German bond markets and US monetary policy

Low interest rates have been a major problem for the European life insurance industry. The implementation of Solvency II certainly has forced European life insurers to improve their risk management procedures and to buy long term bonds in order to handle the interest rate risk inherent to their liabilities. As a consequence, the industry meanwhile more or less seems to be able to cope with the problem of low interest rates. However, now the US central bank has started to hike rates. The Bank of Canada meanwhile has followed its southern neighbor. The changed monetary policy environment in North America might create new challenges for asset managers in the European life insurance industry. This paper provides some additional thoughts and empirical evidence about the linkages between US monetary policy and the European bond market employing techniques of time series analysis.     

Learnability and monetary policy: A global perspective

The recent literature on monetary policy design has emphasized the importance of equilibrium determinacy and learnability in the choice of policy rules. This paper contains an analysis of the learnability of the equilibrium in a class of simple, micro-founded models in which the policy authority uses a Taylor-type monetary policy rule. Unlike previous analyses, the model economy is not linearized about a steady state—instead, a global perspective is adopted. Globally, the nonlinear model economy can possess rational expectations equilibria other than the steady state consistent with the inflation target of the monetary authorities. These include a second, low inflation ‘liquidity trap’ steady state, periodic equilibria, and sunspot equilibria. The main results in the paper characterize the conditions under which these alternative equilibria maybe stable under adaptive learning, even when the policy rule obeys the Taylor principle. The stability of multiple equilibria is associated with policy rules which are forecast-based. An important finding is that backward-looking Taylor-type policy rules can guarantee that the unique learnable equilibrium is the steady state associated with the inflation target of the monetary authority.     

现行国际货币体系难以承受之重：美国货币政策的量化宽松

美联储第二轮量化宽松的货币政策出台前后,国际社会争议不断。文章从量化宽松货币政策与国际货币体系的关系着手分析,指出本次国际金融危机再次暴露出现行国际货币体系内在缺陷,量化宽松货币政策有可能加剧国际金融风险,并提出了改革国际货币体系的对策建议。     

货币政策变动下的全球经济形势走势

在盘古智库2016中国宏观经济运行分享会上,盘古智库高级研究员张明从货币角度分析了全球的经济形势,他认为：“一是不要对当前大宗商品价格反弹和新兴市场国家货币反弹过于乐观,二是目前不要投资黄金,黄金价格在未来一至两年很可能触底,三是未来的市场动荡可能会加剧,可适当增持美元,持币观望,四是关注负利率引发的新的全球货币套利机会。”他说。     

Announcements and the effectiveness of monetary policy: A view from the US prime rate

Until 1994, the US prime rate was said to be sticky because of its irresponsiveness to short-term interest rates. After the Fed started the practice of announcing its intended funds rate in 1994, however, the prime rate has come to react immediately to shifts in the target rate. This paper attempts to explain how the Fed’s policy announcements changed the behavior of the prime rate by using a simple menu cost model. It shows that an increase in the expected duration of funds rate targets was essential to the improvement in the target rate pass-through.     

Identifying the interdependence between US monetary policy and the stock market

We estimate the interdependence between US monetary policy and the S&P 500 using structural vector autoregressive (VAR) methodology. A solution is proposed to the simultaneity problem of identifying monetary and stock price shocks by using a combination of short-run and long-run restrictions that maintains the qualitative properties of a monetary policy shock found in the established literature [Christiano, L.J., Eichenbaum, M., Evans, C.L., 1999. Monetary policy shocks: what have we learned and to what end? In: Taylor, J.B., Woodford, M. (Eds.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, vol. 1A. Elsevier, New York, pp. 65-148]. We find great interdependence between the interest rate setting and real stock prices. Real stock prices immediately fall by seven to nine percent due to a monetary policy shock that raises the federal funds rate by 100 basis points. A stock price shock increasing real stock prices by one percent leads to an increase in the interest rate of close to 4 basis points.     

International interest rates and US monetary policy announcements: Evidence from Hong Kong and Singapore

This paper investigates the responses of market interest rates to US monetary policy announcements for the US and two emerging economies, Hong Kong and Singapore which are similar on many respects but have experienced opposite exchange rate regimes in the last twenty years. Our results, based on market expectations extracted from federal fund futures rates, document that FOMC announcements significantly affect the term structure of interest rate in the US and both Asian countries. Further, international interest rate differentials around FOMC meeting dates tend to be negative for short maturities with the impact gradually dissipating as bond maturity increases. Finally, for the case of Singapore, we find that domestic interest rates react to both external and domestic monetary policy announcements with a magnitude that is larger over the full bond maturity spectrum for domestic announcements. These results are robust to time-varying futures risk premia and alternative measures of interest rates expectations.     

Optimal sustainable monetary policy

In recent monetary policy literature, optimal commitment policy and its variant from a timeless perspective have been studied with emphasis on welfare gains from policy commitment. These policies, however, involve a time-consistency problem called a stabilization bias in forward-looking models. We analyze Chari and Kehoe's [1990. Sustainable plans. Journal of Political Economy 98, 783-802] sustainable equilibrium and examine optimal sustainable policy, i.e. a policymaker's strategy in the best sustainable equilibrium. This paper shows that such a policy becomes consistent with the optimal commitment policy in sufficiently later periods. It also shows that whether the optimal sustainable policy can attain the Ramsey equilibrium outcome depends on the magnitude of shocks hitting the model economy. Moreover, the paper finds a sustainable policy that attains higher social welfare than discretionary policy does.     

Unconditionally optimal monetary policy

We develop a simple and intuitive approach for analytically deriving unconditionally optimal (UO) policies, a topic of enduring interest in optimal monetary policy analysis. The approach can be employed in both general linear-quadratic problems and in the underlying non-linear environments. A detailed example is provided using a canonical New Keynesian framework.     

Self-oriented monetary policy,global financial markets and excess volatility of international capital flows

This paper explores the nature of macroeconomic spillovers from advanced economies to emerging market economies (EMEs) and the consequences for independent use of monetary policy in EMEs. We first empirically document that a US contractionary monetary policy shock leads a retrenchment in EME capital flows, a fall in EME GDP, and an exchange rate depreciation. We construct a theoretical model that can help to account for these findings. In the model, macroeconomic spillovers may be exacerbated by financial frictions. Absent financial frictions, international spillovers are minor, and an inflation targeting rule represents an effective policy for the EME. With frictions in financial intermediation, however, spillovers are substantially magnified, and an inflation targeting rule has little advantage over an exchange rate peg. However, an optimal monetary policy markedly improves on the performance of naive inflation targeting or an exchange rate peg. Furthermore, optimal policies don't need to be coordinated across countries. A non-cooperative, self-oriented optimal policy gives results very similar to those of a global cooperative optimal policy.     

对当前货币政策的一些思考

在当前世界生产分工呈现新格局,我国贸易巨额顺差格局没有发生重大变化,以及我国汇率政策将继续坚持渐变战略的情况下,货币调控问题越来越突出,这将是目前及以后一个较长时期内宏观调控诸问题中的主要难点.在今后一个可预期的时期内,通常意义上的紧缩政策应该是央行货币政策的主要倾向,但"此紧缩"不完全等同于"彼紧缩".过去采取紧缩手段的惟一目的,是针对过热的实体经济,而目前采取的紧缩手段,尽管也有针对实体经济偏热进行预防的目的,但更多则是针对实体经济增长合理对应的货币需求之外,外贸和外汇储备双过高增长引发的过多供应货币进行对冲.     

Futures markets and monetary policy

It has recently been argued that when differentially informed agents trade with one another monetary policy can influence the distribution of output by altering the information content of prices. This paper introduces a futures market into the Barro (1980) model and shows that under certain conditions prices may aggregate information in a manner such that differentially informed agents hold identical beliefs concerning aggregate market conditions. In such cases, monetary policy will be unable to influence the distribution of output. These results then serve as a backdrop for a more general discussion of the relationship between asset prices and the role of monetary policy.     

Labor contracts and monetary policy

Fischer and others have shown that the very existence of long-term contracts can imply a stabilization role for monetary policy in models that incorporate the natural rate hypothesis and rational expectation formation. The present paper examines some of the factors that determine the length of labor contracts and how they are affected by monetary policy. It is argued that a successful stabilization policy might be expected to increase the length of contracts. The net effect of the imposition of such a policy would therefore be to dampen the amplitude of business cycles, but to make them more inertia ridden.     

The fiscal dimension of a common monetary policy: results with a non-Ricardian global model

The paper studies the interaction of fiscal and monetary policy within an Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Results suggest that, in a model in which bonds and money are counted as net wealth, an important source of cross-country heterogeneity in response to a common monetary shock is the differences in national economies' budgetary positions. In particular, we note that centralising seigniorage revenues may lead, in the long term, to wealth redistribution across countries. Although institutional arrangements such as the Stability Pact might not be necessary to ensure fiscal sustainability, its strict enforcement is shown to be associated with overall ever-lasting benefits. Transition to the new steady state is, however, likely to be remarkably costly for high-debt EMU countries. Finally, different degrees of efficiency characterising European credit markets do not seem to play a major role in explaining asymmetric responses.     

货币政策加力从紧的理由

在国人眼里,地震带来的是无法弥补的损失和创伤;在央行眼里,地震带来的是什么？这是一个有关“是什么”的实证问题,撇开个人的感情色彩和价值判断来看,对货币政策应该是一个怎样结论？