The top Treasury officials of the late 1980s say that the Labour minister of finance, Sir Roger Douglas, asked them to draft a Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act that would counter having his predecessor, Sir Robert Muldoon, as Minister of Finance and trying to interfere in monetary policy
In a comment the other day on my post outlining a possible alternative governance model for the Reserve Bank, Andrew Coleman at the University of Otago included some quotes from Walter Bagehot’s 1873 classic work Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (available free here).
The quote that particularly took my fancy was some concluding remarks Bagehot made about the need for changes to the structure and governance of the Bank of England.
“There should be no delicacy as to altering the constitution of the Bank of England. The existing constitution was framed in times that have passed away, and was intended to be used for purposes very different from the present. The founders may have considered that it would lend money to the Government, that it would keep the money of the Government, that it would issue notes payable to bearer, but that it would keep the…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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