Economists Carl Hansen and Prasanna Gai have been appointed to the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee.
Carl Hansen is the executive director of Capital Strategic Advisors, which provides policy advice to government and private sector clients.
Professor Gai is a professor of macroeconomics at the University of Auckland where he oversees economics, accounting, finance and property.
These appointments replace labor economist Peter Harris and agricultural economist Caroline Saunders when their terms end in March and June, respectively.
This means Hansen will take part in the April policy review beginning next week, the results of which will be announced on Wednesday the 10th.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced the appointments on Thursday afternoon.
She said Hansen and Gai were both highly-qualified and have been appointed on the recommendation of the Reserve Bank’s board.
They were chosen for their professional knowledge, skills and experience, including in the areas of economics and monetary policy.
Reserve Bank board chairman Neil Quigley said both candidates had worked at central banks during their careers and were highly qualified for the role.
“Their respective business experience at a high level and research expertise on macroeconomics and monetary policy will add fresh perspectives to Committee discussions,” he said.
Governor Adrian Orr, who chairs the committee, said he was looking forward to working with the pair soon.
“The Monetary Policy Committee remains laser-focussed on its job to control inflation and Carl and Prasanna will play an important part in our discussions,” he said.
Orr thanked Harris and Saunders for serving on the committee for many years and during an “especially turbulent time”.
Gai’s first meeting will be for the July monetary policy review in four months’ time.
13 Comments
You read a lot of 'stuff' from bank economists as they are widely quoted in MSM. (IMO - far too much!) Never forget who pays for bank economists to create their infomericals.
You hear much less from non-bank economists as they are seldom quoted in MSM and only read by those interested th RBNZ's MPSs, Treasury statements, etc.
And when you read what some economist has said, take great care to identify who is paying their salary, the biases they might have, and what restrictions may be placed on what they can say.
This is great - well done Nicola
The RB needs a shake up and less 'Yes Men and Women' on the committee to counter the terrible performance of the Governor and bank during 2021-2023 - lets face it they forgot about their day job but it didn't help that Labour's overspending was inflationary.
Tony Alexander paints a dire but truthful picture of the state of the economy in his post today.
I'll be doing all I can with what I can influence to help keep NZ a great place for the next generations and I compel others to do the same
A seemingly important announcement, but only 5 comments- a little puzzling! When the GDP figures came out recently, (and there were no surprises there as we all knew for weeks in advance that there was zero GDP growth), there were over 200 comments!
I don't know enough about these two guys to say what effect they will have on a committee of ?eight people. I do know that Mr Orr has one job to do, and that is to get inflation under control. He has 510 people working at RBNZ to help him with this task - I wish we were all that fortunate to have just one focus and so many people to assist us!
We need less Māori world view too at the RBNZ. They have a job to do. They need to have the best qualified people and cut the cultural crap and get on with it. Monetary policy has nothing to do with feelz and cultural BS. Hopefully this is the start of the transition away from that nonsense…..and Orr should be out soon too.
Of course it is - either indirectly by adjusting the risk weighting rules for banks, or using tighter LtV / DTI / stress-testing rules (and then bringing the OCR down), or directly through discounted Crown lending for productivity-boosting investment (via an intermediate bank).
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