A note on the neutrality of temporary monetary disturbances

In the rational expectations analysis of Lucas and Barro, the quantity of money is subject to random shocks that are specified to be unanticipated and permanent in character. The present note provides some simple examples of alternative money supply specifications that lead to non-neutrality of perceived temporary monetary growth through the channel of expected inflation. Subsequently, the discussion demonstrates that this non-neutrality is not robust to an alternative specification of private monetary behavior, the permanent balance model. The key difference is that the initial model involves commodity supply and demand which depend on current real balances while in the subsequent model these depend on permanent balances. Some final remarks are directed to the idea that the distinction between current and permanent balances in this simple model could be linked to alternative roles of money in more detailed, optimizing analyses.     

Interest rate interactions in the classical gold standard, 1880-1914: was there any monetary independence?

This paper examines an hypothesis of Svensson (1994) (Journal of Monetary Economics 33, 157-199) that a credible target zone can confer on a country a degree of independence in the operation of its monetary policy, even when exchange rates are fixed. We test this hypothesis for the Classical gold standard using a newly created monthly data base for the period 1880-1913. Building on the recently noted finding that the Classical gold standard represented a credible, well-behaved, target zone system we propose a number of ways of testing the Svensson’ model. Our main finding is that the Classical gold standard did indeed confer some independence in the operation of monetary policy for participating countries. This would seem to have an important bearing on the kind of institutional framework required for a modern day target zone to function effectively and, in particular, to weather speculative attacks.     

黄金充当货币的历史逻辑

历史上先后出现过两种类型的货币,即商品货币和纸币。在商品货币发展的过程中,唯有黄金本位制演变为全球性的货币制度安排。本文分别从黄金优良的物质特性,以及工业革命后英国确立在全球经济和金融领域主导地位、黄金大发现等社会经济因素角度,分析了黄金充当货币的历史逻辑。文章指出,虽然黄金已逐渐淡出国际货币舞台,但其作为一些国家重要的国际储备选项,仍然发挥着国际货币体系价值支撑的作用。     

Factors affecting monetary policy in an era of inflation

A money supply-reaction function is developed and estimated within the context of an IS-LM framework to test the responsiveness of the Federal Reserve to the government budget restraint and certain parameters of the model. The results reveal that a large portion of the recent expansion of the monetary base may be attributed to increases in government debt and provide an essential first step in quantifying the inflationary impact of deficits. The monetary base is also expanded in response to increases in inflationary expectations and previous increases in the monetary base, but is not statistically correlated to changes in the unemployment rate or potential national income, or to rises in interest rates caused by sources other than higher inflationary expectations, previous monetary policy, or the Treasury borrowing requirement.     

房地产黄金时代已经过去

房地产市场从黄金时代变成白银时代,我们要适应这种变化,产品要创新,融资要创新,管理要创新,通过创新要适应变化了的市场,这是什么市场?是卖方市场进入买方市场。在亚洲地产融资模式创新峰会上,中国房地产研究会副会长顾云昌如此解读房     

A model of the classical gold standard with depletion

The operation and properties of the classical gold standard are well recognized. However, one aspect that has not been dealt with is that gold has the characteristics of a durable, but depletable resource. In this paper, we compare the simple classical model of the gold standard with a model of the gold standard that incorporates the durable, depletable nature of gold. Using numerical simulation techniques, we demonstrate an inescapable tendency to long-run deflation when account is taken of the resource constraint. These results are consistent, with and without technological progress and variable real rates of return.     

Tests of a rational expectations-structural neutrality model with persistent effects of monetary disturbances

This paper describes tests of a rational expectations-structural neutrality (RESN) model capable of accounting for the persistent effects of aggregate demand shocks. The model imposes the identifying restriction that only contemporaneous shocks to aggregate demand affect a vector stochastic process of highly cyclic real variables. Tests are performed using a well-known measure of unanticipated monetary change as the demand disturbance. The results suggest that RESN models, observationally inequivalent from Keynesian models, can be constructed in such a way as to account for observable relationships between monetary and real variables.     

The impacts of standard monetary and budgetary policies on liquidity and financial markets: International evidence from the credit freeze crisis

This paper evaluates the domestic and international impacts of lowering short-term interest rates and increasing budget spending on several indicators of liquidity, volatility, credit and economic activity. Data from the 2003–2011 period in the United States, the Euro zone and Canada were used to develop two SVAR models for assessing the national effectiveness and the international spillovers of monetary and budgetary policies during the credit freeze crisis. While monetary policies caused a temporary decrease in volatility and increase in liquidity in North American stock markets, the shocks were mainly domestic and ineffective at generating liquidity in the banking sector. In contrast, government spending shocks had a positive impact on credit and consumption, especially in Europe and Canada. Moreover, budgetary policies also had a positive international spillover effect on consumption and credit, especially for smaller economies such as Canada.     

Substitution between monetary assets and consumer goods: New evidence on the monetary transmission mechanism

This paper presents important new evidence on the monetary transmission mechanism in the context of the degree of substitution across UK monetary assets and consumption goods. Specifically, our empirical results show that durable goods expenditures are a relatively powerful element of the monetary transmission mechanism with semi-durables consumption having a somewhat smaller impact. Our results also provide an explanation for the “puzzle” that the nominal expenditure share of durables has remained relatively stable in recent years while the real expenditure share has increased dramatically. In addition, this paper demonstrates that the potential bias in substitution estimates from using artificial break-adjusted monetary data can be reduced by using the relatively new non-break adjusted monetary data produced by the Bank of England.     

On the choice of immediate monetary targets

This paper studies the control problem of a stochastic monetary system. The Central Bank has the choice of two targets: the size of its portfolio of assets or the level of interest rate on that class of assets. If its objective is to minimize the variance of a monetary aggregate or of private sector interest rate, the conditions under which one or the other of the targets should be used are analyzed. However, if the ultimate objective is a minimum variance in a desired GNP level the effect of the immediate target is the same whether the central bank employs a money stock or a private interest rate target.     

The impact of monetary policy announcements on the stock price of large European banks during the financial crisis

Since 2007, the European Central Bank responded decisively to the challenges posed by the global financial crisis, reducing key policy interest rates to unprecedented low levels and intervening with non-standard policy measures (i.e., monetary easing and liquidity provision). This paper aims to assess the impact of ECB monetary policy announcements on the stock price of large European banks. As a first step, an event study is conducted in order to measure cumulated abnormal returns (CARs) around the announcements over June 2007–June 2013; the second step is a regression analysis aimed at identifying the determinants of CARs. Results show that banks were more sensitive to non-conventional measures than to interest rate decisions, and that the same type of intervention may have a different impact depending on the stage of the crisis. In addition, banks with weaker balance sheets and operating with high-risk were more sensitive to monetary policy interventions.     

Lumpy investment and the monetary transmission mechanism

The lumpy nature of plant-level investment is generally not taken into account in the context of New Keynesian monetary theory (see, e.g., 8 and 32). Our main result shows that if this theory is augmented by a standard model of lumpy investment, monetary policy shocks lead to large but very short-lived impacts on output and inflation, in a way that goes against empirical evidence and the consensus view in the literature.     

Hot money in bank credit flows to emerging markets during the banking globalization era

This paper investigates the relative importance of hot money in bank credit and portfolio flows from the US to 18 emerging markets over the period 1988–2012. We deploy state-space models à la Kalman filter to identify the unobserved hot money as the temporary component of each type of flow. The analysis reveals that the importance of hot money relative to the permanent component in bank credit flows has significantly increased during the 2000s relative to the 1990s. This finding is robust to controlling for the influence of push and pull factors in the two unobserved components. The evidence supports indirectly the view that global banks have played an important role in the transmission of the global financial crisis to emerging markets, and endorses the use of regulations to manage international capital flows.     

International channels of the Fed's unconventional monetary policy

Previous research has established that the Federal Reserve's large scale asset purchases (LSAPs) significantly influenced international bond yields. We use dynamic term structure models to uncover to what extent signaling and portfolio balance channels caused these declines. For the U.S. and Canada, the evidence supports the view that LSAPs had substantial signaling effects. For Australian and German yields, signaling effects were present but likely more moderate, and portfolio balance effects appear to have played a relatively larger role than in the U.S. and Canada. Portfolio balance effects were small for Japanese yields and signaling effects basically nonexistent. These findings about LSAP channels are consistent with predictions based on interest rate dynamics during normal times: Signaling effects tend to be large for countries with strong yield responses to conventional U.S. monetary policy surprises, and portfolio balance effects are consistent with the degree of substitutability across international bonds, as measured by the covariance between foreign and U.S. bond returns.     

Milton Friedman's monetary economics and the quantity-theory tradition

This article provides a selective review of Milton Friedman's contributions to monetary economics focusing on five areas in particular: the demand for money, the joint historical and empirical work with Anna J. Schwartz, the theoretical and empirical analyses of the Phillips Curve, monetary policy and monetary dynamics.     

Unconventional monetary policies and the corporate bond market

The paper uses a reduced-form vector autoregressive framework to study the effects of quantitative easing and operation “twist”, as well as a conventional monetary expansion, on corporate bond yields and spreads. We construct rating- and maturity-based weekly bond portfolios using TRACE and simulate monetary policies as shocks to the Treasury yield curve. We find that none of the policies can persistently lower corporate spreads, and that operation twist is the only policy capable of lowering corporate yields. This latter finding can be accounted for by the operation twist’s ability to keep the monetary base constant and, therefore, to flatten the riskless yield curve without generating inflationary expectations.     

Deconstructing the information era

Information theory, while claiming universality, ignores civilisation and spiritual perspectives of knowledge. Moreover, the information society heralded by many as the victory of humanity over darkness is merely capitalism disguised but now commodifying selves as well. This essay argues for a more communicative approach wherein futures can be created through authentic global conversations--a gaia of civilisations. Current trends, however, do not lie in that direction. Instead, we are moving towards temporal and cultural impoverishment. Is the Web then the iron cage or can a global ohana (family, civil society) be created through cybertechnologies? Answering these and other questions are possible only when we move to layers of analysis outside conventional understandings of information and the information era and to a paradigm where communication and culture are central.     

告别名紧实松的货币政策

防止经济从偏热走向过热,"名义紧、实质松"的货币政策调整因此首当其冲。名紧实松的货币政策已到尽头表面看起来,中国的货币政策是比较紧的,特别是2007年以来,连续五次加息、连续九次提高法定准备金率这样的紧缩政策实行,但实质并不如此。