‘The new regulatory wisdom: good of bad?’

This is the title of the second research paper published by the Institute of International Monetary Research (IIMR), by Adam Ridley. This is a brief summary extracted from the paper, which is fully available at http://www.mv-pt.org/research-papers:

‘Output growth in the leading Western economies has been weaker since the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 than at any time since the 1930s. According to the International Monetary Fund’s database, advanced economies’ gross domestic product was flat in 2008 and dropped by 3.4 per cent in 2009. Although 2010 enjoyed a rebound with 3.1 per cent growth, the next three years saw output advancing typically by a mere 1 ½ per cent a year. This was well beneath the pre-2008 trend.

In the leading Western nations the official response to the Great Recession has had a number of well-known and familiar common features, although policy has been far from stable or easy to predict. The elements of this response constitute what might be termed the “New Regulatory Wisdom” (NRW). How is to be defined? What has been its impact so far? And what will be its effects if it is maintained into the future?’

 

Video on changes in bank regulation during and after the Global Financial Crisis

You can also find a video below with further insights on this fundamental topic to understand the collapse in broad money growth in the midst of the Global Financial Crisis, and thus the aggravation of the crisis. The effects of tightening bank capital regulation are quite straight forward; in order to comply with higher capital to assets ratios, banks would have to sell their assets and thus reduce the amount of deposits (bank money) in the economy. This means a contraction in banks’ balance sheets and in turn a fall in deposits (broad money). The effects of such contractionary regulation is addressed in detail in Money in the Great Recession (Ed. Tim Congdon. 2017). In view of recent proposals to even increase capital ratios further the IIMR will hold a conference in this topic in november 2017 (more information with the programme and speakers to follow after the summer)

Comments welcome.

Juan Castañeda

 

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Assessment of the monetary strategy of the ECB: 1999 – 2014

Following up my last post on the eurozone crisis and the monetary policy of the ECB (see IIMR esearch Paper 3: Have Central Banks forgotten about money? by my colleague Tim Congdon and myself), please find below a video with further details on the changes made to the monetary strategy of the ECB since its establishment.

What I claim in the video is that the ECB did give a prominent role to the analysis of the changes in broad money up to 2003, when it reviewed its strategy, and not surprisingly it led to a higher rate of growth of money in the Eurozone in the years running up to the Global Financial Crisis. Just to be clear, I do not support that any central bank should adopt a ‘mechanistic’ monetary growth policy rule, by which the bank adheres to an intermediate M3 (or broad money) rate of growth target come what may. The link between money and prices and nominal income is indeed very strong over the medium and long term, but it is of course affected by other variables/phenomena in the short term that need to be properly considered and taken into account by policy makers. So rather than a mechanistic approach to such a monetary target, changes in money growth should be given a primary role in assessing inflation and nominal income forecasts, and thus in the making of monetary policy decisions; and this is precisely what the ECB did from 1999 to 2003 under its two-pillar strategy. So when money growth continuously exceeds the rate deemed to be compatible with monetary stability, this would signal inflationary pressures and even financial instability the central bank would eventually tackle by tightening its monetary policy. This rationale would show the commitment of the central bank to both monetary and financial stability over the long term, and the use of a broad monetary aggregate would serve as a credible indicator to make monetary policy decisions and as a means to transmit the central bank’s expectations on inflation and output growth.

As ever, comments very welcome.

Juan Castañeda

PS. More videos on the IIMR YouTube channel

 

 

 

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