By the numbers

There's a really neat bit of dataviz gone up on the Productivity Commission website, which has a go at showing different measures of the intensity of competition in the various sectors of the New Zealand economy. The Commission has had an interest in competition as it surmises - I'd say correctly - that the intensity of competition (or lack of it) may have something to do with our national productivity (or lack of it).

The story starts with the Commission getting Motu's Dave Maré and independent researcher Richard Fabling to look at the links between the intensity of competition and productivity outcomes, an exercise they published as 'Competition and productivity: do commonly used metrics suggest a relationship?'. As part of that exercise they first had to get the underlying dataset scrubbed up, an exercise they describe in brief here; their full paper is here.

The competition and productivity data that Maré and Fabling collated form the basis of the dataviz. It's the work of data wizzes Aaron Schiff and Harkanwal Singh, who have taken the data on competition and created the Competition Explorer.  There's an accompanying paper, 'Competition in New Zealand: highlights from the latest data', which you'll be relieved to hear "is aimed at non-specialist (and non-economist) readers", and which explains that it "provides a consistent set of competition measures for 39 industries for each year between 2001 and 2016".

Have a play with the Explorer. By default you start at the 'About' tab, which shows you the measures: yer standard Hirschman Herfindahl Index of concentration; price to cost margins (in two flavours, broadly similar); profit elasticity, which measures the responsiveness of profits to changes in variable costs and which should be higher in more competitive industries (again in two flavours, but the 'fixed effects' version is the one with legs); and subjective measures of self-reported levels of competition in their neck of the woods as told by businesses to Stats' Business Operations survey. Once you've got your head around the measures head for either 'Home' or 'Measures' and you're underway.

In principle this measurement of the strength of competition is a good idea. I liked it before, when the Productivity Commission was doing its services inquiry ('Yes, you can measure competition'), and again when the Electricity Commission had a go at trying to figure out whether electricity retailing was more or less competitive than other parts of the retail sector ('Measuring the degree of competition'). We all need to know whether markets are workably competitive, and I'm a big believer in using data imaginatively wherever possible.

But there's no getting away from the conundrum that it's hard to do. Maré and Fabling did the sensible thing: when you have a whole bunch of indicators, each of which is likely related in some way to the intensity of competition, you can feed the lot of them into the principal components sausage machine and see if the various data series reflect some underlying common driver. As it happens, the exercise turned up two* common underlying threads, one linked to market structure and one linked to profitability, which was promising.

But subsequent attempts to see how these competition indices affected productivity did not find a lot. One explanation, as the Productivity Commission said in its 'Cut to the Chase: Competition and productivity' write-up of the research is that

this does not necessarily mean that competition and productivity are unrelated but could reflect the fact that changes in competition over the period studied have not been particularly pronounced, meaning any effect of competition changes on firm productivity has been masked by other sources of time variation in productivity.

Another, though, as the Commission and the various researchers acknowledge, is that measures of competition within industries will not necessarily reveal what you are really interested in, which is competition within markets. It's possible that an industry might be homogeneous enough to be a market, but it's generally not going to be the case. Sometimes an industry - like Professional, Scientific and Technical Services - is going to be so diverse that data based on it are going to be a jumble of the many markets within it (eg for lawyers and accountants, who may be lumped together in the same industrial sector but are very rarely in the same market for competition purposes).

So: interesting stuff, but still a work in progress. We may not yet have been able to unearth many of the likely real links between competition and productivity, but it will be worth banging on with the search. And the Productivity Commission's competition proposals (from pp5-6 of the 'Cut to the Chase' publication, and based on their earlier services sector report) are good standalone ideas in any event:

● addressing search and switching costs, including better support for comparison websites, dealing with unfair contract terms, promoting switching facilities and portability;

● addressing occupational regulations, including the role of professional bodies in supporting competitive entry to the market and the merits of certification regimes as opposed to those based on registration; and

● continuing to refine competition law, including Section 36 relating to the misuse of market power and its interpretation.

*Strictly speaking three, but the third did not explain much.

How'd it go?

You'll have seen the key takeaways from the Commerce Commission's petrol market study:

many fuel companies appear to be achieving a level of profitability in New Zealand that is persistently higher than what we estimate a reasonable return would be in a workably competitive market ... The core problem, in our view, is that an active wholesale market does not exist in New Zealand. This is weakening price competition in the retail market (Executive Summary, X10-11)

and you can follow up on the details in the full report.

Most people, rightly, will be concerned with the substance of the report, but us competition geeks also have an interest in the market study process itself, especially as this was the first use of the Commission's new market study powers. So, how'd they go?

Overall, I'm impressed. They've self-evidently done a ton of work on this in effectively just six months. Occasionally I've been critical of how some of the Commission's work would stack up, from a productivity point of view, against a top rank commercial economic consultancy. Not this time. I was especially impressed by the work done in Attachments B though E on estimating profitability. And amongst all the other stuff they tackled it was good to see regression analysis applied, too: in a world of ever bigger torrents of data, the opportunity to deploy econometrics to useful effect is growing all the time. If this productivity partly reflected the tight deadlines, on Parkinson's Law lines, then let's keep whipping the Commission along. But I'm also pretty sure it reflects the team (Commissioners and staff) raising their game.

And the heap of data the Commission had available makes another point: you're not going to get meaningful answers to any potential competition questions unless the folks involved have a clear mandate to fossick where they need to, have the powers to collect the data and other information they need, and have the resources to process what they find (contrary to some asinine political reaction about spending a million dollars of the taxpayers' money). MBIE's petrol inquiry in 2017, despite the fine people they recruited to do it, had ticked none of those boxes adequately: the Commission's did. The case for market studies, as set up under Part 3A of the Commerce Act, is now closed.

Another thing I noted was the willingness to put out work-in-progress analysis with a "this is where we've got to, whatcha reckon?" tag. That's progress too: you don't want to put out shoddy stuff, but you don't want to be unnecessarily perfectionist, either. On this showing, the 80:20 rule is getting more of a look-in at 44 The Terrace. It's not without its own challenges, and no doubt the Commission's lawyers are several steps ahead of me in dealing with how you allow adequate consultation if some of these provisional findings get changed between the draft report and the final one, but the "it's looking as if this is how it's going down, are we right or wrong?" approach has a lot going for it, including the clear signal of open-mindedness.

That's another thing: this study looked a balanced exercise. It's easy (trust me) to see 'problems' everywhere when you're a regulator: to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But I thought the report, correctly, said the right things about the efficiency of the petrol companies' infrastructure, their retail innovations on the forecourt, and the inadvisability of jumping to inadequate-competition conclusions just because companies are profitable.

The other thing I'd wanted to see was a firmly remedy-oriented approach (assuming there were problems identified). No complaints there, either: head straight to Chapter 8 if that's your thing. I may be reading too much into 8.6 - "A number of the options are directed at industry participants who may be best placed to implement them. Others are of a regulatory nature that the Government
may consider instead of, or alongside, those market options" - but if the sense, or hint, is that the industry can get to a better place through enlightened self-interest improvements rather than anything more heavily-handed regulatory, jolly good.

On the substance of the report? So far I've only given its 424 pages the once over lightly, but it looks a generally plausible set of findings, even if not what people on the street were likely expecting as the big issue (some kind of tacit leader-follower price coordination). One thing that is nagging me, though, is the extent to which our local business cycle may be partly responsible for the reported petrol company profitability. Here, for example, is a chart (from page 326) showing a measure of profitability (return on average capital employed) for both the New Zealand petrol companies and a group of overseas comparators.

It looks, doesn't it, like profitability everywhere took a knock through the GFC, but recovered afterwards - fairly early on here at home, only in the last few years overseas. You see the same cyclical pattern in local importer margins, too, if you look at Figure 2.4 on page 28. I'm not saying that a relatively good post-GFC cyclical expansion here in New Zealand explains everything away, but at the moment I'm left wondering whether at least some of the profits reflect generally benign economic conditions as much as anything, and, if so, how that should be incorporated into the analysis.

The unsung heroes

Earlier this month, in a criminal case, the Federal Court of Australia pinged Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha Ltd (K-Line) A$34.5 million, the highest ever criminal cartel fine in Australia, though just adrift of the highest civil penalty, Visy's A$36 million in 2007.

K-Line was the second Japanese shipping company to have its collar felt for the longstanding rort of rigging the cost of shipping Japanese cars to Australia, following the earlier criminal conviction and A$25 million fine for NYK Line (see 'The Shipping News'). The K-Line judgment is here (handy hint - you can safely skip paras 86 through 169).

The only reasonable response to the fine is, jolly good. This fell squarely within the 'hard core' kind of cartel conduct that criminalisation was intended to punish and deter, complete with the usual cloak and dagger contrivances. NYK had had a version of Maxwell Smart's 'cone of silence', and K-Line had "reports ... often marked with words to the effect of “Confidential. Dispose of after Reading”. You can imagine some hapless manager in Tokyo trying to eat the files as the lads from Japan's Fair Trade Commission arrived.

The only smidgen of mitigation that, as an economist, you might feel for them is that, as the judge noted

41 ... the market for ocean transport service for roll-on, roll-off cargo was characterised by high capital costs with ‘lumpy’ investment, meaning that capacity could not be smoothly adjusted in response to demand.

42    The market was also characterised by long investment lead times. That was because the length of time required to commission and build a specialised car, or car and truck vessel was approximately two to three years per vessel. Such vessels were also not generally available for short term lease or charter, though in some instances space on vessels was made available between particular carriers pursuant to space chartering arrangements

But workably competitive markets are inventive enough to come up with licit solutions to these kind of problems. One is long-term 'take or pay' contracts, as you see every other day in (for example) the commercial property market, where developers line up leasing precommitments before they turn the first sod.

Lawyers should probably have a look at the bits of the judgment that discuss the extent of K-Line's cooperation with the ACCC, as described in the agreed statement of facts. The judge at [193] pointed to the "rather general and anodyne nature of some of the facts recited in it" and at [341] said it was "a statement of facts which appears to have been the product of detailed discussion and agreement between the respective legal teams. The result is a lengthy and detailed document which has no doubt been carefully crafted as a result of the negotiations, but which is nonetheless rather unhelpful in a number of important respects. The Court is left in the rather unenviable position of having to decipher and draw inferences and conclusions from that rather bland and sanitised document". You can be too clever by 'arf, in other words.

Other than that, there isn't too much to take away from the sheeting home of a particularly large, global and brazen cartel.

Except for two unsung heroes at K-Line.

One pops up at [79], where we read that "The Car Carrier Business Group General Manager was particularly distrusted by some NYK and Mitsui employees because he would sometimes compete aggressively for market share and on occasion attempt to depart from agreements reached with the other carriers" (he subsequently got sat on).

The other appears in [81], where "a Manager in one of the regional teams in the Car Carrier Business Group proposed to the Managing Executive Officer of the Car Carrier Business Group that K-Line should consider ceasing its communications with other carriers because such communications were risky for K-Line and its employees and K-Line should focus on having a strong sales force" (he - almost certainly a he - was ignored).

Well done, guys. And hopefully for their companies' sakes there aren't honest New Zealand executives in the same ignored and sidelined boat. Cartel criminalisation goes live in New Zealand from April 2021.

I've been to a conference

The Commerce Commission's biennial 'Competition Matters' conference has wrapped up. Here are some of my takeaways: where the road forked for parallel sessions, I went the economics / competition / regulation route rather than the law / fair trading / consumer protection path, so if you prefer that end of the world you'll probably need to watch the recordings of those sessions (they're not up on the Commission site yet, but can't be far away).

If there was an overarching theme, it was Big Data and all that new digital economy stuff. Repetitive though it sometimes can be to be reminded, again, of the ever-increasing pace of change, the reality is that we are indeed in the early stages of one of those transformative technologies that alter how entire societies behave and work. It's right up there with the printed book and the car. My main takeaway was that, if you subscribe to the traditional 'is there a problem / what's causing it / can we fix it / ought we' policy model, competition analysts everywhere are largely at sea. They haven't satisfactorily got over the first fence, let alone the rest of the course, or as the Singapore Commission's Han Li Toh put it more formally, we're all still looking for "adequate evaluative tools".

For what it's worth, I could easily be convinced that the net benefits of the new technologies massively outweigh any costs, and some of of the scaremongering reminds me of the comparable 'make a man walk with a flag in front of it' response to the arrival of the car. By all means ping any of the big players if you can indeed find them guilty of the same sort of rort a steelmaker might get up to (though we're not even sure enough on issues like market definition to be able to do that), but otherwise from a competition policy point of view I'd be very loath to jump to premature controls of any kind, let alone the heavy duty structural separation ideas that are being floated on the American presidential campaign circuit. Maybe I'll change my mind when I eventually get round to reading the UK's Furman report ('Unlocking Digital Competition') and/or the ACCC's doorstopper 'Digital Platforms Inquiry', summary here, which appeared as the conference was underway, but for now count me among the anti-competitive agnostics.

I was very encouraged by what's been called 'NewReg' regulation, the idea that panels of consumer representatives can be given authority to strike product quality agreements with regulated businesses. At the moment for, say, our electricity lines businesses, we default to things like frequency or duration of power outages, on the assumption that regularity of supply is the key quality characteristic in consumers' eyes. But it mightn't be. They might care more (and did, in the case of AusNet, the Melbourne area lines business where this got a trial) for how quickly a company cleans up after things like power surges, or whether they can easily get hold of someone at the company when they need to talk to them about something.

When the consumer panel wandered - like "curious chooks" as its chair put it - across the whole of the lines business, they found heaps of things that could easily be made to work better for consumers. It reminded me, in a good way, of the management fad a few years back for 'process reengineering'. Remarkably, they found improvements that would both benefit consumers and save AusNet money, which is a remarkable illustration of the general proposition that monopolists can be very dozy indeed when not challenged (I don't mean that to be especially critical of AusNet, who after all embraced this NewReg trial and ran with it). I'd say there is clear room for this to be at least a complement to our current 'building blocks' regulation, and in an ideal world a replacement for it. And I also wonder about the community trusts who run some of our lines businesses, and are hence exempt from price control on the assumption that the community ownership structure will constrain monopoly power. How effective have they actually been in that curious chook role? Or have they been [insert your favourite harmless animal metaphor here]?

Market studies - the first one isn't far away now, with the draft petrol study maybe two to three weeks away. For the sake of the new regime, this first one needs to go well, and not just on the technical market analysis stuff but also on how it is sold to its various audiences. One of the things that the very experienced Roger Witcomb, former chair of the UK Competition Commission, emphasised was that market studies need government support, and while you don't want independent authorities like our Commission pandering to the current public service please-the-pollies zeitgeist, this first one needs to hit all the appropriate persuasiveness buttons.

Roger also stressed being remedy focused from early on, accepting that you don't necessarily know, day one, how a study is going to unfold. In our regime, the Commission doesn't have any market study enforcement powers, and maybe that's broadly right and best left to the pols. Commissioner John Small mused, though, about whether it would be useful for our Commission to have a power to initiate binding codes of conduct, along ACCC lines: that might well be a useful extension (either in the market studies context or more generally). And speaking of remedies, it's useful that (ahem) some of us helped get s51E into the law ("The Minister must respond to the final competition report within a reasonable time after the report is made publicly available") to stop the minister sitting on the Commission's recommendations.

The big keynote speeches were very solid. Dr David Halpern on behavioural insights convinced me (and others, going by coffee urn chats) that competition analysis needs to look hard at how consumers actually behave in the real world rather than relying solely on the old utility maxing within constraints we default to. Dr Howard Shelanski on competition intervention in markets likely confirmed us in our existing views on price controls (ick) and line of business regulation (meh) but opened our minds to potential greater use of access regulation. And Ed Willett left us with some warm fuzzies that we've rolled out fast fibre-based broadband better than the Aussies have, and also raised the possibility that maybe some of the old rationales for telco regulation may not apply any more. If I'm sitting at home with a choice of copper, fibre, and three mobile networks selling fixed wireless (in turn based on competitive backhaul markets), where's my regulatory problem?

Assorted other snippets: it is indeed probably worth kicking the tyres harder when looking at vertical mergers, though, on the other tack, if you're looking for the paper that Martin Cave cited, pointing to the unexpectedly widespread efficiency benefits of vertical mergers, it's 'Vertical Integration and Firm Boundaries: The Evidence'. And despite Dr Darryl Biggar's emphatic 'No' to my question about whether electricity lines businesses should be let play in the solar and battery markets, I think I'll remain open to it for now, if only for pragmatic get the damn thing done reasons.

Finally, the panel on 'Why does competition really matter?' looked at how the work of regulators sits with the broader national wellbeing agenda as set out, for example, in Treasury's Living Standards Framework. I didn't warm to one bit of it: there was, I thought, a bit of unnecessary economist self-flagellation. It's not (in my humble) true that economists in general have been mesmerised by GDP and monetary costs and benefits, and oblivious to soft outcomes they couldn't measure, nor that competition authorities have also been blind to them. Look at (for example) the Commission's decision on NZME / Fairfax, where by far the biggest moving part was the likely loss of media plurality in the civic marketplace (as I discussed here).

But the rest of the panel's ideas were spot on. If you look at two of New Zealand's biggest challenges - productivity (low and sticky), and poor outcomes for too many at the bottom end of the heap - making competitive markets work properly helps on both fronts. Stronger competitive pressures could do a useful Schumpeterian job of clearing out our disproportionately long tail of low productivity firms (as the Productivity Commission's Murray Sherwin noted). And on the equity front, it's inevitably the most vulnerable who fare worst when the anti-competitive fix goes in.

Save some dollars at CLPINZ. Oh, and watch a video

Roll up, folks, you've only got till Friday to get the early bird rate to attend this year's Competition Law and Policy Institute workshop. Full details here.

You're big enough to read the workshop programme for yourself, but I'd just like to point out that there's one very impressive name indeed on the agenda - David Evans, co-author (with the equally eminent Richard Schmalensee) of Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms (Harvard Business  Review press, 2016). Sooner or later, as a competition/regulation economist or lawyer, you're going to have to get your head around two-sided and multi-sided markets. This is where you should start: highly recommended.

Want to hear what the man actually sounds like? Here you go: this is a video I used on a training mission to a developing economy competition authority. It's Evans on using the hypothetical monopoly test for market definition. Not bad, eh?

Spot the good guys

Trade wars are top of mind for those interested in the macroeconomic outlook. As our own Reserve Bank said in today's monetary policy review, " A drawn out period of [trade] tension could continue to suppress global business confidence and reduce growth". And it's not just the US vs China stuff, bad as that is, but it's all over the place, as the World Trade Organisation pointed out a few days ago under the heading 'WTO report shows trade restrictions among G20 continuing at historic high levels'.

Out of casual interest I had a fossick through the WTO's trade database, which among other things counts the prevalence of trade barriers. Here's an interesting result.

We're not angels all the time, but at least on this criterion New Zealand scrubs up well by not adding much to the current protectionist rackets. And full marks to MBIE and the National-led government who in 2017 drew the teeth of the worst of these anti-dumping rorts, by amending the law so that consumers got a look in before anti-dumping duties get imposed. 

Here's the press release at the time, and if you're a trade policy tragic the new public interest test can be found in s10F(2) of the amended Trade (Anti-dumping and Countervailing Duties) Act 1988. It reads: "Imposing the [anti-dumping] duty is in the public interest unless the cost to downstream industries and consumers of imposing the duty is likely to materially outweigh the benefit to the domestic industry of imposing the duty".

Personally I'd have put the onus the other way around - "Imposing the duty is not in the public interest if the costs to downstream industries and consumers are likely to materially outweigh the benefits to domestic industry" - but hey, in these more trade-hostile days, I wouldn't quibble too much about wording. When you get a pro-consumer public interest test in trade law, take it and run.

It's happened again

It's easily done. A company decides to get out of a line of business, and sells the operation to someone else. A business decides to flag away retailing and stick to wholesaling, and sets up an exclusive retail arrangement with a distributor. A company buys another company in the same line of trade. All perfectly normal and (barring an acquisition of a competitor that would create substantial market power for the new combo) perfectly fine from a competition policy perspective.

But then the parties "jump the gun", as the jargon puts it. They start tidying their affairs - mutually agreeing things - before the divestment / distribution agreement / merger has actually gone into effect. That's where they risk falling foul of s27 of the Commerce Act (arrangements lessening competition) or, worse, s30 (price fixing). And things can really go pear shaped if the proposed divestment / agreement / merger falls over, as it can easily do. Now you can find yourself swinging in the wind when the Commerce Commission comes calling and wants to know why you're colluding with what is still an independent competitor.

The latest to find this out the hard way ($825K fine and $100K costs contribution) is Milfos, which among other things sells milk quality sensors and dairy herd management software (Commerce Commission press release here, High Court judgement here on the Commission's site). A proposed exclusive distribution agreement eventually turned to custard but the two companies involved went on coordinating the price of the milk sensors in the interim anyway.

It's not yet a full-blown Thing, but this has become one of those areas where a bit of probably not explicitly malign carelessness can now walk you into a heap of trouble. Nobody wants to be jumping at every imaginable legal risk, but it's now clearly advisable to add something else to the checklist when you're thinking of divestment or acquisition. If you'd like some more background info on what to look out for, have a read of what happened in a recent Australian case ('Too harsh?') which was cited in this latest Milfos episode, or on the wider general topic of gun jumping you might like 'Jumping the gun'.

The other thing that's started to pop up more in mergers is failure to get clearance from the Commission for potentially problematic ones. We went years without seeing the Commission sally forth and challenge a merger, and then there was a sudden blizzard of them in 2018 ('They're like buses'). Fortunately, most of them (listed here) have gone away with no further action, and to date only one has been pinged, and deservedly so ('Naïve? Casual? What?'). Two are still live.

I say "fortunately" because I like our system of voluntary notification of mergers. Most other developed countries have some sort of compulsory merger notification regime: we don't, and I like it that way. I wouldn't want it to fall over, which it assuredly would if it's discovered that merger parties are routinely trying to do an end run around it.  As a small economy,  we're already got at least our fair share of micromanagement superstructure: we don't need another dead hand process on top.

Are we ready?

The Budget came and went while I was overseas, and I've been catching up with the news and the coverage.

It's not surprising that a lot of the media and analyst attention was focused on the 'wellbeing' perspective: it's getting attention overseas, too, as in this thoughtful piece in the Financial Times ($?). It's equally unsurprising, though, that virtually nobody (as usual) has asked the simple Keynesian question, is the Budget expansionary or contractionary? Do its direct effects on government spending and taxation boost or brake the economy?

Here, buried (as usual) on page 15 of the 'Additional info', is Treasury's best guess at the answer. The 'fiscal impulse' is the effect of policy changes on aggregate demand, allowing for anything cyclical that might also be affecting tax revenues and government spending. A positive impulse is expansionary, and you can see that fiscal policy has been giving a decent 1%-of-GDP-ish boost to the economy in the June year just finishing. It's not doing a lot either way in the next couple of years, and then if policies stay as they are, it starts to modestly brake the economy over 2021-2 and 2022-3.

The last time we saw these calculations was at last December's 'Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update', or HYEFU, when they looked like this (I wrote about them here).

From a fiscal policy cycle-management point of view, the new profile makes a good deal more sense than the old one. In the old one, there was a stonking 2%-of-GDP fiscal boost in the 2018-19 year, when the economy didn't need it, nor was there any obvious reason why the brakes should have gone on immediately afterwards. The new pattern is rather more sensible: there's less of a pro-cyclical boost in this June year, and the brakes aren't getting applied in the coming June year.

It would be nice to think that this was a deliberate adjustment of fiscal policy to make it more attuned with the cycle, but it looks more happenstance than design. While there is a bit of extra spending in 2019-20 that helps draws the sting of the previously planned braking, otherwise it seems to be down to timing differences: spending didn't happen to the original timetable. Or as the official explanation puts it

The 2018/19 impulse is now estimated to be 1.1% of GDP compared with 2.2% forecast at the Half Year Update. This reflects changes in the expected timing of operating and capital spending. Some operating spending previously expected to take place in 2018/19 is now expected in 2019/20. Changes in the timing of spending and higher allowances announced at Budget 2019 see a broadly neutral impulse in 2019/20 compared with a -0.9% of GDP impulse forecast at the Half Year Update.

That's all understandable: we're all human, things always don't go like clockwork, and the incoming Coalition government didn't exactly have a fully worked-out policy programme when it first took the reins, so some slippage isn't a huge surprise.

But if you get biggish changes in the stance of fiscal policy happening by administrative accident rather than for proactive cycle-management reasons,  it does make you wonder how effective fiscal policy can be in dealing with cyclical ups and downs. You might well want to slow things down, for example, only to find the economy gets an unwanted boost from spending programmes kicking in late, or conversely find that planned fiscal boosts get undermined by slower than expected spending.

With monetary policy creeping ever closer to its practical limits, especially after the latest interest rate cuts in Australia and New Zealand, fiscal policy is necessarily going to have to do more of the heavy lifting to manage the business cycle in the next downturn, which may not be too far away if the Trump administration continues in brinkmanship mode.

As it stands, however, fiscal policy is vulnerable to large ebbs and flows that can dwarf any attempt at fiscal cycle control. We need to be able to do something more effective when - not if - the next downturn turns up. Ideally, 'shovel ready' infrastructure spending programmes that could be rolled out quickly would do the trick, but while they're not impossible to organise they're not a doddle either. An alternative would be quicker-to-work defibrillator fixes like "put $500 in every beneficiary's bank account", which we've shown we can organise (recall the recent winter heating top-ups to national super, for example).

I'd like to think there's someone in Treasury primed and ready to pull the Emergency Fiscal Boost lever. Am I wrong?