round to writing about the first piece of monetary policy communications from our Reserve Bank this year.  That was the “speech” by the Bank’s chief economist (and MPC) member Paul Conway given to … Continue reading The Conway speech