Christina Leung is a principal economist with the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research. Photo / Mike Scott
Christina Leung is a principal economist with the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research. Photo / Mike Scott
Economist Christina Leung describes herself as "hawkish" on inflation.
Like a lot of Kiwis, she thinks that has something to do with her formative years in the tough economic conditions of the early 1990s.
The power of inflation to erode the value of savings is something she has never forgotten.
"Coming here as a child of immigrants in the 1990s, it took a while for my parents to find jobs, so money and budgeting were very much the focus for quite a while," says Leung, who is now a principal economist with the NZ Institute of Economic Research.
"I feel that has been instilled in me. I carry that with me - that importance of spending within your means - and, [when] you are investing or borrowing, that the rate of return on investment outweighs the cost of borrowing ... the basics."
Leung's parents were originally from Hong Kong and she says the move to New Zealand, in her early years of primary school, was quite an adjustment.
"Coming to New Zealand in the early 1990s it was a time of very high inflation. That was when the RBNZ was the first central bank to introduce inflation targeting.
"So for my parents - and this more now looking back - it was very much a scary time trying to find jobs, but with savings, and not really having much of an idea of how long their savings would last for."
Leung says she feels that has shaped her views and put her on the hawkish side of economic debates about inflation.
"Just knowing how damaging inflation can be to savings, particularly when it comes to the purchasing power of the money that you have.
"Of course now it's a very different story," she says.
That era of high inflation, through until the late 90s, and the pain we went through to beat it, had a big impact on New Zealanders.
But since then we've been through a long period of low inflation. Even battling deflation for a while.
Leung has always had an interest in money and economics. She grew up in Auckland but straight out of school she secured an internship at the Reserve Bank.
"I moved to Wellington and did that for five years. It was a very fun but very informative time," she says.
With Alan Bollard in charge as governor, Leung was working at the Reserve Bank when the global financial crisis hit in 2008.
"I was in the forecasting team at the Reserve Bank during the GFC period. So it was a time of very large changes, running through many scenarios and policy decisions ... a very intense period.
"I would like to think we have learnt lessons from that in terms of how to make sure the financial system is more resilient."
Forecasting the economic outlook is still a big part of Leung's job at NZIER - which puts out an influential Quarterly Predictions report.
She is the first to admit that many economic forecasts were blown out of the water by Covid-19.
"With this pandemic a lot of economic relationships that we've seen in the past completely broke down."
So, for example the artificial constraint of forced lockdowns just didn't match up with conventional models of consumer and business confidence, she says.
More broadly though, economic forecasts very rarely pan out exactly as forecast, she says.
They provide a framework to think about what to expect to happen under certain conditions, but it's important to factor in where the risks lie to that set of conditions.
"The forecast provides a baseline to work through.
"For example, many of us thought, at the start of the outbreak, that house prices would fall. But then what happened was that the Reserve Bank and Government came in with an unprecedented amount of stimulus.
"So the surge in house price inflation was in response to that change in conditions. It really is about the set of conditions that the economy is responding to."
• Money Talks is a podcast run by the NZ Herald. It isn't about personal finance and isn't about economics - it's just well-known New Zealanders talking about money and sharing some stories about the impact it's had on their lives and how it has shaped them.
• Money Talks is available on IHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes come out every second Wednesday.
