Protecting your economy from vulnerabilities is like protecting you computer. The more you reduce how vulnerable your computer is, the worse your computer’s performance is. In the same way, the more we introduce policies to try and reduce New Zealand’s vulnerability to shocks, the more we lower the average performance of the New Zealand economy […]
According to this piece on Rates Blog, in a recent presentation Dr Geoff Bertram discussed the inflation targeting framework, and the idea of the NZ$ being overvalued. Back in the day I had him as a lecturer, he is an extremely smart man and he brings up a number of important points. However, I have […]
“Wages not keeping up with inflation” that is the headline we get here. While I’m sure that will get a lot of people wound up and complaining about something, its a load of cr*p. Actually looking through the numbers, we see that gross wage growth is roughly inline with the growth in consumer prices excluding […]
Does the US have a marginally functional government? We already know they don’t have a fully functional government, or a reasonably functional government. But we are waiting to see if the government really exists at all, and is able to muster itself together enough to avoid accidentally defaulting on debt and starting a new financial […]
So because the dollar has eased back following the OCR people have decided that the statement was dovish (ahh the Herald did this too). Fact, no it wasn’t – it was a more hawkish than expected statement. Probabilities of rate increases did rise following the statement. Remember something here, the link between the exchange rate […]
The daily post for today has been delay to next week – as this issue needs to be covered now. That’s what the RBNZ is likely hearing when columns like this appear. This one is from Bernard Hickey, where he bemoans the Bank’s decision to signal an increase in interest rates (which will increase long […]