Afternoon roundup

The afternoon's worthies

• Covid tests considered reliable enough to let you board a flight to New Zealand aren't considered reliable enough to be allowed to be imported into the country. We truly are run by Vogons. 


• Glad to hear that Michael Reddell is feeling better. On 7 March he posted that his household had caught Covid but all was well. On 29 March he posted that he'd been unable to maintain concentration for any sustained period: "Reading one 8 page memo bright and early yesterday morning completely did me in for the day." 28 April, he notes things are improving. I'm very glad that things are improving.  


• Parliament is scrambling to put some kind of enforcement regime around its stupid road user charge holiday. I feel bad for NZTA here. I expect they were blindsided on this one, that they told government that all of this was stupid, and they're stuck having to administer it. But I'll have to wait for the OIA results to find out. 


• David Dodge, former Bank of Canada Governor, argues for very large and rapid interest rate hikes. Stimulatory monetary policy in an overheated economy is a bad idea. Meanwhile, Adrian Orr assures us RBNZ has everything in hand and thinks his interest rate increases thus far are courageous. I miss the old Tui Billboard "Yeah, Right" campaigns.


• Darian Woods sings about GDP on this Planet Money episode. Very suitable for NCEA classroom use. Darian was in the same superstar cohort with James Graham (now teaching at Sydney) and Nick Sander (Bank of Canada). Good times. Here's an old RNZ piece on his album with Lucy Botting. 


• Russians supporting the current thing


• The Auditor General's worried about Covid spend. Treasury hasn't seemed really able to keep on top of this spend. And Treasury noted that it only likes the government's new debt ceiling if there's a focus on value-for-money in spending. So we have a new public finance regime that requires more vigilance from Treasury, an not a lot of reason to believe that Treasury is up to the bigger task. 
• Next time we're out near Dunedin, we'll definitely be checking this out for the kids: a 12 year old down there is running her own business, doing horse riding experiences for other kids. 


• A private backer was ready to sponsor Moana Pasifika - but the NZ government prefers to crowd out private investment. 


• Divorce rates are down, but largely on the back of marriage now largely being only chosen by those with strong preferences around being married. 51% of babies born in 2021 had married parents. Yikes.


• The convoluted ownership structures for the proposed amalgamated water entities might not even achieve balance sheet separation.  


• Hard to tell if this is the normal RMA stupidity, or bureaucrats sticking it to Peter Thiel just because. Either way it ain't great. 


• Monetary policy in pandemics. "If the activist policy was appropriate, by year end 2022, inflation will be on the way back down to 2 percent with an unemployment rate remaining near 4 percent. If the nonactivist policy would have been better, inflation would remain near double digits and would recede only with a recession."