Missed this last week. The Bureau of Resource and Energy Economics (BREE) is headed for the scrap heap. Presumably the mooted chopping is a part of ongoing efforts to shore up the Budget as the terms of trade crash hollow it out.
There is, therefore, a certain poetic justice in BREE paying the ultimate price given it played a key role in reinforcing the delusional commodity price forecasts that have proved ruinous for budget policy-making three years in a row.
The Bureau was a useful source of information and presumably Treasury will pick up that function in future. But better a world with no BREE at all than one that stokes the group think of yesterday’s commodity policy mania.
