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Für Thomas Mayer, Deutsche Bank, erscheint es sinnvoll, dass die EZB den Leitzins auf sein neutrales Niveau hochführt. Noch wichtiger für die Wahrung der Stabilität des Euro wäre es aber, dass sich die EZB aus der Finanzierung von durch Insolvenz bedrohten Staaten und ihren Banken zurückzieht. Holger Schmieding, Berenberg Bank, sieht keine Inflationsgefahr. Er rechnet für Deutschland mit einem jährlichen Preisanstieg von gut 2%. Manfred Jäger-Ambroz.ewicz, Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft Köln, vertritt die Meinung, dass die EZB eine sachgerechte Leitzinspolitik umsetzt und einen angemessenen Leitzinspfad suggeriert. Michael Lamla und Jan-Egbert Sturm, ETH Zürich, betonen, dass die EZB genügend Glaubwürdigkeit und Transparenz besitzt, um die Inflationserwartungen zu beeinflussen und zu homogenisieren. Ihrer Ansicht nach steigen insgesamt die Inflationserwartungen im Euroraum für das nächste Jahr weiterhin an, ohne aber beunruhigende Werte anzunehmen. Auch Ulrich Kater, DekaBank, sieht die Glaubwürdigkeit des Inflationsregimes mit der Geldwertstabilität als wichtigster Zielsetzung unabhängiger Notenbanken nicht gefährdet. Leon Leschus, HWWI, geht davon aus, dass hohe Rohstoffpreise weiterhin zum Inflationsdruck beitragen werden. Es wäre somit wünschenswert, wenn die EZB ihre begonnene restriktive Geldpolitik fortsetzen würde. Hans Wolfgang Brachinger, Universität Fribourg, sieht angesichts teurer Rohstoffe, zunehmender Spekulation und steigender Produktionskosten in China die Inflationsrisiken in Deutschland wachsen, und zwar unabhängig vom Handeln der EZB.

While there is ample evidence how central bank communication and interest rate decisions are perceived by financial markets, insights regarding the response of the public is lacking. Media is known to be an important transmitter of news to the public. Based on articles in the Financial Times Europe, we test how expectations on the future course of monetary policy presented in the media are affected by central bank communication and interest rate decisions., KOF Working Papers, 334

From 2000 to 2003, when Ben Bernanke was a professor and then a Fed Governor, he wrote extensively about monetary policy at the zero bound on interest rates. He advocated aggressive stimulus policies, such as a money-financed tax cut and an inflation target of 3-4%. Yet, since U.S. interest rates hit zero in 2008, the Fed under Chairman Bernanke has taken more cautious actions. This paper asks when and why Bernanke changed his mind about zero-bound policy. The answer, at one level, is that he was influenced by analysis from the Fed staff that was presented at the FOMC meeting of June 2003. This answer raises another question: why did the staff's views influence Bernanke so strongly? I seek answers to this question in the social psychology literature on group decision-making.

This paper aims at discovering the decision rule the Governing Council of the ECB uses to set interest rates. We construct a Taylor rule for each member of the council and for the euro area as a whole, and aggregate the interest rates they produce using several classes of decision-making mechanisms: chairman dominance, bargaining, consensus, voting, and voting with a chairman. We test alternative scenarios in which individual members of the council pursue either a national or a federal objective. We then compare the interest-rate path predicted by each scenario with the observed euro area's interest rate. We find that scenarios in which all members of the Governing Council are assumed to pursue Euro-area-wide objectives are dominated by scenarios in which decisions are made collectively by a council consisting of members pursuing national objectives. The best-performing scenario is the one in which individual members of the Governing Council follow national objectives, bargain over the interest rate, and their weights are based on their country's share of the zone's GDP.

I propose a discrete choice method for estimating monetary policy reaction functions based on research by Hu and Phillips (2004). This method distinguishes between determining the underlying desired rate which drives policy rate changes and actually implementing interest rate changes. The method is applied to ECB rate setting between 1999 and 2010 by estimating a forward-looking Taylor rule on a monthly basis using real-time data drawn from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. All parameters are estimated significantly and with the expected sign. Including the period of financial turmoil in the sample delivers a less aggressive policy rule as the ECB was constrained by the lower bound on nominal interest rates. The ECB's non-standard measures helped to circumvent that constraint on monetary policy, however. For the pre-turmoil sample, the discrete choice model's estimated desired policy rate is more aggressive and less gradual than least squares estimates of the same rule specification. This is explained by the fact that the discrete choice model takes account of the fact that central banks change interest rates by discrete amounts. An advantage of using discrete choice models is that probabilities are attached to the different outcomes of every interest rate setting meeting. These probabilities correlate fairly well with the probabilities derived from surveys among commercial bank economists.

This paper investigates why financial market experts misperceive the interest rate policy of the European Central Bank (ECB). Assuming a Taylor-rule-type reaction function of the ECB, we use qualitative survey data on expectations about the future interest rate, inflation, and output to discover the sources of in- dividual interest rate forecast errors. Based on a panel random coefficient model, we show that financial experts have systematically misperceived the ECB's in- terest rate rule. However, although experts tend to overestimate the impact of inflation on future interest rates, perceptions of monetary policy have become more accurate since clarification of the ECB's monetary policy strategy in May 2003. We find that this improved communication has reduced disagreement over the ECB's response to expected inflation during the financial crisis.

This paper examines the impact of the financial crisis of 2008, specifically the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, on the federal funds market. Rather than a complete collapse of lending in the presence of a market-wide shock, we see that banks became more restrictive in their choice of counterparties. Following the Lehman bankruptcy, we find that amounts and spreads became more sensitive to a borrowing bank's characteristics. While the market did not contract dramatically, lending rates increased. Further, the market did not seem to expand to meet the increased demand predicted by the drop in other bank funding markets. We examine discount window borrowing as a proxy for unmet fed funds demand and find that the fed funds market is not indiscriminate. As expected, borrowers who access the discount window have a lower return on assets. On the lender side, we do not find that the characteristics of the lending bank significantly affect the amount of interbank loans it makes. In particular, we do not find that worse performing banks began hoarding liquidity and indiscriminately reducing their lending.

The author evaluates the effect of the Bank of Canada's conditional commitment regarding the target overnight rate on longer-term market interest rates by taking into account the relationship between interest rates, inflation, and unemployment rates. By using vector autoregressive models of monthly interest rates, month-over-month inflation, and unemployment rates for Canada and the United States, the author finds that the Canadian 1-year treasury bill rates and 1-year forward 3-month rates have generally been lower than their model-implied values since April 2009, while the difference between the U.S. realized rates and their model-implied values has been much smaller. The author also studies the effect of the conditional commitment on longer-term government bond yields with maturities of 2, 5, and 10 years, and finds lower actual Canadian longer-term interest rates than their model-implied values, though their difference diminishes as the maturities become longer. The evidence appears to suggest that the Bank of Canada's conditional commitment likely has produced a persistent effect in lowering Canadian interest rates relative to what their historical relationship with inflation and unemployment rates would imply. However, this finding is not statistically strong and is subject to caveats such as possible in-sample model instability and the dependence of the results on the choice of inflation variable., L'auteur tente d'évaluer l'incidence que l'engagement conditionnel de la Banque du Canada à l'égard du taux cible du financement à un jour a pu avoir sur les taux du marché à plus long terme. Pour ce faire, il examine la relation entre les taux d'intérêt, l'inflation et le taux de chômage au moyen de modèles vectoriels autorégressifs formalisant l'évolution mensuelle des taux d'intérêt, de l'inflation et des taux de chômage au Canada et aux États-Unis. Il constate qu'au Canada, les taux des bons du Trésor à un an et les taux à trois mois anticipés à l'horizon d'un an ont en général été inférieurs depuis avril 2009 à ceux que génèrent les modèles, alors qu'aux États-Unis, la différence entre les taux réalisés et les valeurs issues des modèles est beaucoup plus faible. L'auteur étudie aussi l'effet de l'engagement conditionnel des autorités sur les rendements des obligations d'État à 2, 5 et 10 ans. Les taux d'intérêt canadiens à moyen et long terme sont plus bas que ceux prévus par les modèles, mais l'écart se rétrécit à mesure que l'échéance s'éloigne. Il semble donc que l'engagement conditionnel pris par la Banque se soit traduit par une diminution durable des taux canadiens par rapport à ce que leur relation passée avec les taux d'inflation et de chômage laissait présager. Ce résultat n'est cependant pas très significatif. Il pourrait être dû à une instabilité du modèle sur échantillon et est sensible au choix de la variable relative à l'inflation.

Estimations of simple monetary policy rules are often very rigid. Standard practice requires that a decision is made as to which indicators the central bank is assumed to respond to, ignoring the data-rich environment in which policy-makers typically form their decisions. However, the choice of the feedback variables in the estimations of simple rules bears non-trivial implications for the prescriptions borne from these rules. This paper addresses this issue for the euro area using a new comprehensive real-time database for the euro area and examines the ECB’s past interest-rate setting behaviour in two complementary ways that are designed to deal with both model and data uncertainty. In a first step we follow the “thick-modelling” approach suggested by Granger and Jeon (2004) and estimate a series of 3,330 policy rules. In a second step we employ a factor-model approach similar to Bernanke and Boivin (2003) for the US Fed, but with structurally interpretable factors à la Belviso and Milani (2006). Taken together, we find a strong justification for the need of adopting robust approaches to describe the historical evolution of euro area monetary policy. We also find that the ECB is neither purely backward nor forward-looking, but reacts to a synthesis of the available information on the current and future state of the economy.

This paper reviews the rationale for quantitative easing when central bank policy rates reach near zero levels in light of recent announcements regarding direct asset purchases by the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. Empirical evidence from the previous period of quantitative easing in Japan between 2001 and 2006 is presented. During this earlier period the Bank of Japan was able to expand the monetary base very quickly and significantly. Quantitative easing translated into a greater and more lasting expansion of M1 relative to nominal GDP. Deflation subsided by 2005. As soon as inflation appeared to stabilize near a rate of zero, the Bank of Japan rapidly reduced the monetary base as a share of nominal income as it had announced in 2001. The Bank was able to exit from extensive quantitative easing within less than a year. Some implications for the current situation in Europe and the United States are discussed.

Senior Non-Resident Fellow Jürgen von Hagen offers his recommendations for the proper monetary policy to lead the eurozone out of the crisis. He argues that the tentative recovery in the euro area indicates that both monetary and fiscal policy can be normalised soon. However, because delaying fiscal consolidation would result in greater debt burdens whereas monetary policy can be quickly adjusted to respond to unforeseen developments, there is less risk involved if a fiscal exit comes first. In any case, the two strategies must be coordinated and the European Central Bank must be very clear on its interest rate policies. This paper was prepared as part of testimony for the European Parliament's Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee.

The US Federal Reserve cut interest rates more vigorously in the recent recession than the European Central Bank did. By comparison with the Fed, the ECB followed a more measured course of action. We use an estimated dynamic general equilibrium model with financial frictions to show that comparisons based on such simple metrics as the variance of policy rates are misleading. We find that - because there is greater inertia in the ECB’s policy rule - the ECB’s policy actions actually had a greater stabilizing effect than did those of the Fed. As a consequence, a potentially severe recession turned out to be only a slowdown, and inflation never departed from levels consistent with the ECB’s quantitative definition of price stability. Other factors that account for the different economic outcomes in the Euro Area and US include differences in shocks and differences in the degree of wage and price flexibility.

The paper evaluates the ability of market participants to anticipate monetary policy decisions in the euro area and in 13 other countries. First, by looking at the magnitude and the volatility of the changes in the money market rates we show that the days of policy meetings are special days for financial markets. Second, we find that the predictability of the ECB’s monetary policy is fully comparable (and sometimes slightly better) to that of the FED and the Bank of England. Finally, an econometric analysis of the ability of market participants to incorporate in the current money rates the expected changes in the key policy rate shows that in the euro area policy decisions are anticipated well in advance.

Most monetary policy committees decide on interest rates using a simple majority voting rule. Given the inherent heterogeneity of committee members, this voting rule is suboptimal in terms of the quality of the interest rate decision, but popular for other (political) reasons. We show that a clustering of committee members into 2 subgroups, as is the case in a hub-and spokes systems of central banks such as the Fed or the ESCB, can eliminate this suboptimality whilst retaining the majority voting rule.

We investigated, empirically, why Japanese banks held excess reserves in the late 1990s. Specifically, we pin down two factors explaining the demand for excess reserves: a low short-term interest rate, or call rate, and the fragile financial health of banks. The virtually zero call rate increased the demand for excess reserves substantially, and a high bad loans ratio largely contributed to the increase in excess reserve holdings. We found that the holdings of excess reserves would fall by half if the call rate were to be raised to its level prior to the adoption of the zero-interest-rate policy, and the bad loans ratio were to fall by 50%.

Using an empirical New-Keynesian model with optimal discretionary monetary policy, we calibrate key parameters - the central bank's preference parameters; the degree of forward-looking behavior in the determination of inflation and output; and the variances of inflation and output shocks - to match some broad characteristics of U.S. data. Our preferred parameterizations all imply a small concern for output stability but a large preference for interest rate smoothing, and a small degree of forward-looking behavior in price-setting but a large degree of forward-looking in the determination of output. We provide some intuition for these results and discuss their consequences for practical monetary policy analysis.