Cutting interest rates last year was a mistake - economist

Former Bank of New Zealand chief economist Tony Alexander. Photo / File

The Reserve Bank made a mistake cutting its official cash rate last year and the resulting reignition of house price inflation means the central bank will probably tighten loan-to-valuation restrictions on bank lending, according to economist Tony Alexander.

The former Bank of New Zealand chief economist wrote in his latest newsletter that hindsight shows the cuts of 25 basis points in May and then by 50 points in August, taking the OCR down to 1 per cent, were unnecessary, Alexander said.

"They shouldn't have done that. They didn't need to," he told BusinessDesk, adding that the central bank had panicked about how negative business confidence had become.

The 50-point cut was initially counter-productive. Previously the RBNZ had only moved the OCR by 50 points in times of crisis, so the August cut left the business community worrying about what crisis the central bank could see that they might have missed.

Business confidence has since lifted off its lows and, in any case, the depths to which it had fallen wasn't a gauge of what was actually happening in the real economy, Alexander said.

Electronic card transaction data for December released last week showed core retail spending growth accelerated from 0.6 per cent in the June quarter to 1.1 per cent in the September quarter and 1.8 per cent in the December quarter, he said.

"If you're a retailer reading this and bemoaning the lack of customers coming through your door then your problem looks like something to do with you and not the country's consuming population," he said.

"If I were outside New Zealand looking in, I'd be seeing signs here of good growth in consumer spending completely at odds with whatever it was that motivated the Reserve Bank to cut interest rates."

Alexander notes that in the three months ended July, "just before the Reserve Bank stuffed things up for first home buyers by panic-slashing" the OCR, house price inflation was slowing in most districts around the country.

Post the August cut, house price inflation sped up in many districts in the three months ended December.

The Real Estate Institute's national house price index was 6.6 per cent higher in December than a year earlier, accelerating from the 2.9 per cent annual pace in August.

The New Zealand Institute of Economic Research's latest survey of business confidence showed a net 26 per cent of respondents still felt pessimistic in the December quarter but that was an improvement from a net 35 per cent in the September quarter.

Alexander said for him the worst signal coming out of the NZIER survey was the reluctance of firms to invest – a net 3 per cent of those surveyed planned to reduce investment.

Even though a net 44 per cent of businesses said they were struggling to hire skilled staff and a net 27 per cent said they couldn't find skilled people, a net 12 per cent said they intended to hire more people, a one-year high and above the 11 per cent average.

"If businesses aren't investing then their reliance on labour is going to grow" at a time when they can't find staff, Alexander said. That's the opposite of what they should be doing to adjust to the new structural shortage of labour, he said.