Central banks have a very weak ‘theory’ of inflation

In a recent forum held by the ECB (ECB Forum on Central Banking 2021: Part 4 – Panel 1: The future of inflation, see min. 15:40 – 26:20), Professor Charles Goodhart criticised central banks for relying too much on what he called the ‘bootstrap theory of inflation’, one that affirms that ‘as long as inflation expectations are anchored inflation will also remain anchored’. Therefore, this theory mainly explains inflation according to changes in inflation expectations. Charles Goodhart also summarised the reasons why we shouldn’t rely too much on such a theory of inflation. In what he referred to as the absence of a general theory of inflation by central banks and other policy actors and international organisations, there seems to be a preference for a ‘bits and pieces’ approach to inflation; one that incorporates inflation of commodities, inflation in services, shipping shortages, … among many other indicators, without the proper analytical theoretical framework to support it. In his brief presentation Charles Goodhart stressed the need to incorporate supply side factors in the explanation of inflation trends in the long term. Do not miss it. In just 10 minutes he summarises the poor state of macroeconomics as regards the explanation of inflation, which can lead to also very poor policy decisions.

In my opinion, there is such a general theory of inflation/deflation; one that links changes in the amount of money broadly defined and changes in the price level over the medium to the long term. I don’t claim that this theory can explain every single change in inflation, particularly on a monthly basis, but indeed it does explain changes in inflation trends. The ECB should rely much more on its own monetary pillar to explain changes in inflation in the right time horizon (1-2 years). It missed an excellent opportunity to do so in its recent review of its monetary strategy.

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Moneda, precios y el monetarismo en Europa (video)

Moneda, precios y el monetarismo en Europa

Aquí podéis encontrar la charla que tuve el placer de dar a mis amigos y colegas del Centro Hazlitt de la Universidad Francisco Marroquín (UFM), en Guatemala (Marzo 2020). El tema era la vigencia (o su no vigencia) del monetarismo como perspectiva y escuela de análisis económico en Europa. Como comprobaréis, soy muy pesimista en mi presentación; sobre todo en lo que se refiere a la explicación de la inflación en los modelos económicos predominantes en las ultimas tres/cuatro décadas. A pesar de ello, reivindico el uso de un análisis monetario riguroso (de la oferta y de la demand da dinero) si queremos explicar tendencias en los precios en el medio y largo plazo; una afirmación que me parece obvia, pero que en el entorno académico actual resulta tristemente revolucionaria … . Además, si bien soy muy crítico con el estado de los modelos macroeconómicos en lo que respecta a la explicación de la inflación, soy más optimista por lo que en la práctica los bancos centrales hacen cuando se enfrentan a una crisis financiera. Hemos visto cómo a partir de 2009/10 (o más tarde en la Eurozona), los bancos centrales recurrieron a operaciones de compra de activos (‘expansión cuantitativa’ o QE en sus siglas en inglés) para evitar la caída de la cantidad de dinero. Querían evitar con ello caer en el mismo error en el que cayó la Reserva Federal de los EEUU en los años 30 del siglo XX. Pareciera como si, por la vía de los hechos, los bancos centrales estuvieran persiguiendo una política monetaria encaminada a lograr la estabilidad del crecimiento del dinero (‘a la Friedman’).

Asimismo, también comento en algún detalle en la presentación algunas de las críticas más habituales que se hacen al monetarismo desde distintas perspectivas teóricas: como (1) la (supuesta) necesidad de imponer la estabilidad en la demanda de dinero (o de su inversa, la velocidad de circulación) para su validez en la práctica; o (2) el no tratamiento de los efectos reales que las variaciones en la cantidad de dinero traen consigo a medio y largo plazo. Como veréis en este video, intento demostrar que ambas críticas no son ciertas o están basadas en supuestos erróneos, y que la ecuación cuantitativa del dinero sigue siendo un esquema teórico válido para explicar variaciones de los precios y de la actividad nominal a lo largo del tiempo. Eso sí, no debería utilizarse esta ecuación y los supuestos en los que se basa, de una manera miope y mecanicista; eso sería un error grave. Hay muchas variables que afectan a la inflación en el corto plazo que están fuera del alcance de esta ecuación y de lo que los banqueros centrales pueden aspirar a controlar. Además, hay un grado indudable de incertidumbre y de retardos en la transmisión de las variaciones de la cantidad de dinero en los precios y la actividad económica; de ahí que sea mejor hacer análisis en el medio y largo plazo o en tendencia.

Aquí tenéis la grabación de la charla, que fue seguida de un coloquio con los miembros del Centro Hazlitt de la UFM que resultó muy provechoso e interesante. Muchas gracias a los asistentes y especialmente a Daniel Fernandez y a Clynton López, por su amable invitación a participar en estos seminarios. A ver cuándo podemos repetirlo!

Juan Castañeda

 

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Inflation; the next threat?

On the economic effects of the policy responses to Covid-19

Today the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA, London) has just published a report by my colleague Tim Congdon and myself (Institute of International Monetary Research and University of Buckingham) on the debate on the expected inflationary vs. deflationary consequences of the current crisis. Of course there are many unknowns yet and we should not claim or have the illusion that we can forecast exactly inflation rates in the next 2-3 years. But what we can attempt is to do ‘pattern predictions’ (see Hayek’s 1974 Nobel lecture speech). Based on the monetary data available and the theoretical body linking changes in the amount of money to price changes over the medium/long term, we have observed in the last two months an extraordinary increase in the amount of money in most leading economies (certainly in the USA, with a rate of growth of money, M3, of 25% in April 2020). This comes from the implementation of quite significant asset purchases programmes (i.e. Quantitative Easing) and the (partial) monetisation of very much enlarged government deficits; a trend that will most likely continue for the rest of the year. It is both the extraordinary money growth rates seen recently, along with the expected persistence in monetary growth in 2020 what support our forecast of an inflationary cycle in the US (and in other leading economies, though to a lesser extent) in the next 2-3 years. The diagram below from the report says it all (see page 8).

More details in the report (IEA Covid-19 Briefing 7, June 2020) at:

https://iea.org.uk/themencode-pdf-viewer-sc/?file=/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Inflation_the-new-threat25787FINAL.pdf. Also, the webinar presentation of the report with my colleagues Geoffrey Wood and Tim Congdon will be available soon at the IEA’s website/YouTube channel.

Juan Castañeda

Summary of the report (in pages 4-5):

• The policy reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic will increase budget deficits massively in all the world’s leading countries. The deficits will to a significant extent be monetised, with heavy state borrowing from both national central banks and commercial banks.

• The monetisation of budget deficits, combined with official support for emergency bank lending to cash-strained corporates, is leading – and will continue to lead for several months – to extremely high growth rates of the quantity of money.

• The crisis has shown again that, under fiat monetary systems, the state can create as much as money as it wants. There is virtually no limit to money creation. The frequently alleged claim that ‘monetary policy is exhausted at low (if not zero) interest rates’ has no theoretical or empirical basis.

• By mid- or late 2021 the pandemic should be under control, and a big bounce-back in financial markets, and in aggregate demand and output, is to be envisaged. The extremely high growth rates of money now being seen – often into the double digits at an annual percentage rate – will instigate an inflationary boom. The scale of the boom will be conditioned by the speed of money growth in the rest of 2020 and in early 2021. Money growth in the USA has reached the highest-ever levels in peacetime, suggesting that consumer inflation may move into double digits at some point in the next two or three years.

• Central banks seem heedless of the inflation risks inherent in monetary financing of the much-enlarged government deficits. Following the so-called ‘New Keynesian Model’ consensus, their economists ignore changes in the quantity of money. Too many of these economists believe that monetary policy is defined exclusively by interest rates, with a narrow focus on the central bank policy rate, long-term interest rates and the yield curve. The quantity theory of money today provides – as it always has done – a theoretical framework which relates trends in money growth to changes in inflation and nominal GDP over the medium and long term. A condition for the return of inflation to current target levels is that the rate of money growth is reduced back towards annual rates of increase of about 6 per cent or less.

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The problem of asymmetry in a monetary union the Eurozone must address

In a fixed exchange rate system such as the euro symmetry in the application of the standard is key for the well running of the currency and even its preservation over the long term: i.e. surplus countries should overspend and run deficits (either private or public or a combination of both) so they suffer from an excess of money in the economy and thus ultimately higher inflation. And just the opposite in case of deficit countries within the euro standard, as they need to cut down their spending in order to cut costs and prices and ultimately regain competitiveness. This was for long considered, if only implicitly, as the main ‘rule of the game’ in the running of the classical gold standard at the time.

Of course we have heard about the application of adjustment policies in deficit countries in the eurozone during the recent crisis, the so-called ‘austerity policies’; or in the technical jargon, policies aimed at achieving ‘internal devaluation’ as an external devaluation is not possible at all. However, it is important to remember that it is the running of both policies in surplus and deficit countries what would lead to a balanced macroeconomic equilibrium over time in the eurozone. Just looking into the 2018 balances of each country (to be precise, each national central bank) in the Target2 payments settlement system in the Eurozone, we can see how far we are from symmetry in the area. Actually, the balances have been deteriorating quite dramatically since the summer of 2007; and now we have countries like Germany holding a significant creditor position against the rest of the Eurozone countries (and particularly against Italy and Spain) of nearly 30% of the German GDP.

 

Source: Institute of International Monetary Research, Monthly Update (2018). From ECB data. 

 

The gold standard is often taken as a predecessor of the euro standard; true, both systems are based on the commitment to fixed exchange rates but the euro standard is much more stringent and demanding in that it is a ‘monetary union‘ (and not simply a ‘currency union‘ as the gold standard was, where national currencies ran at the announced fixed exchange rate and were ultimately governed by the national central banks). In an monetary union such as the euro standard the need to abide by symmetry, by both surplus and deficit member states, is even more difficult to articulate and achieve: the states do not longer have their national central banks to inject or withdraw money as needed be, and symmetry can mainly be achieved by expanding or tightening fiscal policy (and also by supply-side policies, that are indeed needed but take a longer time to be effective).

Along with two colleagues of mine, Alessandro Roselli (Cass Business School) and Simeng He (University of Buckingham) we have conducted a research on the measurement of asymmetry in the running of the gold standard from the 1870s to 1913. As shown in the table below, only the hegemonic economy, the UK, abided by symmetry, whilst the other 4 major European economies at the time did not (see table below).

See the following link for further details on our paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328562649_A_measurement_of_asymmetry_in_the_running_of_the_classical_gold_standard

This is an extract from the paper with a summary of our conclusions, with striking parallels on the situation of the euro standard and the asymmetries mentioned above:

‘The consequences resulting from the running of the gold standard with a deficient degree of symmetry should not be underestimated, as countries like Germany and France refused to let the increase in reserves to be reflected in a greater amount of money supply. This created tension in the system, as countries like Italy or Spain would find it more difficult to regain competitiveness, and thus a greater internal devaluation was needed to be able to compete with their trade (surplus) partners.

Were the asymmetries of the pre-WW1 period the origin of the gold standard’s final collapse? The straight answer is negative: all the five countries here surveyed had to suspend the standard at the outbreak of the war, if not before such as Spain in 1883; it was the War, with the huge expansion of the money supply, dramatic inflation and social unrest that made later in the 1930s the gold standard unable to survive. In the post-war period, Britain had lost her hegemonic status and symmetry together with it.  (…) the asymmetry of the hegemonic country (the US) under the Bretton Woods System might well explain its collapse.

Should we infer from these experiences that symmetry of the hegemonic country is the precondition for a fixed rate system (or for a currency union with a single currency) to survive? And, referring to the Eurozone, should we think that Germany – unquestionably the hegemonic country – is behaving asymmetrically and that the Eurozone should collapse as a consequence? Another paper would be needed to answer these questions.‘

Some claim the Eurozone must be completed with a full fiscal (budget) union, so a meaningful ‘federal EU budget’ can transfer resources within the area when needed; however, even if politically feasible, this option will take time to take place and the imbalances within the Eurozone keep on accumulating day by day. There are pressing issues resulting from the lack of symmetry in the running of the euro standard no one can now deny: How are the Target2 balances going to be settled, if they will be at all at some point? Can persistent trade imbalances among member states run within Eurozone countries? Can more flexible goods and services as well as labour markets reduce asymmetries within the Eurozone enough? Can the Eurozone force surplus countries to be more expansionary when needed be?

The eurozone member states clearly opted for a more centralised monetary union during the crisis, and the questions above are some of the key questions still pending to address for the euro standard to stop accumulating internal asymmetries. The other option would have been to abide by the no bail-out clause stated in the Maastricht Treaty and the application of the subsidiarity principle in the construction of the eurozone, and thus let errant countries fail if they could not fulfil the strict requisites to remain in the eurozone; but this was clearly not the option taken.

 

Juan E. Castaneda

PS. For information, we will address these issues in a conference on ‘The Economics of Monetary Unions. Past Experiences and the Eurozone’ at the University of Buckingham (21-22 February 2019). Please check the speakers and the programme online should you want to attend (by invitation only).

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MONEY TALKS, by IIMR

‘Money talks’ is a series of mini-videos the Institute of International Monetary Research (IIMR) will start to release every week on the 18th of June, Monday.

The name of the series says it all: experts in money and central banking will be covering key concepts to understand better monetary economics in less than two minutes long videos. Tim Congdon (Chairman of the IIMR) and Geoffrey Wood (IIMR Academic Advisory Council) along with myself and many others to come will be addressing the fundamentals in money and banking to be able to understand how our monetary systems work and which are the roles and functions of modern central banks.

The topics address include the following:

Episode 1: What is Money?

Episode 2: What is the Central Bank?

Episode 3: What is the Monetary Base?

Episode 4: What is the Money Multiplier?

Episode 5: What does Monetary Policy consist of?

Episode 6: What is Central Bank Independence?

Episode 7: The Central Bank as the Lender of Last Resort

Episode 8: Bail outs and Bank Failures

Episode 9: Basel Rules

Episode 10: What os ‘Narrow Banking’?

Episode 11: Fiat Money

Episode 12: What is a monetary policy rule?

Episode 13: What is Monetarism?

Episode 14: Monetary Policy Tasks

But of course, these are just the ones we are starting with. The list will be expanded in the next few weeks and the aim is to produce a library of mini-videos that could be a good reference to search for short definitions on money, banking and central banking.

If you are interested in this project, please subscribe to the IIMR YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLudZPVEs3S82iu2zb-QZfcK7pqnrHfPgO) to stay tuned.

As ever, comments and feedback most welcome!

 

Juan Castañeda

 

 

 

 

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Have Central Banks forgotten about money?

This is the title of a research paper I have written with my colleague and leading monetarist, Professor Tim Congdon, and published by the Institute of International Monetary Research (IIMR). This is a brief summary extracted from the paper, which is fully available at http://www.mv-pt.org/research-papers:

The quantity of money matters in the design of a monetary policy regime, if that regime is to be stable or even viable on a long-term basis. The passage of events in the Eurozone since 1999 has shown, yet again, that excessive money growth leads to both immoderate asset price booms and unsustainably above-trend growth in demand and output, and that big falls in the rate of change in the quantity of money damage asset markets, undermine demand and output, and cause job losses and heavy unemployment. This is nothing new. The ECB did not sustain a consistent strategy towards money growth and banking regulation over its first decade and a half. The abandonment of the broad money reference value in 2003 was followed in short order by three years of unduly high monetary expansion and then, from late 2008, by a plunge in money growth to the lowest rates seen in European countries since the 1930s. The resulting macroeconomic turmoil was of the sort that would be expected by quantity theory- of-money analyses, including such analyses of the USA’s Great Depression as in Friedman and Schwartz’s Monetary History of the United States.

This paper argues, from the experience of the Eurozone after the introduction of the single currency in 1999, that maintaining steady growth of a broadly-defined measure of money is crucial to the achievement of stability in demand and output. The ECB did not sustain a consistent strategy towards money growth and banking regulation over its first decade and a half.

The chart below illustrates our point very well:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As ever, comments very welcome.

Juan Castañeda

 

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A discussion on money and central banking with Tim Congdon and Geoffrey Wood

On the 13th of March (IEA, London) I had the pleasure to participate in the launch of the new MSc in Money, Banking and Central Banking (University of Buckingham, with the collaboration of the Institute of International Monetary Research), starting in September 2017; and I did it with two of the professors who will be teaching in the MSc, indeed two excellent and very well-known experts in the field: Professors Geoffrey Wood and Tim Congdon. I have known them both for long and shared research projects and co-authored works in money and central banking; and it was a privilege for me to have the chance to  introduce the new MSc, as well as to engage in a fascinating dialogue with them on very topical and key questions in monetary economics in our days: amongst others, ‘How is money determined? And how does this affect the economy?’; ‘Is a fractional reserve banking system inherently fragile?’; ‘Does the size of central banks’ balance sheet matter?’; ‘If we opt for inflation targeting as a policy strategy, which should be the variable to measure and target inflation?’; ‘Why the obsession amongst economists and academics with interest rates, and the disregard of money?”; ‘Who is to blame for the Global Financial Crisis, banks or regulators?’; ‘Does tougher bank regulation result in saver banks?’; ‘Is the US Fed conducting Quantitative Tightening in the last few months?’.

You can find the video with the full event here; with the presentation of the MSc in Money, Banking and Central Banking up to minute 9:20 and the discussion on the topics mentioned above onwards.  Several lessons can be learned from our discussion, and however evident they may sound, academics and policy-makers should be reminded of them again and again:

• Inflation and deflation are monetary phenomena over the medium and long term.
• Central banks‘ main missions are to preserve the purchasing power of the currency and maintain financial stability; and thus they should have never disregarded the analysis of money growth and its impact on prices and nominal income in the years running up to the Global Financial Crisis.
• A central bank acting as the lender of last resort of the banking sector does not mean rescuing every bank in trouble. Broke banks need to fail to preserve the stability of the banking system over the long term.
• The analysis of both the composition and the changes in central banks’ balance sheets is key to assess monetary conditions in the economy and ultimately make policy prescriptions.
• The analysis of the central banks’ decisions and operations cannot be done properly without the study of the relevant historical precedents: to learn monetary and central banking history is vital to understand current policies monetary questions.
• Tighter bank regulation, such as Basel III new liquidity ratios and the much higher capital ratios announced in the midst of the Global Financial Crisis, resulted in a greater contraction in the amount of money, and so it had even greater deflationary effects and worsened the crisis.

These are indeed key lessons and principles to apply should we want to achieve both monetary and financial stability over the medium and long term.

I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did. As ever, comments and feedback will be most welcome.

Apply for the MSc here!

Juan Castaneda

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‘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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The Institute of International Monetary Research: it’s all about money!

A new monetary research centre has been established in collaboration with the University of Buckingham early this year, the Institute of International Monetary Research, to study something we should not have ever forgotten, the importance of the analysis of money growth in any modern economy. I know, it sounds simple and even obvious but it happens that we have disregarded monetary analysis for far too long, perhaps under the overall  dominant presumption at the time that just by focusing on stabilising CPI inflation (around a low but still positive rate of growth) the economy could maintain a stable rate of long term growth. As stated on the Institute’s website, its mission is quite clear:

“The purpose of the Institute of International Monetary Research is to demonstrate and bring to public attention the strong relationship between the quantity of money on the one hand, and the levels of national income and expenditure on the other.”

Of course, central banks claim they have always paid attention to monetary aggregates; you may ask, ‘how could a central bank forget about money?!’ Well, let’s start saying that some have indeed forgotten more than others, and even those which did explicitly include a monetary analysis in its reports and in the communication with the public usually gave far more weight to other (macro) indicators in the making of monetary policy decisions, to say the least … . The facts well speak for themselves, and this is what clearly happened, at the very least in the 4-5 years prior to the outbreak of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We have seen again booming broad money growth during the last phase of the expansionary years prior to 2008 and then a sudden collapse in the midst of the GFC. The consequences and the impact on output growth have been enormous and this is another reminder on the key importance of keeping a stable rate of growth of money on long term basis as a policy goal. Those familiar with this blog will not find surprising my emphasis on monetary stability (see just a recent post on the topic here; let me say that I myself devoted my PhD dissertation to the distinction between monetary stability and price stability back in 2003! But of course nobody paid much attention to it then …).

Here you will find a video and the slides to the presentation of the Institute in London on the 11th of June (at the Royal Automobile Club), by its Director Tim Congdon. I have had the privilege to contribute to the Institute as one of its Deputy Directors and I do firmly believe there is ample room to both develop ourselves and cooperate with other colleagues and institutions to encourage much more monetary (and monetarist) research in the years to come so we can get a better understanding on the relation between broad money growth, overall inflation, asset price inflation and nominal income. More news and posts on the Institute’s events and agenda will follow.

Juan Castaneda

PS. The Institute’s website has not been chosen randomly of course, mv-pt.org, and requires no further explanation.

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