Tag Archives: interest rate

Commitment in action: Federal Reserve’s interest-rate “path”

It is a big shame that today’s FOMC meeting is one of those not to be followed by a press conference and a Q&A with Ben Bernanke. The policy decision is one of the more spectacular in recent times. Not because the Fed decided to keep the target for the Federal Funds Rate within the 0–0.25% range, where it has been since December 2008. The big news, however, is that the non-move is accompanied by an explicit commitment to keep it there for the next two years (if current conditions continue). This is very specific compared to previous talk about keeping rates low for “an extended period” (which has been … Continue reading

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Steady as she goes: The ECB keeps policy rate unchanged again

After having raised the key policy interest rate in April (from 1 to 1.25 %), the ECB kept it unchanged on June 9, thus repeating their “non-action” of May. This is a somewhat bold and perhaps unconventional move by a central bank whose overriding legal mandate is price stability. Given their own definition of price stability as meaning an annual Euro-wide HICP-inflation rate not above 2%, you would have thought that the increase in April would have been followed by further increases. After all, HICP-inflation is currently above 2.5%, and unemployment is falling slightly (continuing the downward adjustment, which I have argued earlier could have been the trigger for the … Continue reading

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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

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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

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