CRISIS
Alan Bollard with Sarah Gaitanos
Auckland University Press, $30, pbk
Recent comments by the theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking that the universe could have been formed from nothing should come as no surprise to bankers, who do this sort of thing all the time with money.
The vortex of confidence, promise, obligation and threat that is the banking system creates vast treasures out of thin air.
Sitting at the core of this are the central bankers - perhaps these are the gods whose necessity Stephen Hawking questions - their role to inject a modicum of intelligent design into the process.
Reserve Bank of New Zealand governor Alan Bollard typifies the steady hand on the tiller sought as a central banker.
It seems hard to believe that he has been doing the job since 2002, but his is the sort of job that goes unnoticed if done well.
Dr Bollard uses his retiring, gentle nature to great effect in Crisis, and turns it into an asset.
If the meek ever do inherit the earth, they will elect him from among their number as their financial regulator.
By contrast, his predecessor was, well, brash.
This book details the Reserve Bank's handling of the global financial crisis from the American mortgage meltdown in 2007 to New Zealand's fragile apparent recovery early this year.
The economic and financial detail is comprehensive, and any reader with more than a passing interest in the subject will find the content absorbing.
Much is made of the governor's neutrality: "We serve with the same professionalism and enthusiasm whomever the public elects".
The writer describes the bipartisan support for many of the bank's emergency responses and contrasts the political environment of this country with the United States' tradition of replacing the top few levels of federal institutions with each change of government.
The impression of a wholesome, bipartisan atmosphere is clearly the writer's intent, but there is plenty of scope for exegesis: Dr Bollard openly describes his predecessor Don Brash's rapid leap from neutral governorship into party politics but resists any urge to comment.
Dr Bollard's own early walkout from the newly-elected Government's Jobs Summit to watch a game of cricket is described similarly candidly, but if he thought the summit was a waste of time, you won't catch him admitting so.
The book has enough of Dr Bollard's personal story to carry this reviewer (and university economics dropout) through the jargon-heavy prose - the reader needs Dr Bollard's occasional Christmas holiday pruning of his pine plantation as much as the governor.
A particularly poignant moment has Dr Bollard sitting on a plastic seat among the dawn cleaning staff at Orly Airport in Paris, reading his employees' leadership appraisal of himself.
Crisis abandons us in June this year with the first post-crisis raising of the official cash rate, when "New Zealand's economic position in the world remains hugely challenging".
The book would have been at the printers when Allan Hubbard's South Canterbury Finance crumpled and Dr Bollard's crafted guarantee scheme was invoked to bail the depositors.
The payout has been controversial, but it was the discharging of an obligation made earlier by a former government.
The alternative would have been unthinkable: it could have meant the end of the banking universe.
Peter Dowden is a Warrington reviewer
