Most central banks in advanced economies use published inflation targets to guide the day-to -day conduct of monetary policy. This article reviews the quite considerable differences in how various countries, which use quite similar operational targets, articulate what they expect from a central...

Monetary policy has an important, but limited, role to play in providing a reasonably stable backdrop for real economic activity. Against that standard, the flexible inflation targeting approach that has guided New Zealand’s monetary policy for over 20 years served the country relatively well...

This article reviews New Zealand’s approach to funding foreign currency reserves: a mix of holding foreign currency assets funded by outright purchases of foreign exchange, borrowing foreign currency long term to fund foreign currency assets, and swapping local currency assets for foreign...

New Zealand entered the Great Depression with very large public and private debts. The burden of those debts was greatly exacerbated by the unexpected size of the fall in real incomes and in the price level. In 1931 and 1932, the government passed legislation to ease pressure on private...

Speech to the Auckland Employers and Manufacturers Association, 6 August 2012 Alan Bollard and Michael Reddell

Household spending is typically the largest component of economy activity. This article sets ot some ways of thinking about what shapes household consumption decisions and looks at New Zealand’s experience over the last decade or so – a period marked by rapid growth in asset prices and debt,...

The recent global recession and international financial crisis have sparked fresh interest in financial data. Traditionally, data on the balance sheets of financial intermediaries has been collected fairly comprehensively, but data on debt securities markets has been considerably more patchy....

The first issue of the Reserve Bank Bulletin of 2011 contains articles and documents all loosely linked to the sorts of economic and financial challenges that New Zealand has faced in the last few years, brought into sharp relief by the global recession and the international financial crisis.