croaking cassandra

(No, two posts in two weeks does not foreshadow any sort of return to regular blogging – tempting as it has occasionally been at least for the pre-election period – but having written copious amounts on the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy, associated gover…

Yesterday the Prime Minister and leader of the National Party made some rather preposterous claims in his post-Cabinet press conference (as reported here by The Post) When you read stuff like this from the head of the government perhaps one comes to better

A month or so ago the Reserve Bank announced the appointment of a new Assistant Governor (a deputy chief executive) responsible for its financial stability functions.

Various media last weekend (I think this was the first) latched onto a chart in the OECD’s latest Employment Outlook publication which appeared to show that over the last five years New Zealand real wages had not only fallen sharply (down 6.4 per cent) but

No, this is nothing to do with (say) Neil Quigley’s months-long spin and obfuscation from last year (eg here or here).

I didn’t have too much problem with either the Reserve Bank Governor’s speech a couple of weeks ago on a framework for how monetary policy might deal with the oil shock, or with this week’s OCR review release from the Monetary Policy Committee.

When I stopped regular blogging in December I wrote This is one of those issues that has really got my goat.

About 15 years ago (partly thanks to a couple of years at Treasury, partly to the financial crises in the US and Europe) I started to get much more systematically interested in New Zealand’s disappointing and underwhelming economic performance, and in eco…

Back in the far flung days – well, really only just more than two years ago – the National Party went to the election with a fiscal plan under which the government’s operating deficit would have been more or less closed by now.

That was, more or less, the title of two events I attended at the University of Auckland last Thursday.

In a post last week I included this chart of the latest annual OECD data on labour productivity, expressed in PPP terms.

Over the life of this blog there have been a few charts I’ve kept coming back to.