The AFR’s Chris Joye has today penned a ripping piece calling the RBA out for standing by idly and allowing Australia’s gargantuan housing bubble to inflate:
…the RBA never came close to anticipating the GFC. Its financial stability guru, Luci Ellis, published a paper in 2006 arguing”the most important lesson to draw from recent international experience is that a run-up in housing prices and debt need not be dangerous for the macroeconomy, was probably inevitable, and might even be desirable”.
Ellis maintained that “the experience of Australia and the UK seems to suggest booms in housing price growth can subside without themselves bringing about a macroeconomic downturn”. Two years later the 33 per cent drop in US house prices would trigger the deepest global recession since the great depression.
Second, the GFC necessitated a raft of policy responses that had never been seriously contemplated before, which have transformed the way we think about dealing with shocks and the unanticipated consequences. Contrary to the recommendations of the 1997 financial system inquiry, the Commonwealth guaranteed bank deposits and bank bonds for the first time. The RBA agreed to buy securitised mortgage-backed portfolios via its liquidity facilities, which it had never done, and Treasury independently acquired $16 billion of these loans in the first case of local “quantitative easing”.
Banks borrowed more money on longer terms from the RBA than anyone previously envisioned, which led the RBA to create a new bail-out program called the committed liquidity facility. In emergencies banks can now tap over $200 billion of cash instantly at a cost of just 1.9 per cent that makes trading while insolvent an impossibility.
A central tenet of pre-GFC regulation–attributable to the 1997 Wallis Inquiry—was that taxpayers should never guarantee any private firm for fear of inducing “moral hazard”. This is the “heads bankers win, tails taxpayers lose” dysfunction that emerges when governments insure downside risk. The RBA has since conceded that the crisis bail-outs unleashed unprecedented moral hazards, such as too-big-to-fail institutions, that require new mitigants…
In 2013 the RBA was publicly dismissive of foreign regulators’ efforts to contain credit growth via so-called macroprudential interventions to cool hot housing markets. One and a half years later APRA belatedly sought to cauterise the housing boom the RBA’s 2012 and 2013 rate cuts precipitated with light-touch macroprudential jaw-boning…
Good risk management requires intellectual honesty, which is missing in action among those overseeing the “wonder down under”.
Hear, hear. For years the RBA repeatedly downplayed (or outright opposed) the need for macro-prudential measures, claiming they are both undesirable and ineffective.
This comes despite MB’s and Chris Joye’s repeated warnings since 2011 that the RBA needs to implement strong macro-prudential curbs to prevent another housing bubble. That it actively resisted macroprudential tools until far too late, and then only proceeded with wet lettuce measures, will go down as one of the great monetary policy blunders of our time.
