Education: A Better Tomorrow

Monetary Aggregates Play Little Role In The Conduct Of Monetary Policy

In conventional macroeconomic thinking, the money supply is considered the main determinant of long-run inflation. A variety of monetary aggregates have been proposed to measure the money supply. Yet, nowadays, monetary aggregates play little role in monetary policy deliberations at most central banks.

A new study in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking examines the leading arguments for assigning an important role to tracking the growth of monetary aggregates when making decisions about monetary policy. The analysis finds that none of the arguments provides a compelling reason to assign a prominent role to monetary aggregates.

Monetary and fiscal policy switching.

Two THEMES RUN through policy analysis: rules determining policy choice are functions of economic conditions; those rules may change over time. The themes reflect the views that actual policy behavior is purposeful, rather than arbitrary, and that good policy adapts to changes in the structure of the economy or to improvements in understanding how policy affects the economy.

A growing body of evidence finds that policy reaction functions vary substantially over different periods in the United States. In light of this evidence of regime shifts, which is reviewed in Section 1, it is surprising that there is little formal modeling of environments where ongoing regime change is stochastic, and the objects subject to change are parameters determining how the economy feeds back to policy choice.

Do Monetary Handcuffs Restrain Leviathan? Fiscal Policy in Extreme Exchange Rate Regimes

This paper studies fiscal policy in countries that have chosen an extreme monetary stance. We think of a country as having an extreme monetary policy if it is in either a currency board or a common currency area. In much of our analysis, we distinguish between multilateral currency unions (such as the East Caribbean Currency Area, or ECCA) and countries that have unilaterally adopted the currency of an anchor country (such as Panama).

It is possible to motivate our analysis in several ways. A number of countries are considering whether to abandon national monetary sovereignty and unilaterally adopt the money of another country, including Mexico and Argentina; Ecuador, Guatemala, and El Salvador are already proceeding with dollarization. In Europe, 12 countries have already abandoned national monetary discretion within the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). More generally, there has been much discussion of the “disappearing center” of exchange rate regimes; countries are said to have a choice of either freely floating or going to an extreme monetary stance.

Education: A Better Tomorrow

Monetary Aggregates Play Little Role In The Conduct Of Monetary Policy

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Monetary and fiscal policy switching.

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Do Monetary Handcuffs Restrain Leviathan? Fiscal Policy in Extreme Exchange Rate Regimes

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