Matt Nolan

RBNZ introduces some liquidity

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The RBNZ has made it easier for banks to borrow money off them, in order to stave off a squeeze in credit in the banking sector. This sounds fine to me, and the measures they put in place seem reasonable, there was one thing I did not understand though. It says that the bank is selling more short-term bonds, wouldn’t this contract the money supply and reduce liquidity?

Maybe the reporter put it down wrong, but making it easier for banks to borrow money, and then providing them riskless assets to buy with it doesn’t sound like a way of increasing liquidity in the New Zealand credit market. Hopefully the RBNZ does a release soon, and explains to me how I’m an idiot, or if you’re quick maybe you can beat them to it 😉

Matt Nolan

Outgrowing the inflation problem

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In this article, Rod Oram discusses the two options he sees for battling inflation:

  1. Raise interest rates to slow growth, thereby reducing the pressure on our limited resources.
  2. Increase the resource base

Both of these ‘strategies’ would reduce inflationary pressure. One would reduce aggregate demand; the other would increase aggregate supply.

The first strategy is what NZ is doing (and most countries try to do when inflation comes out of the bag). The second ‘strategy’ would be preferable, as it would increase the number of goods we can buy as a nation. However, Rod didn’t tell us how we are supposed to increase our resource base. According to him we can ‘grow it’, so as the economy is growing the resource base will magically grow as well.

I don’t agree with this idea, but I’m going to try and rationalize what he is saying, and then say why I think it won’t work. Many people have been saying that if we had lower interest rates, investment would be greater, which is an increase in our resource base. As a result, this may be his solution, lower interest rates increase investment, which increases aggregate supply. The problem is, if we kept interest rates at a lower level, we are implicitly allowing a greater level of money supply growth into the economy, which will in turn cause upward pressure on inflation. Which effect dominates depends on the productivity of new capital investment, as if new capital is very productive then the increase in resources requires an increase in the money supply for prices to remain constant.

New Zealand currently has relatively low capital productivity (capital productivity has only risen 1.2% in the last 10 years), and at the margin, this level of productivity will be even lower. This implies that any increase in the supply of resources from a lower interest rate will be very small, and as a result inflationary pressures will be strong.

Furthermore, when a firm makes a long-run investment decision what matters is the long run (risk adjusted) cost and benefit of that investment. In this case the short-term interest rate is not of importance, it is the long-run rate of interest that matters (as interest rate changes can be insured against). Uncertainty for the firms investment decision comes from issues of price, if the level of inflation is high there will be significant volatility between the price of goods (as prices would change at different discrete time periods) making the return on the investment more volatile than in a low inflation environment. As firms are risk averse, higher inflation will lead to lower long run investment – implying that trying to grow our way out of inflation will not work.

Matt Nolan

New Zealand Currency in Free Fall

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So the NZ currency is currently at $0.705US, implying that it has fallen $0.105US in two weeks. What the hell is going on?

As far as I can tell, investors in the US are nervous about some perceived economic contagion from the troubles in the sub-prime mortgage market. As a result of this economic uncertainty in the US, everyone has become significantly more risk averse in their investment behaviour, and in currency markets a ‘flight to quality’ has begun. The quality in this case is US dollars and the Yen.

So the economic situation in the US looks weak, and their dollar has appreciated against ours, messed up aye. Still, for that very reason I don’t think that this is sustainable. The fundamentals that drove our currency to $0.81US still remain in place, robust economic growth, strong world growth, awesome soft commodity prices, and comparatively high interest rates. I’m certain we will hit $0.76US again in the near future, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit $0.78US before September. $0.81US was a bit ridiculous, but I think we have fallen a bit past fair value.

Update: Now we are slipping under $0.69US, this reminds me of a famous Keynes quote “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”. Damn those animal spirits.

Matt Nolan

Floating GST rates?

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So supposedly, the RBNZ has suggested a floating GST rate as a way of controlling inflation. Now this seems silly too me for two reasons:

1) GST is a tax, as a result this would either have to be implemented through fiscal policy (and so would not work, as governments cannot commit to just focusing on inflation), or you would have to give the Bank the right to tax (as the Bank is not elected by the people this is uncomfortable)

2) The level of GST affects the price level, so if the economy is running strongly and you prop it up, you push up the price level.

Now the first criticism is self-evident, however it is a normative problem with the scheme, implying that there might be some theoretical merit. The second criticism is positive. Now, I am not saying that changing the GST tax will cause inflation, as inflation is the rate of change in the price level. Changing the GST tax will change the price level, but not change the rate at which the price level grows, in fact increasing GST will take money out of the economy, slowing growth in the price level and thereby slowing inflation.

So a floating GST tax would slow inflation, however lets think about why we want to slow inflation. We want to reduce volatility in the price level, to give people certainty. Volatility in the price level is bad as the majority of people cannot properly hedge against it. Now by having the GST tax increase and fall we are adding volatility to the price level, causing one of the problems that monetary policy is supposed to solve. It just seems a bit silly.

Matt Nolan

Immigration and inflation

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I have just been flicking through the NZX submission on monetary policy, thanks to a link kindly provided by Lucy.

While I disagree with most of the submission (for the reasons I gave yesterday about higher interest rates being structural), I was happy to see that they discussed immigration.

Now immigration is an interesting issue, ignoring any social issues (i’m an economists after all), I’m going to focus on the link between immigration and inflation. According to Rebus legal perth lawyers, one of the main reason why the overall economy could have a massive downfall and the country could go into the state of depression is due to lack of immigrants. A recent study showed that most of the top CEOs of the county are not the originals of the land but are the descendants of on immigrants who came to the country and got it to a great position where it now stands on.

Some people say immigration causes inflation, as it increases the demand for goods and services, driving up the price. Other people say that immigration drives down inflation by increasing labour supply, and thereby driving down real wage demands, preventing wage inflation.

Now the way I see it is that immigration increases demand and supply. After all labour is an input to production, but once labour has been paid they turn into consumers, who purchase the goods. As a result, whether inflation rises or falls with immigration depends on the productivity of the immigrants. If we bring in a whole lot of untrained, unproductive workers it will cause inflation. If we bring in workers that have the highest marginal product (so in the places where firms are begging for labour) then it should decrease inflationary pressures.

It seems incredibly simple, the difficult issue is actually identifying and bringing in skilled, hard working labour. However, i’m not sure that cutting immigrant numbers when we have shortages of unskilled and skilled labour is a good idea. I’m sorry RBNZ, but I think the NZX is right on this one.

Matt Nolan

RBNZ, NZX and equity markets

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The NZX wants the RBNZ to pay more attention to the way the equity market behaves when the bank change the official cash rate.

Now I can’t find a copy of the submission anywhere, but the above stuff article at least tells us that the NZX would like policy goals to be focused on long term economic growth. Now I think the ultimate goal of the RBNZ is long term economic growth, however the Bank believes that the way to do it is to provide an environment with a high degree of price stability.

The NZX counter-argument is that the narrow focus of RBNZ policy leads to higher equilibrium interest rates, which increases the cost of capital for firms, retarding long run economic growth.

Now I have some sympathy with the idea that our equilibrium interest rate is too high, however I think we have to figure out why interest rates seem to be, on average, higher in NZ than in the rest of the developed world. The RBNZ acknowledges the fact that New Zealand seems to have higher equilibrium interest rates than other develop nations, but they see this as a result of New Zealand’s poor net investment position. As it is the result the Bank doesn’t see monetary policy as the problem, the problem is structural.

The question I have to ask then is, why is our net investment position so bad (current account deficits damn it) and how do we get out of it?

P.S. If anyone knows where I can find copies of the submissions to Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee, please tell me in the comment section. I can only seem to find the Reserve Bank one.