Robert MacCulloch
Robert MacCulloch is a native of New Zealand and worked at the Reserve Bank of NZ before he travelled to the UK to complete a PhD in Economics at Oxford University.
What have we got to know about Reserve Bank of NZ Governor Adrian Orr over the years? He can’t take advice from, nor hire, folks more knowledgeable about economics than himself, is hot-headed and desperate to be the big man in the news.
Orr said he wanted to “engineer a recession” to stop the inflation he created. Instead he engineered three (Stats NZ data is now as unreliable as the Census – because the Chief Statistician/CEO there hasn’t had a statistics qualification for over a decade). But there was never a need. Every other central bank in the world stated it wanted to achieve ‘a soft landing’. And they succeeded.
In nearly every other nation, aside from ours, inflation has come down, though without the ongoing stagnation that has ripped the guts out of NZ. Where’s 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 more as it panicked about inflation, and is now panicking about causing stagnation, so is cutting rates lower than Australia. How has the RBNZ governor covered his tracks?
He has suckered our country’s mainstream media (easy to do), suckered MPs, and suckered the RBNZ board (easy to do, since it doesn’t have a clue about monetary policy, due to being stacked full of mates of politicians) by blaming foreign factors.
Now his huge comms/PR/marketing team is trying to sucker the Kiwi public. But the graph below is better than a thousand words. Australia has had no recession. NZ has had three. Australia didn’t panic when inflation rose – and it didn’t panic as inflation fell. Central banks are meant to smooth business cycles, not exacerbate them.
This article was originally published by Down to Earth Kiwi.
