So maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't give central bankers the keys to the whole monetary system.

"To repeat one of my consistent lines, human beings are fallible, they make mistakes. Central banks – here and abroad – are made up of humans, so they make mistakes. Really serious ones, of the sort seen in the last few years, shouldn’t happen but they do. One might even offer perspectives in mitigation: the pandemic was something quite extraordinary, and many people (here and abroad) misread the macroeconomics of it for too long. But those responsible need to take responsibility for the mistakes that were made."

~ Michael Reddell from his post 'Still avoiding responsibility'

INFLATION: Orr lies

"[T]he Reserve Bank Governor [Adrian Orr]... likes to make up stuff suggesting that high inflation isn’t really the Reserve Bank’s fault, or responsibility, at all....
    "Late last year there was the line ... that for inflation to have been in the target range then (Nov 2022) the Bank would have to have been able to have forecast the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2020. It took about five minutes to dig out the data ... to illustrate that core inflation was already at about 6 per cent BEFORE the invasion ... It was just made up, but of course there were no real consequences for the Governor....
    "And then there was last week’s effort in which Orr ... attempted to brush off the inflation as just one supply shock after the other, things the Bank couldn’t do much about, culminating in the outrageous attempt to mislead the Committee to believe that this year’s cyclone explained the big recent inflation forecasting error (only to have one of his staff pipe up and clarify that actually that effect was really rather small)....
    "It is, of course, all nonsense....

See for example:

• INFLATION: A critique of the “crisis-push” doctrine
• INFLATION: The Elimination of "Less Supply" as the Cause of an Inflationary Rise in Prices
• INFLATION: "Under such a system, the increase in the quantity of money is limited only by the self-restraint of government officials."

"Bottom line: all those stories trying to distract people ... with tales of the evil Russian or the foul weather or whatever other supply shock he prefers to mention, really are just distractions (and intentionally misleading ones ...). The Bank almost certainly knows they aren’t true, but they have served as convenient cover ... We are now still living with the 6 per cent core inflation consequence. It is common – including in the rare Bank charts – in New Zealand to want to compare New Zealand with the other Anglo countries. But what the Bank has never acknowledged – and just possibly may not have recognised – is much larger the boost to domestic demand happened in New Zealand than in the US, UK, Canada or Australia. And domestic demand doesn’t just happen: it is facilitated by settings of monetary policy that were very badly wrong, perhaps more so here than in many of those countries."

~ Michael Reddell, from his post 'Excess Demand'

The Trouble With Trump-O-Nomics [updated]

"Donald Trump’s approach to economics was downright primitive. He essentially held that America was falling from greatness due to trade policy stupidity and corruption in Washington and especially owing to a penchant for bad deals by past presidents. The undeniable economic decline of Flyover America, therefore, amounted to a kind of Global Grand Theft from [America by everybody with whom Americans traded. This was bollocks. Destructive bollocks. Destructive to rust-belt Americans in those places already hollowed out by tax burdens, meddling bureaucracy, and high-wage pro-union legislation, and also to those with whom Americans were still trying to trade. People like us down here. The cost of his antediluvian protectionism is still being paid both financially and in the world's growing security threats. (Remember the old warning: when goods don't cross borders, armies will.)]...
    "[The Donald's ongoing Border Wars were both anti-trade and anti-immigrant. And both campaigns were ultimately Anti-American.] The ... false argument for the Donald’s Border Wars [for example] —that immigrants take American jobs– is utter nonsense. For crying out loud, immigrants are filling, not stealing, lower paying domestic jobs because for reasons of culture and welfare inducements the native-born simply won’t take them. [And the increase in productivity from the expansion of local markets and multiplication of the division of labour makes immigration almost always a productivity boon -- one that The Donald did his best to bury.]
    "[The effect of Trump-o-Nomics was almost wholly negative.] Donald Trump inherited an economy that was tepidly coasting forward on the momentum of the post-crisis cyclical recovery, but he then hammered it into a violent tailspin [especially] during his last year in office... [His protectionism helped destroy whatever recovery was beginning to occur. His propensity for borrow-and-spend, the unthinking resort off the short-termist politician trying to conjure up growth in a maladjusted mess of an economic system, left it more maladjusted and misaligned than ever before.]...
    "[The Donald used debt and bankruptcy to build his property empire. As president this propensity for reckless borrow-and-spend exploded, overseeing the third-biggest deficit increase of any president ever.] This was nowhere more evident than in his endless promotion of a large-scale national infrastructure programme, costing at least $1 trillion in new infrastructure spending over 10 years—all of it paid for by borrowing -- a theme that the Trump White House resurrected multiple times during the Donald’s tenure....
    "The American economy is [now] a debt-entombed, speculation-ridden stagflationary mess, and you can fairly blame a goodly share of its perpetuation and its latest metastasis on Joe Biden. But the shaky foundation on which it rests has been long in the making—with the coup de grâce coming during the misbegotten era of Trump-O-Nomics. ...
    "As we have documented extensively, Donald Trump is not an economic conservative in any way, shape or form. On everything that matters for prosperity and liberty—fiscal rectitude, sound money, free markets and small government—he’s on the wrong side of the policy fence. So to repeat: The Donald is simply an opportunistic, self-promoting demagogue [who helped ride America into the ground seemingly either to preen his overweening narcissism, or simply to stave off his many creditors] ..."

~ summary and interpolation of several posts by David Stockman (former Reagan White House budget director) on the topic of 'The Trouble With Trump-O-Nomics' and 'The Trumpian Myth Of Global Grand Theft'

UPDATE, from Stockman:

"Between them, Trump and Biden have raised the national debt by nearly $13 trillion. That’s 40% of all the money that’s ever been borrowed by presidents since George Washington....
    "When it comes to the core matter of fiscal discipline, the Donald was no disrupter at all. He was actually the worst of the lot among Washington spenders, and by a long shot, too. … All of the hideous excesses of the COVID bailouts were launched on his watch, signed into law with his pen and/or legitimized with the imprimatur of an ostensible Republican president … 

    “When you compare the constant dollar growth rate of total Federal spending during his four years in the Oval Office with that of his recent predecessors it is evident that the Donald was in a big spenders' league all of his own … the Donald’s record stands first among no equals on the wall of shame.”
    "[He is truly] the King of Debt.... Ultimately, excessive, relentless public borrowing is the poison that will kill capitalist prosperity and displace limited constitutional government with unchained statist encroachment on the liberties of the people. So for that reason alone, the Donald needs to be locked-out of the nomination and out of the Oval Office.”