War Is Catching Up With an Inflation-Fighting Pioneer

In the hours after US and Israeli missiles slammed into Tehran, Anna Breman sprang into action. The governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand called colleagues, ran some numbers, and drafted lines to respond to the inevitable questions about how the conflict would upend the central bank’s sanguine outlook.

Breman may have been prepared, but the press had other ideas. Public discourse was, she told a Washington audience recently, full of stories about oil and gas storage. Did the nation have sufficient reserves, might the government have to ration fuel, and what about storage capacity? Prices, in terms of how they flowed through the broader economy, weren’t the primary focus in those first days of March.