Every other Central Bank in the world stated it wanted to achieve "a soft landing". And they succeeded. In nearly every other country, aside from ours, inflation has come down, although without the ongoing stagnation that has ripped the guts out of NZ. Where's the proof? Look at the graph below. It compares NZ's Official Cash Rate with Australia's. Unlike the Reserve Bank of Australia, the RBNZ hiked rates far higher as it panicked about inflation, and is now panicking & cutting rates lower than Australia due to NZ's stagnation. Although the RBNZ Governor suckered the Main Stream Media, our MPs, the RBNZ Board (which doesn't have clue about monetary policy since Labour stocked it full of its mates) and now his huge Comms / PR / marketing team is trying to sucker the Kiwi public, the graph below tells a thousand words. Australia had no recession these past years. NZ had three. Australia didn't panic when inflation was rising, and didn't panic again as inflation fell. Central Banks are meant to smooth the business cycle, not exacerbate it.
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.
1 comment:
I thought that I was the only one to notice the lack of statistics qualifications within the Executive within Stats NZ. Many years ago I worked as a Ph.D-trained statistician at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (now MPI), working on agricultural production, forestry and land use. Two complete clowns joined me and a team of about eight others as our manager and team leader.
They were both about half our age and knew nothing about either statistics or agriculture. Their treatment of staff was quite horrendous, delivering unceasing threats of firing staff, physical intimidation, deliberately inserting errors and typos in one person's reports before making those reports public (my reports, to be honest!) and even an act of physical violence that could not be proved because it occurred during off-site during a recess session. I saw that particular act myself, perpetrated by my so-called manager!
Guess what? Those two clowns went off to Stats NZ as highly-paid managers, where I would hear of further bullying from both of them. That young woman then rose to an Acting Deputy Chief Executive role, ahead of genuine experienced statisticians and official statistics methodology experts.
Sorry - but too many like them at the top tables within the public sector! Now read the following article on the 2018 Census:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/political-roundup-the-absolute-debacle-of-the-2018-census/2ERWBW5ZOWR45OFM3Z56L4WMX4/
Today Stats NZ appears to have fallen short of expectations in the protection of Census information. Would these debacles have occurred if Stats NZ had placed a few more experts at the top tables and within middle management?
David Lillis
Post a Comment