Fundamental Paper Wealth and Monetary Policy

This paper articulates three insights regarding asset prices and monetary policy: (1) Asset price appreciation due to monetary expansion, despite its “paper” wealth nature, tends to make current consumers as a whole wealthier; (2) the wealth effect of monetary policy (on consumption) is negatively correlated with Tobin’s q effect (on investment), which positively depends on investment elasticity; and (3) the soundness of asset market performances does not depend on whether they are fundamental or not, but on their compatibility with the AD-AS balance in the long run. These basic insights and their implications reveal some limitations of monetary policy as a stabilization policy, clarify some misperceptions on fundamental asset prices, and provide a rationale for monetary policy to react directly to asset market performances.