NZIER had their annual NZIER Economics Award earlier in the week – or as we often call it NZ Economist of the Year. The winner for 2019 was John McDermott, current Executive Director and Motu and former Chief Economist of the RBNZ. John was an excellent choice for this award. He has contributed significantly to NZ and […]
As part of my job as a researcher I like to read about different topics – I have done work on health economics, labor economics, and more recently firm recruiting with the use of reverse phone lookups to hire the best employees. One topic that comes up across all these fields is the idea of […]
I’ve heard the arguments that secular stagnation refers to a situation with low long-term interest rates – reaching the zero lower bound on nominal rate often – low inflation and low output growth. But what does this really mean?
It took me a while to convince myself to write about “neo-fisherism” as a solution to low trend inflation. The motivation behind neo-fisherism is relatively intuitive – we have observed nominal interest rates and inflation move together, and require an explanation that supports that stylised fact. Furthermore, the idea behind neo-fisherism is that there is […]
In my previous posts on the liquidity trap and about US Treasury bond purchases I have mentioned that central banks and governments should coordinate their policies as a part of unconventional monetary policy when the interest rates are near the zero lower bound and inflation is persistently low. However, there are costs and benefits associated […]
Over 2019, interest rates for a variety of fixed terms have been declining – a topic that is likely to be front and centre at Jackson Hole over the coming days. The weird behaviour of interest rates is something that is causing some big name economists to rethink monetary policy – such as Larry Summers […]