Reserve Bank (RBNZ) Governor Adrian Orr appeared before Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee for the first time since the change in Government on Thursday morning. “We are busily internalizing that complex situation and we will be back in February with our [next] Monetary Policy Statement”. Paul Conway, the RBNZ’s chief economist, said that while historical headline GDP had been revised down, consumption and business investment were revised higher. “It is economically impossible to target a date and time to achieve consumer price inflation,” Orr told the committee. OCR should’ve been lifted slightly soonerOrr said the Monetary Policy Committee did wish it had raised the Official Cash Rate earlier, but only by “one or two quarters, at most”.

Source: Stuff December 20, 2023 01:09 UTC