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- Are ECB’s Greek bond purchases really irrelevant for the private sector?
- Is Greg getting bailed out by his rich uncle?
- Taylor legislation? Rules versus discretion misunderstood
- Partisanship and dismal economics blogging
- Chris Auld’s 18 signs
- The case for negative nominal interest rates and how to attain them: Revisiting the Buiter-Eisler approach
- No Negative Rates in Euroland (yet)
- Reinhart and Rogoff’s coding mistake: Much Ado About Nothing
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(Needless to say, I do not necessarily agree with them or endorse them.)
Category Archives: Monetary policy
Politics beat quality any day: Diamond calls it quits
Politics are powerful. Much more powerful than scientific arguments. This is probably a well-known dictum, and I am certain that I could find some cool references to great thinkers who have said something like this in the past. I have refrained from doing so, as I just wanted to put this recent example within economics on record: In the US, members of the board of governors for the Federal Reserve are appointed through a long-winded political process. The fact that elected politicians should have a saying in the nomination of members who will shape monetary policy is sensible from a democratic point of view. I will not dispute that. However, … Continue reading
Posted in Economists, Monetary policy
Tagged Central bank governance, Central bank independence, Paul Diamond
1 Comment
“Hi Mom”: Ben Goes Inflation Targeting
I know. This is a VERY late post. I am going to write a few remarks about something that happened 2 1/2 weeks ago. Old news. Nevertheless, big events deserve a comment even after a while. In the April 27 video above, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is seen in a press conference following the FOMC’s decision to keep the Fed funds rate unchanged within its 0-0.25% zone. What makes this of significance is that it, as I see it, marks the moment where the United States officially enters the group of inflation-targeting countries. He explicitly mentions two percent (or a “bit less”) as the average inflation rate consistent with … Continue reading
Posted in Economists, Macroeconomics, Monetary policy
Tagged Ben Bernanke, Federal funds rate, Federal Reserve, Inflation targeting
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Unemployment goes down and ECB raises policy rate
Today, the ECB raised its policy rate by 0.25 percentage point to 1.25%. This came hardly as a surprise, given the various statements from ECB officials in recent weeks. Many commentators have motivated this by the increasing HICP inflation. However, I would argue that there are other just as applicable, if not better, reasons. Namely that economic activity is picking up, and unemployment is crawling down. Indeed, in the press release following the rate increase, Governor Trichet states Let me now explain our assessment in greater detail, starting with the economic analysis. Following the 0.3% quarter-on-quarter increase in euro area real GDP in the fourth quarter of 2010, recent statistical … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Monetary policy, Uncategorized
Tagged European Central Bank, interest rate, Jean Claude Trichet
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Taylor Rules on the Taylor Rule
The rule for nominal interest rate setting that John Taylor proposed in his 1993 paper “Discretion versus Policy Rules in Practice“, Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 39, 195-214, has had an enormous influence in the macroeconomics profession. It is safe to say that numerous economists, practitioners and academics alike, since that paper have evaluated monetary policymaking using the Taylor rule as some kind of reference point. Empirically, a plethora of papers have estimated coefficients of Taylor-type rules for different countries during different periods. Theoretically, paper after paper on monetary policymaking adopt some form of the Taylor rule as a default specification of monetary policymaking (even undergraduate text books routinely … Continue reading
The Fed and the ECB: “Spurious Bedfellows”
Some days ago, I wrote about an interesting post by Gavin Davies on his Financial Times blog, where he argued that European monetary policy, through the actions of the German Bundesbank and now the European Central Bank, follows the US Federal Reserve’s interest rate decisions with some delay. An observation leading him to label the FED and ECB “strange bedfellows”. The data behind the argument is seen in the following figure: The Federal Reserve’s policy intentions are throughout the period measured by the target value for the Federal Funds Rate (formally, this time series is discontinued as of December 2008, and I show the upper value of the 0-0.25% target … Continue reading
Posted in Economists, Macroeconomics, Monetary policy
Tagged European Central Bank, Federal Reserve, Gavin Davies, German Bundesbank, Olumuyiwa Awe, Spurious correlation
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Gavin Davies on the Fed and the ECB
Gavin Davies has an interesting post on his Financial Times blog. It is entitled “Strange bedfellows – the Fed and the ECB” and it discusses the co-movements between the Federal funds rate and the Deutschmark/Euro policy rate since 1987. There seems to be a leader-follower pattern, in the sense that Europe has followed the Fed with a 6-12 month lag. Davies concludes that this “is one of the most well established rules in the analysis of monetary policy making“. This is perhaps a somewhat strong statement, and I would, based on visual inspection (upon which one should be VERY careful), conjecture that most of this correlation is driven by the … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Macroeconomics, Monetary policy
Tagged European Central Bank, Federal Reserve, Gavin Davies, Inflation targeting, Taylor rule
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ECB, SMP (II): Direct vs. secondary purchases
In my recent post on the ECB’s Securities Market Programme (SMP), I noted that the programme was in violation of the Treaty of the European Union. I based this on Article 21.1, which states: “. . . overdrafts or any other type of credit facility with the ECB or with the national central banks in favour of Union institutions, bodies, offices or agencies, central governments, regional, local or other public authorities, other bodies governed by public law, or public undertakings of Member States shall be prohibited, as shall the purchase directly from them by the ECB or national central banks of debt instruments.” – Article 21.1 of “ON THE STATUTE … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Macroeconomics, Monetary policy
Tagged European Central Bank, Securities Markets Programme, Treaty on European Union
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ECB, SMP, ETC. Who pays for what?
After the financial crisis hit in 2008, new acronyms have been appearing at a rapid pace around the globe. These mainly describe the various measures taken by the world’s central banks to offset the troubles caused by the crisis. Many took the form of liquidity provisions to aid “frozen” banking markets. The European Central Bank launched on May 14, 2010 a so-called Securities Market Programme (SMP), under which it – temporarily – allows itself to purchase Euro denominated government bonds. In its decision, the ECB motivated the move by “ . . . in view of the current exceptional circumstances in financial markets, characterised by severe tensions in certain market … Continue reading
Posted in Economics, Macroeconomics, Monetary policy
Tagged Central bank independence, central banks, European Central Bank, Financial crisis, Jean Claude Trichet, Marvin Goodfriend, Quantitative easing, Securities Markets Programme, Treaty on European Union
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