Alan Bollard has now pretty much finished his role as governor of the RBNZ following today’s MPS. He, and the RBNZ, did a great job of helping to steady the NZ economy during the global financial crisis – I think there are few other people in the world who would have felt that sort of […]
From Twitter, and email adverts, I’ve heard the Steve Keen is or was in town discussing economics. That’s good, everyone should be discussing economics. As you may have noted earlier both Anti-Dismal and myself have had issues with Keen’s analysis in the past – his criticism of microeconomics is just patently wrong. However, I intend […]
With the RBNZ asking for comments on the upcoming countercyclical capital adequacy regulation, and the RBA/APRA releasing a report on macroprudential policy now is a good time to ask – why? I have seen many people justify these types of policies based on “debt being high” – but this doesn’t answer “why”. I’ve heard a […]
Goldman Sachs has raised an interesting issue regarding the future of financial intermediation following the crisis: New bank regulations and capital requirements are “structural” changes to the industry that are more to blame for declining profits than the U.S. economic slump, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) analysts said. Remember, we have had the failure of […]
Recently the Labour party has suggested we have free food in low decile New Zealand schools. At the same time, Kiwiblog suggested that this was nonsensical. So how do we should we view this policy? Generally, having the government buy something and give then give it out is relatively inefficient – we get no clear […]
Recently I was sitting at my computer looking at Twitter, when the following popped up in my feed: NZIER calls for changes to the RBNZ’s Policy Targets Agreement to combat the overvalued NZ dollar – http://bit.ly/Q6aOWX I found this surprising, as earlier in the day I had read a piece on the NZIER site that […]