Prebble is right to resign from Waitangi Tribunal. Wellington, including the likes of the NZ Treasury & Reserve Bank, has become a waste of time for us all.

Its good to see that Richard Prebble has resigned from the Waitangi Tribunal. I never go to Wellington anymore - those visits stopped when it clicked with me that useless managers were asking me to do their work for them for free. After my visits, they plagiarized my work & presented it to higher up bosses - or Ministers - as their own. It was actually very dishonest of them. So, coincidentally to Prebble's resignation, this is how I just replied today to "an invitation" sent by a Big Boss Treasury Adviser. The "adviser" wants advice (its Wellington, so advisers can't give advice of their own). The adviser has tried to cover their tracks well by saying at the bottom of the invitation that "The information in this email is confidential" and that a series of meetings will be held under Chatham House Rules. So I wont say anything about what the mail is about, other than to comment that either one signs an enforceable confidentiality agreement, or one does not. The issues discussed at this particular set of meetings by their nature relate to market sensitive information. On second thoughts, maybe I should attend & get rich trading on what I find out? Chatham House Rules mean nothing. Maybe someone should tell the Treasury. So here is my reply. It is not at all confidential:

From: Robert MacCulloch

Sent: Tuesday, 18 February 2025.

To: [Big Treasury Boss Adviser]

Subject: Invitation [purpose is deleted]

"Dear [Big Treasury Boss]

Its not my job to do free consulting for the NZ Treasury - obviously you don't have the in-house talent to do these jobs yourself and you don't want to hire expensive consultants either. Sadly, you cannot ask the new Secretary of the Treasury, Iain Rennie, to [work out the solution to these matters] himself, because he also lacks the expertise. My advice is to fire 90% of your managers and hire someone who actually knows what they are doing.

Yours

Robert

Whether its Richard Prebble's Waitangi Tribunal, or a whole bunch of other Wellington formerly prestigious institutions, its best to have nothing to do with the place anymore.

Predicting Interest Rates in NZ: the RBNZ's Great Mad Cap Interest Rate Reversal, from "Engineering a Recession" to "Engineering a Boom".

Over the past six months, interest rates in Australia have barely changed. Their Official Cash Rate was 4.5% back then and is now 4.25%. Not so in NZ. Our OCR has swung from 5.5% to 3.75%, plummeting nearly 2 percentage points. How come? Well, just over six months ago, the Reserve Bank of NZ was doing "Shock and Orr". It was desperately trying to "engineer a recession" to quell the run-away inflation that was caused by its run-away printing money program (known as Quantitative Easing). Six months later, NZ languishes as one of the world's worst performing economies, coming in at 181st out of 190 countries (in terms of the IMF's Economic Growth numbers). So now the RBNZ has a new genius strategy: "engineer a boom". The proof is in the yield curve below. It shows one of the wildest swings of any country I've looked at. Six months ago our short-term rates were way above our long rates - now the situation is reversed. The graph shows how NZ has gone from panic tightening to panic loosening. Yes, the Kiwi economy is characterized by a close to zero sloped trend-line rate of economic growth, but with wild Reserve Bank induced "booms and busts" around that near-zero-productivity-increasing trend - the worst way to run a nation. National's response was to renew the contract of Waikato University Vice Chancellor, Neil Quigley, last year, the well-connected man who has presided over this fiasco as Chairman of the Reserve Bank of NZ. Good one, National.

The New Zealand Yield Curve