Pattrick Smellie: Bunker mentality returns to the Reserve Bank?

Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr is showing signs of strain. Photo / File

COMMENT:

While all eyes have been on the woes of Treasury Secretary "Gabs" Makhlouf at No 1 The Terrace, across the road at No 2, Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr is also showing signs of strain.

Makhlouf's troubles stem from sloppy website practice.

Orr's troubles are more fundamental: he has angered the big four trading banks with a large, proposed increase in capital-holding requirements and their intense lobbying against this is starting to get to him.

Orr gave two remarkably spiky public performances at a press conference and a select committee hearing on the central bank's latest Financial Stability Report a day ahead of last Thursday's Budget.

Makhlouf was hogging the headlines at the time.

Orr made it more than clear that he believes his critics are getting far too much uncritical air-time.

"I will be short where I see continuous mis-statements coming out, whether it's from journalists or people who have particular vested interests," said Orr at the FSR press conference, where he took umbrage at recent BusinessDesk reporting on a related issue.

In the same presentation, he mocked the New Zealand Bankers' Association submission on the bank capital proposals as "astounding" for suggesting "that at the end of the day, if banks fail it should be our fault and we pay them out anyway".

Orr is the antithesis of his prickly predecessor, Graeme Wheeler. Photo / File

"There are a lot of interesting assumptions across a lot of the submissions, particularly from those who are the ones who may be facing higher capital requirements," Orr opined.

The banks were claiming various impacts on lending rates, particularly to farmers, but that was a business decision, based on capital allocation models, not an artefact of regulatory settings.

"This is where people get lost. We're not asking for this transition to happen tomorrow. We're asking for it to happen through time," said Orr, who has more than once extended the consultation process in response to the fierce trading bank pushback.

"If banks are choosing to use this as an excuse to change their current business behaviours, then that is a customer decision: whether to be remaining or asking questions about that," he said. "It will not be the regulatory impost that is making them move."

Orr reminded "all customers that the banking sector is competitive. I would remind the banking sector that it is competitive", albeit that some farms are highly indebted and may face difficult business decisions.

That's particularly as Orr regards part of the RBNZ's mandate as encouraging resilience to climate change.

Again, critics and climate change sceptics scoff that he's outside his mandate, whereas Orr sees the RBNZ's role as regulating how well both the banking and insurance industries manage risk as a core task Te Putea Matua, or Primary Fund, as that can be translated.

He calls it the "wonders of the financial markets that they are bringing these future risks into current decision-making".

Effectively accused by National's finance spokeswoman Amy Adams of 'opinion-shopping' with his choice of three international experts to review the capital-holding proposals, Orr pushed back strongly.

Not only were all three appointees experienced in practical central banking, but the RBNZ could not use New Zealand experts because they had already all been "bought" by the local trading banks.

All this makes the central bank's core leadership highly sensitive to criticism at present, heightened by the wave of both public and private criticism that the capital proposals have unleashed.

Orr pushed back strongly over Amy Adams' 'opinion-shopping' comments. Photo / File

Some of it has been personal and inappropriate, some of it borderline racist in its approach to Orr's push to develop a Te Ao Māori expression.

No doubt, he thinks about such slights in the context of the less-than-glowing findings of the conduct and culture review of the banks undertaken jointly by RBNZ/Financial Markets Authority last year.

Ebullient, rambunctious, prone to Shane Jones-ian turns of phrase, Orr is the antithesis of his prickly predecessor, Graeme Wheeler. The RBNZ is now more open and transparent.

However, Orr and members of his senior team are starting to exhibit some of the same bunker mentality as beset Wheeler, who lasted just one five-year stint in a role that his predecessors, Alan Bollard and Don Brash, held for 10 and 14 years respectively.

Wheeler angered the banks by introducing new macro-prudential tools – principally loan-to-valuation restrictions on property lending – which were among the first of the many moves that eventually tamed rampant house-price inflation in Auckland.

Orr's proposals are a radically larger imposition of new capital requirements, as he swings the RBNZ's priorities away from a generation-long obsession with inflation and makes financial stability and bank supervision the primary focus of his governorship.

Orr says the bank is open-minded about changing subject to advice, while noting "that hasn't been the reaction of the industry we have been looking to increase the capital with".

Because of that, he has a target on his bank from biggest part of the big end of town.