Mr Bean - oops, RBNZ Governor Orr - is in Washington - lecturing on how to conduct monetary policy.

Labour's former Ministers and appointees are on a roll. Grant Robertson has returned to Otago University, where he spent much of his student days playing politics at the Union, but is now the Boss. Meanwhile Ms. Ardern is lecturing the world how to do pandemics. Harvard University characterizes her as follows, "She drew widespread praise [in NZ] for her leadership style .. she faced some protests against her vaccine policy during the COVID pandemic, but earned broad support for strict lockdown & public health policies". Its a good (brand) line, ".. some protests". These days, Harvard won't let a good "narrative" get in the way of truth. The Occupation of Parliament Grounds - never happened.

Now its RBNZ Governor Orr's turn. He's given a lecture in Washington this week on how to do monetary policy during pandemics. Mr Orr pulled off an amazing feat. How do we know? He told us so - saying “we're now in a situation where we can provide the perspective of an economy returning to low & stable inflation, interest rates becoming less restrictive, and economic activity being revitalized. But that is just the most recent navigational plot on the ocean chart". In Orr's Central Bank Fiefdom where he sits as King Frog, his preferred male comparison is Demi God Maui. Its just no-one in NZ knows our "economic activity is being revitalized" - we're one of the worst performing economies in the world, according to the IMF (which he's visiting). Our GDP is stagnant; GDP per capita is falling. As for interest rates, they're still high. As for how the RBNZ navigates oceans, this is what Orr told Bloomberg in 2021, before inflation took off in 2022, 2023 and 2024, as reported on DownToEath.Kiwi:

"Inflation is a very different beast today than it was in the 1970s, giving central banks the confidence to look through a short-term spike in prices .. The fear of the 70s, the 80s, stagflation, it is such a different world . There is a single global price for so many of the raw materials, the intermediate inputs and the final consumer goods. We google that, we are prepared to wait .. Central banks today are therefore prepared to wait longer because they're more confident that we have stable inflation expectations, we have a much more flexible set of pricing, we have less of that generalized inflation.

In 2021, according to Governor Orr, there would only be a short term "spike in prices" - no high "generalized inflation" after the pandemic. And though unemployment is surging in NZ, he assured us no such occurrence should be feared, since "Its a different world now". Stagflation no longer exists, apparently. Good luck to Mr. Orr with his lectures at the IMF .. and to Ardern with her lectures about how she unites, not divides .. and to Robertson as he does on-the-job-training as to how to be a VC. And good luck to Hipkins as he plots his political come-back by erasing memories.

Sources:

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/announcements/jacinda-ardern-appointed-hks-fellowship

A Two Minute Covid Enquiry

Lets do a Covid Inquiry in two minutes, unlike the NZ government, which is onto its second, after years of time. In 2020, before vaccines had been invented, NZ, whether by good luck - being geographically remote - or good management - being the "elimination strategy" - we will never know for sure which one - managed to largely keep the virus out. We recorded one of the world's lowest death rates that year. No country had vaccinated its citizens by the end of 2020, since no vaccines were available at that time. Former PM Ardern was lauded as a savior, winning a landslide election. Afterward, NZ's Covid response went pear-shaped. Once vaccines became available, NZ became one of the slowest OECD countries to roll them out, being bottom for many months. Here's the picture summarizing NZ's 2021 failure:

By June 2021, the above graph shows that whereas nearly 50% of Americans & Europeans had been vaccinated, barely 10% of Kiwis had been. Faced with their failure to protect 90% of the population, former PM Ardern, Covid Minister Hipkins & Health Director Bloomfield freaked out. Their one-trick-pony tool was lock-downs & severe restrictions on civil liberties. Maybe it had worked in 2020, but there was nothing clever about that strategy in 2021 - it was a desperate attempt to undo the mistake of the late vaccine order. This Blog takes satisfaction in publicly disseminating that mistake, as we were one of the first, if not the first, to explain the reasons behind the late order and make a deal of it. DownToEarth.Kiwi is particularly grateful to Sir John Key for quoting from our Blog when he made his 2021 Hermit Kingdom speech that turned opinion against Ardern-Hipkins, ultimately leading to the fall of their government. Back then, Hipkins "slammed former PM Sir John Key’s ideas to transform the country’s pandemic strategy as an insult to New Zealanders". Shortly after, Hipkins himself was forced by events to transform that strategy and reverse course.

There isn't much more to say. As for the future, there's little value in the latest NZ Medical Journal Editorial by Mr Ashley Bloomfield arguing for even more stringent government force, in terms of full mobilization of the security services, for "the next pandemic". The lesson we learnt from Covid was that you can only play the lock-down trick for little over a year. Thereafter, patience wears thin. In the meantime, one must either develop a vaccine oneself, or have entered agreements to purchase them from abroad. The emphasis must be on a light speed roll-out, not snail's pace, which was the Ardern-Hipkins legacy. Bloomfield & colleagues should have learnt the lesson that without effective vaccines, a command-and-control strategy, which he's still promoting, but at more stringent levels, whilst maybe useful for brief periods of time, cannot be regarded as a long-term winning strategy. Should no vaccine become available when "the next pandemic" hits, as he describes it, indefinite lock downs enforced by the Army and Security Services will only lead to civil unrest & conflict. We learnt as much. Shame none of those observations will ever be part of "official" Covid enquiries, at least Labour Party initiated ones.