Mike's Minute: The unanswered questions around the Reserve Bank's funding

Some questions for you around the Reserve Bank and their funding. 

Firstly, the Finance Minister is to be congratulated on her handling of the fiscal matters in reducing the expenditure by 25% – this is a DOGE like achievement. 

In fact, if you have been following DOGE, what they said they would do and what they have done is like a lot of the Trump output so far, mainly hot air. So in fact, Willis leaves them somewhat in her dust. 

Then came the revelation from the cabinet papers that a lot of the extra money the Reserve Bank had got hadn't been spent... this is possibly referred to as waste and was a good insight into how Adrian and Grant ran the place. 

But despite the fact it hadn't been spent, all of a sudden just before Nicola came along, it did get spent. Budgets in areas like people and tech info and data were spending like drunks. 

So clearly Willis has seen their scam, called their bluff, and got her way. Good on her. 

But the bigger question is this, with all that money, tens of millions a year, were they any good, and did that money buy good results? 

Were good people doing good work? 

Well history shows us obviously the answer is no. 

Our Covid response is now widely seen as inept. Our three recessions, the outworking of a complete and utter cock up when it came to handling a financial crisis. 

We have smaller issues still at play like the reserves for commercial banks, an out working of the OCR paranoia. 

For all that money we seem to have employed a Central Bank that did worse than most, to this day Treasury —and this might be on Treasury not the Reserve Bank— cannot work out the value of all that money flooding into the economy. What did it do? What was its value? 

If they can't work it out, did the Reserve Bank know going in or were they panicked and flying blind? 

Why did they give that free money to the banks with no restrictions on what happened to it next? There remain the unanswered questions years later, the out workings of which we economically are still paying for. 

So the 25% cut is one story, the other is what we got for our investment. How would you describe a return that bad? 

And given it went to the inept, is 25% enough? 

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