Mike's Minute: Who from the Reserve Bank will be held accountable?

Was this the final nail in the Adrian Orr coffin? 

Can we add Christian Hawkesby and the entire monetary policy committee? After all, it's easy to blame a governor, but it’s a committee that votes on what to do with the cash rate. 

After the famed Q2 finished (remember April, May and June), we come to the next committee decision in July. Orr is gone, Hawkesby is up, and they have just witnessed the previous three months. 

And what do they do? Nothing. No change. They held. 

Why? Because they felt things were in hand. 

They also said the economy would contract 0.3%. 

Yesterday came the proof that it's hard, when you are actually paid as a so-called expert, to get it more wrong than they did. 

We all felt it and knew it. Most of us wouldn't have been able to put a number round it like the banks have to, but most of us don’t have the data they have access to. 

But what we all knew was it was bad, it was tight, it was ugly, and it wasn’t going in the right direction. 

But the gap between -0.3% and -0.9% is inexcusable. 

The same way it is inexcusable to stand there in July and tell us more stimulus wasn’t needed. 

At some point someone has to be held to account. Yes, Orr is gone, but only because he packed a sad. Yes, Quigley is gone, but only because he got found out. 

No one has actually been held to account for a spectacular failure to do the job. Why are the Monetary Policy Committee members still in work? How many of them are there because of their so-called "expertise" versus being appointed for the so-called “right” reasons? 

Results count. Facts matter. 

And here is the issue for the Government: as the poll showed us this week, a lot of New Zealanders blame the Government for the economy. 

They have been let down in no small part by the Reserve Bank and when the Prime Minister the other week on this show fired off a bit of advice, all the pointy heads wrote op-eds whining about independence. 

Independence is fine. But not if you're useless. 

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