Michael Reddell: A Letter

After the Reserve Bank’s appearance on 20 February at the Finance and Expenditure Committee (the Governor, his macro deputy Karen Silk, and his chief economist Paul Conway) on the previous day’s Monetary Policy Statement, I wrote a post here about it, focused on a number of areas in which Orr, either actively abetted or silently accompanied by his senior colleagues, had been stringing along or actively misleading (or worse) the Commitee. The post was headed Orr at it again, a reminder that there had been all too many such cases from the Governor over recent years – mostly misleading FEC (a rather serious matter) but also not infrequently any media outlets that ever posed slightly awkward questions. It is a long list and I won’t bore you with details (you can search: Google and “croaking cassandra, Orr, misleading” appears to work well).

Michael Reddell: Central bank policy communications

For a long time I’ve been a strong supporter of central bank transparency about stuff a central bank actually knows something about, but a sceptic of the faux transparency of publishing stuff a central bank really knows very little about. In the former category, one might think of the background papers going to the MPC (by aiming deliberately low I once got them out of the Bank for a forecast round 10 years previously, but good luck if you asked now for the papers around the 2020 and 2021 decision-making, let alone those from six months ago).

Michael Reddell: Bits and pieces

As the executive members of the Reserve Bank’s MPC have fanned out in an attempt to put a favourable gloss on what everyone else recognises as a really sharp change of view between May and July/August (call it a U-turn or a flip-flop, or just a change a view sharper in a short space of time than ever seen from the Reserve Bank absent an exogenous external shock) there have been various rather dubious attempts to rewrite history.