Search

To analyse the interdependence between monetary and fiscal policy during a financial crisis, we develop an open-economy DSGE model with monetary and fiscal policy as well as financial markets in a continuous-time framework based on stochastic differential equations. Monetary policy is modelled using both a standard and a modified Taylor rule and fiscal policy is modelled as either expansionary or austere. In addition, we differentiate between open economies and monetary union members. We find evidence that the modified Taylor rule notably reduces the likelihood that the financial market crisis affects the real economy. But if we assume that households are averse with respect to outstanding government debt, we find that a combination of expansionary monetary policy and austere fiscal policy provides better stabilisation of both domestic and foreign economies in terms of both output and inflation. In the case of a monetary union, we find that stabilisation of output in the country where the financial shock originates is no longer as easy and, in terms of prices, there is now deflation in the country where the crisis originated and a positive inflation rate in the other country.

We examine the relative ability of simple inflation targeting (IT) and price level targeting (PLT) monetary policy rules to minimize both inflation variability and business cycle fluctuations in Canada for shocks that have important consequences for global commodity prices.

The author considers scientific background of the methods and instruments of monetary policy under the integration conditions in the post-Soviet space. Analysis of formation conditions of the Economic and Monetary Union of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kirgizstan is presented. Findings about the expediency of the use of various theoretical approaches to regulation of exchange rate within the formation of state’s currency policy under globalization conditions are introduced. Problems of monetary and currency policy along with directions of their development in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) are discussed. The directions of monetary and currency policy coordination within EAEU are offered. The author defines possibilities of their realisation under present conditions.KEYWORDS: economic integration, monetary policy, currency, exchange rate, restrictions.

The paper uses historical data on interest rates from 1920 to 2016 to explore whether a world rate of interest exists and whether a monetary hegemon affects it. The first principal component of long-term interest rates accounts for 75% of the variation in a matrix of 17 countries and proxies for the world rate of interest. The U.S. played the role of a hegemon, influencing long-term bond rates. After the introduction of the euro in 1999, interest rates in most European countries followed German interest rates but German rates followed U.S. rates even more than before the introduction of the euro. In two countries on the northern periphery, Denmark and Sweden, interest rates shadow German rates and the low rates have contributed to rising house prices and rising mortgage debt. Independent monetary policy calls for targeted controls on capital flows.

The essence of monetary hegemony is the power of one monetary authority to influence monetary conditions outside its jurisdiction. Such power did not exist under the gold standard but came into existence for the U.S. Federal Reserve in the aftermath of the First World War. The basis of that power was the massive drain of gold out of Europe into the U.S. during its period of neutrality and the scope for the newly created Federal Reserve to pursue a discretionary monetary policy with specific aims such as stable prices, rapid recovery from recession, and countering pullbacks in the equity market. Throughout its 100-year exercise of monetary hegemony, the U.S. has used this in ways that have spread inflation around the globe, both goods inflation and asset inflation. Both the U.S. and the rest of the world would have benefited from a U.S. monetary hegemon based on sound money principle rather than on inflationary finance.

We construct a new measure of uncertainty about Federal Reserve policy actions and their consequences, a monetary policy uncertainty (MPU) index. We evaluate the information content of our index and document the usefulness of our index in bridging periods of conventional and unconventional policy making. We also estimate the aggregate effects of shocks to MPU on output, credit spreads, and other variables. Finally, we investigate the transmission channels of MPU, finding that heightened MPU leads to protracted declines in firm investment through both real options and financial frictions channels.

COVID-19 is the most invasive global crisis in the postwar era, jeopardizing all dimensions of human activity. By theorizing COVID-19 as a public bad, I shed light on one of the great debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries regarding the relationship between the United States and liberal international order (LIO). Conceptualizing the pandemic as a public bad, I analyze its consequences for US hegemony. Unlike other international public bads and many of the most important public goods that make up the LIO, the COVID-19 public bad not only has some degree of rivalry but can be made partially excludable, transforming it into more of a club good. Domestically, I demonstrate how the failure to effectively manage the COVID-19 public bad has compromised America's ability to secure the health of its citizens and the domestic economy, the very foundations for its international leadership. These failures jeopardize US provision of other global public goods. Internationally, I show how the US has already used the crisis strategically to reinforce its opposition to free international movement while abandoning the primary international institution tasked with fighting the public bad, the World Health Organization (WHO). While the only area where the United States has exercised leadership is in the monetary sphere, I argue this feat is more consequential for maintaining hegemony. However, even monetary hegemony could be at risk if the pandemic continues to be mismanaged.

As African countries await the birth of her monetary union, the link between economic policies and the real economy will continue to dominate policy debate. This paper investigates whether financial development influences the effectiveness of monetary policy on output and inflation in Africa. We apply standard panel data techniques to annual data from 1990--2015 for a panel of 39 African countries, and find a weak relationship between financial development and monetary policy effectiveness in Africa. The results show no statistical evidence of the relationship for output growth, whereas a negative relationship exist in the case of inflation, but only at their contemporaneous levels. Thus, there is need to strengthen the monetary transmission mechanism in African countries through deliberate efforts to deepen financial sector development.

Monetary policy entails demand augmenting and demand diverting effects, with its impact on the trade balance—and spillovers to other countries—depending on the relative magnitude of these opposing effects. Using US data, and a sign-restricted structural VAR identification strategy, we investigate how monetary policy shocks affects the trade balance, shedding light on the importance of the two effects. Overall, the results indicate that monetary policy has a meaningful impact on the trade balance. A monetary loosening (tightening) leads to a strengthening (weakening) of the overall trade balance, indicating that, on average, demand diversion dominates. This effect of monetary policy on trade is revealed in full when distinguisging between trading partners with fixed exchange rates—for which only demand augmenting operates—and flexible exchange rates—for which both effects operate. We also explore spillover differences between conventional and unconventional monetary policy, as well as changes in spillovers in the postcrisis period (due to an impaired monetary transmission mechanism). While our results suggest that monetary policy comes with spillovers through trade, they should not be interpreted as evidence against the use of this policy instrument as such. From a global perspective, optimal monetary policy should be assessed in conjunction with deployment of other policy measures, inclluding the ability of recipient countries to deploy their own policy measures to offset undesirable spillovers.

In this paper, we examine the asymmetric effects of monetary policy shocks on economic activity in Turkey. We use quarterly data for the gross domestic product (GDP) and industrial production along with their sub-sectors for the 2006Q1–2017Q4 period. We implement a Markov Switching Model to endogenously determine the states of the economy with two different variables: we first use real aggregate GDP data to determine the expansionary or contractionary business cycles and then we use credit data to determine expansionary or contractionary credit cycles. We find that the monetary policy shocks have stronger effects on both the GDP, industrial production and their sub-components during contractionary periods, while the results are much weaker for the expansionary periods. Moreover, the asymmetric effects become more apparent when we use credit cycles for the determination of economic states.

Currency choices in international trade are related to the depth of financial markets, especially in the provision of trade finance. This paper examines: (i) how this financial channel affects international currency choices and (ii) the corresponding macroeconomic implications. Based on unique data with global coverage, we first document the empirical patterns of international currency usage and emphasize the importance of financial market development identifying the distinct trade finance channel. We then build a two-country monetary search model featuring time-to-ship friction and trade finance arrangements: goods are delivered one period after the contract, and the lack of commitment between exporters and importers forces the two parties to rely on bank-intermediated trade finance. The currency choice is endogenized and related to financial efficiency, terms of trade, and the inflation rate. We find that a country issuing a single international currency will: (i) enjoy incumbency advantage but have less room when implementing monetary policy; (ii) face a hump-shaped relationship between its economy size and optimal inflation level; and (iii) experience a persistent deficit in international trade. These results are illustrated with numerical examples and have rich implications for the current international monetary system dominated by the U.S. dollar.

Using a simple New Keynesian model of a monetary union that incorporates financial frictions, we show that country-targeted macroprudential policy could complement a single monetary policy at the union level. In particular, macroprudential policy helps taming financial and economic imbalances in the presence of countercyclical financial shocks and imperfect transmission of monetary policy to financial conditions in a monetary union. These results are even stronger when different economies are hit by asymmetric shocks that cancel out without provoking any monetary policy reaction. In addition, we show that when coordinated with monetary policy, country-targeted macroprudential policy (implemented by national or supranational authorities) has advantages over a federally implemented policy that reacts to average financial indicators.

We estimate a logit mixture vector autoregressive model describing monetary policy transmission in the euro area over the period 1999–2015. In contrast to other classes of nonlinear vector autoregressive models, regime affiliation is neither strictly binary, nor binary with a transition period, and based on multiple variables. We show that monetary policy transmission in the euro area can be described as a mixture of two states. In both states, output and prices are found to decrease after contractionary monetary policy shocks. However, the effects of monetary policy are less enduring in the “crisis state.”

We study how monetary policy in China influences banks’ shadow banking activities. We develop and estimate the endogenously switching monetary policy rule that is based on institutional facts and at the same time tractable in the spirit of Taylor (1993). This development, along with two newly constructed micro banking datasets, enables us to establish the following empirical evidence. Contractionary monetary policy during 2009–2015 caused shadow banking loans to rise rapidly, offsetting the expected decline of traditional bank loans and hampering the effectiveness of monetary policy on total bank credit. We advance a theoretical explanation of our empirical findings. (JEL E32, E52, G21, O16, O23, P24, P34)

All books in this flagship series contain carefully selected substantial extracts from key cases, legislation, and academic debate, providing students with a stand-alone resource. This chapter, focuses on the free movement of capital and economic and monetary union (EMU). It first considers the movement of capital, one of the four freedoms enshrined in the original Rome Treaty. It then discusses EMU and analyzes the movement towards EMU, and the Treaty provisions that set the legal framework for EMU. The chapter considers arguments for and against EMU and the position of the European Central Bank, concluding with an overview of the stresses and strains of EMU in the light of the banking and financial crisis. The UK version contains a further section analysing issues concerning free movement of capital between the EU and the UK post-Brexit.

Analyzing the 1998 Asian financial crisis, this chapter attempts to lay out interactions between hedge funds, financial markets, and nation-states. The author holds that with no world government, the free trade ideal has never been realized. The balance of international trade is not the balance of free trade, but a balance between mercantilism and monetary hegemony. The core strategy of hedge funds is to manipulate prices in financial markets. This is similar to monopoly. To prevent the world falling into another Great Depression, international agencies should regulate manipulation. This requires the unanimous consent of most countries, especially the dominant ones.

Recent resurgence of interest in understanding the transmission mechanism of monetary policy focuses on two main channels of explanation, i.e. the money and credit channel. This paper investigates a version of the credit channel, i.e. the bank-lending channel for the Malaysian economy. The bank-lending channel assigns a critical role for the supply of bank loans in transmitting the effect of monetary policy on real economic activities. The study analyzes the effect of monetary policy on the ability and willingness of Malaysian banks to issue loans with respect to the development in the open financial market. Specifically it argues on the changes of the pattern of influence as progress in the open financial market takes place. A multivariate system analysis of vector auto regression (VAR) is used. The results show that prior to the progress in open financial market, the monetary authority has a direct influence on supply of loans of banks. However, this direct influence lessens as the open financial market develops. Loans are more affected by interest rates spread that dictates conditions in open financial markets. Thus, the ability of the monetary authority to steer real economic activities is subjected to development in the financial market.

We discover a consumption channel of monetary policy in a model with money and government bonds. When the central bank withdraws government bonds (short-term or long-term) through open market operations, it lowers returns on bonds. The lower return has a direct negative impact on consumption by households that hold bonds and an indirect negative impact on consumption by households that hold money. As a result, firms earn less profits from production, which leads to higher unemployment. The existence of such a consumption channel can help us understand the effects of unconventional monetary policy.

This paper examines the effects of fiscal devaluations in a model of a monetary union characterized by national fiscal policies and supranational monetary policy. We show that a revenue-neutral permanent tax shift in one country, which raises its consumption tax to finance a cut to labor taxes, increases welfare of the monetary union in the long run. The distribution of gains among countries depends on their degree of financial integration. We also document that price rigidities result in short-run welfare costs.

This paper explores James Buchanan’s contributions to monetary economics and argues these contributions form the foundation of a robust monetary economics paradigm. While often not recognized for his contributions to monetary economics, Buchanan’s scholarship offers important insights for current debates, especially the renewed interest in narrow banking in the wake of the financial crisis. We argue that the post-2007 crisis milieu creates a unique opportunity to recognize, as Buchanan did, the vital role that money plays in the market as the ‘grammar of commerce.’ That recognition makes the need for more fundamental reform of our monetary regimes at the constitutional level more apparent, making Buchanan’s work on monetary constitutions more relevant than ever before. We then discuss how adopting Buchanan’s monetary framework can improve both monetary scholarship and institutions.

This paper investigates the causal effects of monetary policy on the British economy during the classical gold standard. Based on the narrative identification approach, I find that following a one percentage point monetary tightening, unemployment rose by 0.9 percentage points, while inflation fell by 3.1 percentage points. In addition, monetary policy shocks accounted for a third of macroeconomic volatility.

Monetary aggregates have a special role under the "two pillar strategy" of the ECB. Hence, the need for a theoretically consistent measure of monetary aggregates for the European Monetary Union (EMU) is needed. This paper analyzes aggregation over monetary assets for the EMU. We aggregate over the monetary services for the EMU-11 countries, which include Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Slovakia, and Slovenia. We adopt the Divisia monetary aggregation approach, which is consistent with index number theory and microeconomic aggregation theory. The result is a multilateral Divisia monetary aggregate in accordance with Barnett (2007). The multilateral Divisia monetary aggregate for the EMU-11 is found to be more informative and a better signal of economic trends than the corresponding simple sum aggregate. We then analyze substitutability among monetary assets for the EMU-11 within the framework of a representative consumer's utility function, using Barnett’s (1983) locally flexible functional form, the minflex Laurent Indirect utility function. The analysis of elasticities with respect to the asset’s user-cost prices shows that: (i) transaction balances (TB) and deposits redeemable at notice (DRN) are income elastic, (ii) the DRN display large variation in price elasticity, and (iii) the monetary assets are not good substitutes for each other within the EMU-11. Simple sum monetary aggregation assumes that component assets are perfect substitutes. Hence simple sum aggregation distorts measurement of the monetary aggregate. The ECB has Divisia monetary aggregates provided to the Governing Council at its meetings, but not to the public. Our European Divisia monetary aggregates will be expanded and refined, in collaboration with Wenjuan Chen at the Humboldt University of Berlin, to a complete EMU Divisia monetary aggregates database to be supplied to the public by the Center for Financial Stability in New York City.

This paper examines the influence of central bank characteristics and their monetary policies on the level of financial development. Initially, on the basis of a review of the literature, we selected the central characteristics of the central banks as well as their monetary policies likely to influence the level of financial development. Next, we estimated an econometric model linking the level of financial development with measures of central bank characteristics and their monetary policies using panel data econometrics. The sample is made up of a panel of 89 countries, including 22 developed countries, 34 emerging countries and 33 developing countries over the period 1980–2010. The results show that there is a very significant influence of central bank characteristics as well as their monetary policies on the fluctuation of the level of financial development for the three categories of countries.

We estimate a global vector autoregression model to examine the effects of euro area and US monetary policy stances, together with the effect of euro area consumer prices, on economic activity and prices in non-euro EU countries using monthly data from 2001-2016. Along with some standard macroeconomic variables, our model contains measures of the shadow monetary policy rate to address the zero lower bound and the implementation of unconventional monetary policy by the European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve. We find that these monetary shocks have the expected qualitative effects but their magnitude differs across countries, with southeastern EU economies being less affected than their peers in Central Europe. Euro area monetary shocks have a greater effect than those that emanate from the US. We also find certain evidence that the effects of unconventional monetary policy measures are weaker than those of conventional measures. The spillovers of euro area price shocks to non-euro EU countries are limited, suggesting that the law of one price materializes slowly.

The purpose of this article is to quantify how bank capital determines the effects of monetary policy on bank lending. Additionally, we test how these effects differ during monetary contractions and expansions. Using a sample of 3,028 European banks between 1999 and 2012, we find that the reduction in loans caused by monetary restrictions is similar across banks regardless of their capital. In addition, during monetary expansions, banks increase their loan supply more as they become better capitalized. Contrary to previous studies, there are differences in the monetary policy transmission through capital only during expansionary monetary regimes. These results are relevant because previous studies have not measured how the marginal effect of monetary policy on the growth of loans varies with the value of capital. We contribute to the existing literature by using a new approach that quantifies this marginal effect, which considerably improves the interpretation of statistical results from models that include continuous variable interactions and allows a better understanding of the role of bank capital in the transmission of monetary shocks.

New Keynesian theory identifies a set of principles central to the design and implementation of monetary policy. These principles rely on the ability of a central bank to manage expectations precisely, with policy prescriptions typically derived under the assumption of perfect information and full rationality. However, the challenging macroeconomic environment bequeathed by the financial crisis has led many to question the efficacy of monetary policy, and, particularly, to question whether central banks can influence expectations with as much control as previously thought. In this paper, we survey the literature on monetary policy design under imperfect knowledge and asses to what degree its policy prescriptions deviate from the rational expectations benchmark.

We present a stylized model that illustrates how interbank trading can reduce the sensitivity of lending to entrepreneurs' net worth, thus affecting the transmission mechanism of monetary policy through the credit channel. We build a model-consistent measure of interconnectedness and document that, in the United States, this measure has increased substantially during the period 1952–2016. Finally, interacting the measure of interconnectedness in a structural vector autoregression and a factor-augmented vector autoregression for the US economy, we find that the impulse responses of several real and financial variables to monetary policy shocks are dampened as interconnectedness increases. We confirm the same result using data from 10 Euro area countries for the period 1999–2016.

This paper examines the relationship between the US monetary policy and stock valuation using a structural VAR framework that allows for the simultaneous interaction between the federal funds rate and stock market developments based on the assumption of long-run monetary neutrality. The results confirm a strong, negative and significant monetary policy tightening effect on real stock prices. Furthermore, we provide evidence consistent with a delayed response of small stocks to monetary policy shocks relative to large stocks.

The seeming impotence of monetary base expansion to influence money growth during the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis, can be regarded as a puzzle. A possible explanation is that central banks have used unconventional monetary policies to pursue dual objectives: to stabilize the financial system and to stimulate the economy. While achieving the latter objective may result in a positive spillover of base money into money growth, this does not necessarily hold for the former objective. This paper aims to disentangle these effects by estimating a state space model in which the monetary base is adjusted for distortions arising from the instability in financial markets. We find that stress in money and bond markets, measured by various indicators, has significantly affected the relationship between base growth and money growth in the EA, but not in the US.

This paper re-examines international transmissions of monetary policy shocks from advanced economies to emerging market economies. In terms of methodologies, it combines three novel features. First, it separates co-movement in monetary policies due to common shocks from spillovers of monetary policies from advanced to peripheral economies. Second, it uses revisions in growth and inflation and the Taylor rule to gauge desired changes in a country's interest rate if it is to focus exclusively on growth, inflation, and real exchange rate stability. Third, it proposes a specification that can work with the quantitative easing episodes when no changes in US interest rates are observed. In terms of empirical findings, we differ from the existing literature and document patterns of “2.5-lemma” or something between a trilemma and a dilemma: without capital controls, a flexible exchange rate regime offers some monetary policy autonomy when the center country tightens its monetary policy, yet it fails to do so when the center country lowers its interest rate. Capital controls help to insulate periphery countries from monetary policy shocks from the center country even when the latter lowers its interest rate.

Existing research demonstrates that housing, particularly residential investment, plays an important role in the transmission of monetary policy shocks to the overall economy. With this in mind, this paper investigates the relationship between monetary policy and housing market activity using a relatively new method for identifying monetary shocks. More specifically, a monetary policy shock is identified by explicitly imposing sign restrictions on impulse response vectors. The extra information from sign restrictions is important for new insights regarding the transmission of monetary policy to the housing sector – notably, the results indicate that residential investment is less sensitive to a contractionary shock than standard estimates with recursive restrictions. Given that the response of the housing sector using sign restrictions is smaller than other work using standard identification methods, the work indicates that further research is needed to examine whether other sectors of the economy may be less sensitive to monetary policy than previously thought.

This paper uses 13,766 firm-year observations between 2003 and 2013 from China to investigate the effects of monetary policy on corporate investment and the mitigating effects of cash holding. We find that tightening monetary policy reduces corporate investment while cash holdings mitigate such adverse effects. The cash mitigating role is especially significant for financially constrained firms, non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) and those firms located in a less developed financial market. Cash holding also improves investment efficiency when monetary policy is tightening and tightening monetary policy enhances the ‘cash-cash flow’ sensitivity. Our empirical evidence calls for a critical evaluation on the monetary policies implemented in China which are less effective for state-owned enterprises. It also calls for a necessity for local government to further develop regional financial markets to protect vulnerable businesses, such as non-SOEs and financially constrained firms, from external shocks in order to maintain their sustainable growth and competitive advantages.

The study examines the existence of the bank lending channel of monetary policy in European Union (EU) countries. The paper advances current research on the monetary transmission mechanism in the following ways: Firstly, we analyze the differences between ‘old’ Economic Monetary Union (EMU) and ‘new’ EU countries. Secondly, we examine the key bank characteristics and monetary policy indicators that may have an impact on the bank lending channel. We assume that short-term market interest rates and monetary aggregate M2 affect banks' activities. We apply the generalized method of moments (GMM) with pooled data from 1999 to 2012. We show that in the pre-crisis period the effect of changing the short-term market interest rates on the bank lending channel of monetary policy is more pronounced among ‘old’ EMU countries, whereas the effect of M2 is significant during the period of the global financial crisis (GFC) among ‘old’ EMU countries. Last but not least the important finding is that banks in ‘new’ EU countries react differently to monetary shocks.

Discussions of monetary policy rules after the 2007–2009 recession highlight the potential ineffectiveness of a central bank's actions when the short-term interest rate under its control is limited by the zero lower bound. This perspective assumes, in a manner consistent with the canonical New Keynesian model, that the quantity of money has no role to play in transmitting a central bank's actions to economic activity. This paper examines the validity of this claim and investigates the properties of alternative monetary policy rules based on control of the monetary base or a monetary aggregate in lieu of the capacity to manipulate a short-term interest rate. The results indicate that rules of this type have the potential to guide monetary policy decisions toward the achievement of a long-run nominal goal without being constrained by the zero lower bound on a nominal interest rate. They suggest, in particular, that by exerting its influence over the monetary base or a broader aggregate, the Federal Reserve could more effectively stabilize nominal income around a long-run target path, even in a low or zero interest-rate environment.

Many emerging markets have undertaken significant financial sector reforms, especially in\ud their banking sectors, that are critical for both financial development and real economic\ud activity. In this paper, we investigate the success of banking reforms in India where significant\ud banking reforms were implemented during the 1990s. Using the argument that wellfunctioning\ud credit markets would reflect a credit channel for monetary policy at work, we test\ud whether a change in monetary policy has predictable impact on borrowing behaviour of several types of firms, including business group affiliated, unaffiliated private firms, state-owned firms\ud and foreign firms. The empirical results suggest that unaffiliated private firms have the most\ud vulnerable to monetary policy stance during tight policy regimes. We also find that during tight\ud monetary policy regimes, bank credit of smaller firms is more sensitive to changes in the\ud interest rate than that of large firms. In an easy money regime, monetary policy and the\ud associated change in interest rate does not affect change in bank credit, change in total debt and\ud the proportion of bank credit in total debt for any of the firms. We discuss the policy\ud implications of the findings.

Purpose This paper aims to provide fresh empirical evidence on how Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) monetary policy decisions from a benchmark monetary policy rule affect the profitability of US banking institutions. Design/methodology/approach It thereby provides a link between the literature on central bank monetary policy implementation through monetary rules and banks’ profitability. It uses a novel data set from 11,894 US banks, spanning the period 1990 to 2013. Findings The empirical findings show that deviations of FOMC monetary policy decisions from a number of benchmark linear and non-linear monetary (Taylor type) rules exert a negative and statistically significant impact on banks’ profitability. Originality/value The results are expected to have substantial implications for the capacity of banking institutions to more readily interpret monetary policy information and accordingly to reshape and hedge their lending behaviour. This would make the monetary policy decision process less noisy and, thus, enhance their capability to attach the correct weight to this information.

Is confidence an important channel through which monetary policy affects the Chinese real economy? To answer this question, this paper uses a counterfactual structural vector autoregression method and examines the impulse responses of entrepreneurs’ confidence to a monetary supply shock for China. The empirical results show that an easing monetary policy can inspire confidence and stimulate economic growth. However, the effectiveness of a positive policy will be undermined if the channel of confidence is removed. Further analysis reveals that the state of confidence matters for credit and pricing decisions. These findings are robust to different measures of monetary policy in China.