‘QE, triumph or folly?’

The Institute of International Monetary Research (IIMR, affiliated with the University of Buckingham) is holding an international conference on the assessment of Quantitative Easing (QE) in the US, UK, Eurozone and Japan on the 3rd of November (London). In the last few years a return to a more conventional set of monetary policies has been widely heralded, and in particular the return to a monetary policy rule focused on monetary stability and the stability of the overall economy over the long term (see the excellent conference organised by CATO and the Mercatus Centre  (George Mason University, US) on this very question just few weeks ago); but we believe the first priority at the moment is to analyse and clarify the impact of QE on financial markets and the broader economy. Amongst others, the following questions will be discussed: Has QE been instrumental in preventing another Great Depression? If QE is meant to boost asset prices, why has inflation generally been so low in recent years? Has QE increased inequality? Has QE been able to expand effectively broad money growth? Should QE programmes be extended at all? These are all vital questions we will address at the conference.

The conference is by invitation only and there are still (very few) places available, so please send an email to Gail Grimston at gail.grimston@buckingham.ac.uk should you wish to attend. It will be held on Thursday 3rd November 2016, in collaboration with Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), at the IEA headquarters in London. You will be able to find a programme with all the topics and the speakers here  As you will see we are delighted to have an excellent panel of experts on this field from the US, continental Europe and the UK. There will be of course very well-known academics but also practitioners as well as central bank economists. In particular economists such as George Selgin (CATO), Kevin Dowd (Durham University), Christopher Neely (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), Ryland Thomas (Bank of England) or Tim Congdon (IIMR, University of Buckingham) amongst many other very distinguished  economists will be giving a talk at the conference, which provides a unique opportunity to analyse in detail the effects and the effectiveness of QE in the most developed economies.

For your information you can also follow the conference live/streaming; please visit the IIMR website this week for further details on how to follow it remotely on the day. In addition the presentations (but not the discussion) will be filmed and published on our website later on. Drop us an email (enquiries@mv-pt.org) should you want to be updated on the Institute’s agenda and latest news.

Thank you,

Juan Castaneda

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Monetary economics after the crisis: painful (ongoing) lessons

The recent financial crisis has challenged quite many of the benchmarks and established monetary economic theory used in the 1990s and 2000s to analyse and prescribe monetary policy decisions. To be frank, we all have learned something in the recent crisis. Let me just list some of the lessons of the crisis I believe all and sundry very much agree on:

• Changes in the monetary base are not good indicators of overall inflation. The three, four or even fivefold expansion of the central banks’ balance sheets has not been accompanied by inflation. It is broad money what explains inflation over the medium and long term.
• In times of crisis, and even more if severe banking/financial crises occurred, central banks are not (cannot be) independent. In their current form central banks are indeed the bankers of governments and this becomes very evident when public revenues collapse and public spending soars, resulting in a much more expensive access to credit (if at all) and a greater and greater appetite to borrow money from the central bank. Perhaps the best we can do is to run healthy public finances in times of expansion so that the threat of ‘fiscal dominance’ is minimised and contained as much as possible.
• CPI ‘inflation targeting’, at least as pursued in the years prior to 2007/08, is not enough to preserve monetary and financial stability over the medium and long term. Particularly in the four years running up to the crisis CPI inflation remained fairly stable (with some spikes though to oil price shocks mostly) and central banks achieved their inflation targets, consisting in a rate of Consumer Price Index inflation around 2% over the long term. However many other economy prices, in particular both financial and real assets’ of various types, did increase quite significantly, and now we know that in an unsustainable way.
• At least in the current institutional setting, the lender of last resort (LOLR) function of central banks is an essential tool to preserve the functioning of monetary markets and thus of financial markets. As I will detail in a later post this does not mean bailing out too risky and insolvent banks (and even less bailing out their managers and shareholders), but preserving the sound operation of the financial and payments systems as a whole. The conditions to do this are very well-known to monetary historians and I am afraid they are many times forgotten.
• Monetary aggregates (money) played virtually no role in the framing of monetary policy decisions before the crisis. However, it has been more than eight years now with historically low (policy) nominal interest rates, so central banks have had to resort to a different source of policy measures; that is, the expansion in the amount of money by the so-called Quantitative Easing (QE) operations. And what are they but purchases of bonds and even equity that ultimately aimed to increase the amount of money in the economy?
• Central banks are not running out of weaponry. In our modern monetary systems, where central banks create the ultimate source of liquidity in the economy, there is virtually no limit for central banks to create more money. Central banks can (as they have done in these years) extend the maturity and the amount of the lending provided to the banking sector, increase their purchases of both private and public assets from financial and non-financial institutions, they can also purchase equity in the market, … .
• Tightening bank regulation in the midst of one of the worst financial crisis in recent history can only aggravate the impact and length of the crisis. The raising of the capital ratios and the establishment of new liquidity ratios by the so-called ‘Basel III Accord’, initially  announced in the Autumn of 2008, forced banks to even contract more their balance sheets (to cut down their liabilities, deposits mainly). This resulted in sharp a fall in money growth and the worsening of the crisis, which had to be (partially) offset by central banks extraordinary policy measures (such as QE) to prevent money supply from falling even further.

There are many other much more disputable issues related to monetary economics and monetary policy indeed. But if we only agreed on the above we would be putting a remedy to some of the biggest gaps if not ‘holes’ in this field and thus creating the conditions to establish a much sounder and sustainable monetary policy framework.

I will devote a single entry to each of the them in the following weeks.

Juan C.

 

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What have we learned about money and banking during and since the Great Recession?

Monetary economics is in shambles. More than eight years after the outbreak of the Global Financial Crisis  many things in our economies have changed indeed, particularly the range of operations in which central banks have embarked in the last few years; but the way mainstream academia and policy makers understand and approach monetary economics have not. The old policy rules which contributed so much to the building up of monetary instability and finally to a profound financial crisis have not really been questioned nor replaced yet by a consistent set of new policies (or better, a policy rule) committed to maintaining monetary stability over the medium and long term. Even worse, I have attended myself scientific meetings on this field in the last years and very rarely (if at all) ‘money’ or ‘monetary aggregates’ are even mentioned in (supposedly) specialised monetary talks and lectures. Instead we seem to be stuck in endless discussions on interest rates and how a 0.25 increase/decrease in the policy rate may affect consumption, investment and eventually output by the spending and credit channels; for the initiated in this subject this means we still use the late 1990s and early 2000s’ new Keynesian model (with no money) to analyse and prescribe monetary policies.

Well there are indeed notable exceptions to the mainstream, and I am very pleased to invite you all to the 2016 monetary Public Lecture of the Institute of International Monetary Research (IIMR), by professor Charles Goodhart. One of the main purposes of the Institute is to promote research into how developments in banking and finance affect the economy as a whole. The Institute’s wider aims are to enhance economic knowledge and understanding, and to seek price stability, steady economic growth and high employment. Particular attention is paid to the effect of changes in the quantity of money on inflation and deflation, and on boom and bust.

Banks and central banks play a central role in the sound functioning of modern monetary economies. The 2008-09 Global Financial Crisis has shown again how important it is to understand their functioning and operations, and the relationship between the quantity of money and the overall economy.

We have much pleasure in inviting you to join us at the Institute’s 2016 public lecture on Wednesday 2nd November (18:30 hrs.) by Professor Charles Goodhart (LSE): ‘What have we learned about money and banking during and since the Great Recession?’, at the Institute of Directors (116 Pall Mall, London).

You may want to visit our website to learn more about the Institute’s research agenda and our latest publications on our website (http://www.mv-pt.org/index). You may want to know the public lecture will be recorded and available on our site.

Thank you,

Juan C.

PS. Please confirm your attendance by e-mail to Gail Grimston at gail.grimston@buckingham.ac.uk

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