By Richard S. Grossman
As an early-stage graduate student in the 1980s, I took a summer off from academia to work at an investment bank. One of my most eye-opening experiences was discovering just how much effort Wall Street devoted to “Fed watching”, that is, trying to figure out the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy plans.
If you spend any time following the financial news today, you will not find that surprising. Economic growth, inflation, stock market returns, and exchange rates, among many other things, depend crucially on the course of monetary policy. Consequently, speculation about monetary policy frequently dominates the financial headlines.
Back in the 1980s, the life of a Fed watcher was more challenging: not only were the Fed’s future actions unknown, its current actions were also something of a mystery.
You read that right. Thirty years ago, not only did the Fed not tell you where monetary policy was going but, aside from vague statements, it did not say much about where it was either.
Given that many of the world’s central banks were established as private, profit-making institutions with little public responsibility, and even less public accountability, it is unremarkable that central bankers became accustomed to conducting their business behind closed doors. Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England between 1920 and 1944 was famous for the measures he would take to avoid of the press. He adopted cloak and dagger methods, going so far as to travel under an assumed name, to avoid drawing unwanted attention to himself.
The Federal Reserve may well have learned a thing or two from Norman during its early years. The Fed’s monetary policymaking body, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), was created under the Banking Act of 1935. For the first three decades of its existence, it published brief summaries of its policy actions only in the Fed’s annual report. Thus, policy decisions might not become public for as long as a year after they were made.
Limited movements toward greater transparency began in the 1960s. By the mid-1960s, policy actions were published 90 days after the meetings in which they were taken; by the mid-1970s, the lag was reduced to approximately 45 days.
Since the mid-1990s, the increase in transparency at the Fed has accelerated. The lag time for the release of policy actions has been reduced to about three weeks. In addition, minutes of the discussions leading to policy actions are also released, giving Fed watchers additional insight into the reasoning behind the policy.
More recently, FOMC publicly announces its target for the Federal Funds rate, a key monetary policy tool, and explains its reasoning for the particular policy course chosen. Since 2007, the FOMC minutes include the numerical forecasts generated by the Federal Reserve’s staff economists. And, in a move that no doubt would have appalled Montagu Norman, since 2011 the Federal Reserve chair has held regular press conferences to explain its most recent policy actions.
The Fed is not alone in its move to become more transparent. The European Central Bank, in particular, has made transparency a stated goal of its monetary policy operations. The Bank of Japan and Bank of England have made similar noises, although exactly how far individual central banks can, or should, go in the direction of transparency is still very much debated.
Despite disagreements over how much transparency is desirable, it is clear that the steps taken by the Fed have been positive ones. Rather than making the public and financial professionals waste time trying to figure out what the central bank plans to do—which, back in the 1980s took a lot of time and effort and often led to incorrect guesses—the Fed just tells us. This make monetary policy more certain and, therefore, more effective.
Greater transparency also reduces uncertainty and the risk of violent market fluctuations based on incorrect expectations of what the Fed will do. Transparency makes Fed policy more credible and, at the same time, pressures the Fed to adhere to its stated policy. And when circumstances force the Fed to deviate from the stated policy or undertake extraordinary measures, as it has done in the wake of the financial crisis, it allows it to do so with a minimum of disruption to financial markets.
Montagu Norman is no doubt spinning in his grave. But increased transparency has made us all better off.
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Image credits: (1) Federal Reserve, Washington, by Rdsmith4. CC-BY-SA-2.5 via Wikimedia Commons. (2) European Central Bank, by Eric Chan. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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By David Cobham
The standard arguments against monetary policy responding to asset prices are the claims that it is not feasible to identify asset price bubbles in real time, and that the use of interest rates to restrain asset prices would have big adverse effects on real economic activity. So what happened with central banks and house prices prior to the financial crisis of 2007-2008?
Looking in detail at what the Federal Reserve Board (Fed), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England (BoE) thought and said about house prices from the beginning of the 2000s, it appears that the Fed was so convinced of the standard line (monetary policy should not respond to asset prices but just stand ready to mop up if a bubble bursts) that it did not allocate much time or resources to discussing what was happening.
The BoE, on the other hand, while equally committed to that orthodoxy, felt the need to argue it out, at least up till 2005, and a number of speeches by Steve Nickell and others explained why they believed that the rises in house prices were a response to changes in the fundamentals (notably, the much lower levels of inflation and interest rates from the mid-1990s) and were therefore not a cause for concern. But after 2005 the BoE seems to have lost interest in the issue even to that extent.
Bank of England headquarters, London
The ECB was in principle more willing to consider the issue and to think about a response, but developments were very different between euro area countries (with Spain and Ireland experiencing strong house price booms but Germany and Austria seeing almost no change in house prices), and this would seem to be the main reason why the ECB never raised interest rates to restrain the house price booms in the former (which it correctly identified).
Since the crisis the Fed and the BoE have produced analyses suggesting that monetary policy bore almost no responsibility for the house price rises, on the one hand, and that using interest rates to restrain them would have caused sharp downward pressures on income and employment, on the other. The trouble with these analyses is that they consider only the effect of interest rates being a little higher before the crisis, with everything else equal. But of course the advocates of ‘leaning against the wind’ (the minority view which has favoured using interest rates to head off large asset price booms) have always emphasised that the existence of such a policy needs to be known in advance, so that it feeds into the public’s expectations of asset prices and helps to stabilise them. The absence of any such expectations effect in these analyses means that they are wide open to the Lucas Critique, and their results cannot be taken as an argument against leaning against the wind in this case.
What this all amounts to is our conclusion that the failure to adequately monitor developments in the housing markets means that the central banks of the United States and the United Kingdom, in particular, cannot reasonably claim to have done all they could have done to mitigate the house price movements that were crucial to the incidence and depth of the financial crisis.
The main outcome of the crisis for the operations and strategy of monetary policy so far has been the creation of instruments and arrangements for ‘macro-prudential’ policies, which will indeed offer central banks some additional ways of addressing problems in asset markets. However, central banks need to take some responsibility for the debacle of 2007-2008 and its effects. And they need to find some way in the future to incorporate an element of leaning against the wind into their inflation targeting strategies, in case macro-prudential policies turn out to be inadequate.
It is not beyond the wit of man or woman to establish a central bank remit which has a primary focus on price stability but allows the central bank to react to other developments in extreme situations, as long as it makes clear publicly that this is what it is doing, and why, and for how long it expects to be doing it.
Such a revised remit would and should incorporate useful expectations-stabilising effects for asset markets. The transparency and accountability involved would also help to shore up the independence of the central banks (particularly the BoE) at a time when there is so much pressure on them from the political authorities to ensure economic recovery.
David Cobham is Professor of Economics at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh. He is guest editor of Oxford Economic Papers April 2013 special issue on ‘Monetary policy before, during and after the crisis’, and co-editor of Oxford Review of Economic Policy spring 2013 issue on ‘The economic record of the 1997-2010 Labour government’.
Oxford Journals has published a special issue on the topic of Monetary Policy, with free papers until the end of March 2014.
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Image credit: Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, London. By Eluveitie. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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By Barry Eichengreen
If the euro’s crisis has a silver lining, it is that it has diverted attention away from risks to the dollar. It was not that long ago that confident observers were all predicting that the dollar was about to lose its “exorbitant privilege” as the leading international currency. First there was financial crisis, born and bred in the United States. Then there was QE2, which seemed designed to drive down the dollar on foreign exchange markets. All this made the dollar’s loss of preeminence seem inevitable.
The tables have turned. Now it is Europe that has deep economic and financial problems. Now it is the European Central Bank that seems certain to have to ramp up its bond-buying program. Now it is the euro area where political gridlock prevents policy makers from resolving the problem.
In the U.S. meanwhile, we have the extension of the Bush tax cuts together with payroll tax reductions, which amount to a further extension of the expiring fiscal stimulus. This tax “compromise,” as it is known, has led economists to up their forecasts of U.S. growth in 2011 from 3 to 4%. In Europe, meanwhile, where fiscal austerity is all the rage, these kind of upward revisions are exceedingly unlikely.
All this means that the dollar will be stronger than expected, the euro weaker. China may have made political noises about purchasing Irish and Spanish bonds, but which currency – the euro or the dollar – do you think prudent central banks will find it more attractive to hold?
There are of course a variety of smaller economies whose currencies are likely to be attractive to foreign investors, both public and private, from the Canadian loonie and Australian dollar to the Brazilian real and Indian rupee. But the bond markets of countries like Canada and Australia are too small for their currencies to ever play more than a modest role in international portfolios.
Brazilian and Indian markets are potentially larger. But these countries worry about what significant foreign purchases of their securities would mean for their export competitiveness. They worry about the implications of foreign capital inflows for inflation and asset bubbles. India therefore retains capital controls which limit the access of foreign investors to its markets, in turn limiting the attractiveness of its currency for international use. Brazil has tripled its pre-existing tax on foreign purchases of its securities. Other emerging markets have moved in the same direction.
China is in the same boat. Ten years from now the renminbi is likely to be a major player in the international domain. But for now capital controls limit its attractiveness as an investment vehicle and an international currency. This has not prevented the Malaysian central bank from adding Chinese bonds to its foreign reserves. It has not prevented companies like McDonald’s and Caterpillar from issuing renminbi-denominated bonds to finance their Chinese operations. But China will have to move significantly further in opening its financial markets, enhancing their liquidity, and strengthening rule of law before its currency comes into widespread international use.
So the dollar is here to stay, more likely than not, if only for want of an alternative.
The one thing that co
