Croaking Cassandra
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Economics, public policy, monetary policy, financial regulation, with a New Zealand perspective.
Croaking Cassandra
1w ago
The Prime Minister’s speech 10 days or so ago kicked off a flurry of commentary. No one much anywhere near the mainstream (ie excluding Greens supporters) questioned the rhetoric. New Zealand has done woefully poorly on productivity for a long time and we really need better outcomes, and the sorts of policy frameworks that would ..read more
Croaking Cassandra
1w ago
I’ve spent the last week writing a fairly substantial review of a recent book (“Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we crushed the curve but lost the race”) by a couple of Australian academic economists on Australia’s pandemic policies and experiences. For all its limitations, there isn’t anything similar in New Zealand. What we do have is ..read more
Croaking Cassandra
2w ago
The CPI will be out later this morning and I’m sure all eyes will be on that. But the Prime Minister’s reshuffle on Sunday prompted thoughts about inflation of another sort – the number of ministerial portfolios/titles in our executive government. When the reshuffle comes into effect on Friday there will (still) be 30 members ..read more
Croaking Cassandra
1M ago
Okay, so the weather in Wellington is even less conducive to either being at the beach or in the garden than it was on Friday. Tomorrow it will be 2025. Once upon a time there was a government that adopted a goal of catching up economically with Australia by 2025. I don’t suppose the Prime ..read more
Croaking Cassandra
1M ago
I wasn’t envisaging writing anything more for a while, but….Welllington’s weather certainly isn’t conducive to either the beach or the garden, and the Herald managed to get an interview with Iain Rennie, the new Secretary to the Treasury (not usually the sort of stuff for 27 December either). I’ve always been rather uneasy about heads ..read more
Croaking Cassandra
1M ago
I was away in Papua New Guinea last week when the HYEFU came out, and have only just gotten round to looking at the numbers. Quite possibly, what is in this post will be repeating ground others have covered, and if so the post will end up being mostly for my records (good to be ..read more
Croaking Cassandra
2M ago
My post this morning was based on Adrian Orr’s Q&A interview as found on TVNZ+. However, it turns out that that wasn’t the full interview which (thanks to the kind people at Q&A for pointing me to it) is now available on Q&A’s Youtube account here. The full interview is almost half an hour, and ..read more
Croaking Cassandra
2M ago
The Reserve Bank Governor has given an interview to TVNZ’s Katie Bradford, apparently done under the aegis of the Q&A show but too late in the year to actually be broadcast on Q&A itself or to be done by Jack Tame, Q&A’s regular and most demanding interviewer. There is a TVNZ article reporting the interview ..read more
Croaking Cassandra
2M ago
Back in early October I wrote a post “Public policy just keeps on worsening”, on the then newly-announced Residential Development Underwrite scheme, under which the government will provide free downside price/liquidity insurance to big residential property developers, for a period that was said not to be forever but with no specific time limit, and instead ..read more
Croaking Cassandra
2M ago
This post was prompted by watching the Prime Minister’s interview on Q&A yesterday (where I don’t think either the interviewer or the PM did particularly well). My interests here are only in the first (economic) half of the interview. Minor things first. You had to wonder about the staff work when the PM professed to ..read more