scholarly journals The monkey in the mirror and other tales of central bank forward guidance

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (1&2) ◽  
pp. 16-27
Author(s):  
Eli Remolona
Keyword(s):  
Central Bank ◽  
Forward Guidance

The Over-Burdened Central Bank and the Shift Away from Autonomy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre L. Siklos
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Central Bank ◽  
Financial Stability ◽  
Central Banks ◽  
Central Banking ◽  
Forward Guidance ◽  
Self Assessments ◽  
Crisis Conditions ◽  
Central Bankers ◽  
Influence Behavior

Many central banks took on additional responsibilities. Inadequate self-assessments remain unfinished almost a decade after the crisis erupted. Government-central bank relationships need to be conditioned on whether times are normal versus crisis conditions. Transparency confronts ambiguity when central banks must communicate the outlook and the conditionality of their decisions. Forward guidance was taken too far and ended up being futile. Central bankers simply exhausted their ability to influence behavior through mere words or ambiguous statements. This is a self-inflicted wound for institutions that are seen as overburdened. These forces leave central banking more vulnerable than is commonly acknowledged. Squaring the conventional objectives of monetary policy with the unclear aims of financial stability is difficult. Adequate limitations on the authority of central banks have yet to be thoroughly debated. We are nowhere near resolving the inherent tensions between old and new sets of central bank objectives.

scholarly journals State-Dependent Forward Guidance and the Problem of Inconsistent Announcements

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. e1019-e1027
Author(s):  
Julian A. Parra-Polania
Keyword(s):  
Central Bank ◽  
The State ◽  
Endogenous Variable ◽  
Specific Variable ◽  
Escape Clause ◽  
Forward Guidance ◽  
State Dependent ◽  
State Of The Economy ◽  
Low Rate

Abstract Forward guidance can be provided as an unconditional promise, i.e. commitment to a specific low policy rate. Alternatively, the promise may include an escape clause, i.e. a condition defining the state of the economy under which the central bank would not keep such a low rate and, instead, it would revert to setting policy under discretion. The escape clause can be expressed as a threshold in terms of a specific variable. The present paper shows that, when such a threshold is expressed in terms of an endogenous variable (e.g. output, inflation), there are cases where it becomes impossible for the central bank to act in a way that is consistent with its promise. Consistency imposes limits on the policy rate that can be set since reverting immediately to the optimal discretionary rate can be incompatible with exceeding the threshold.

scholarly journals The effect of central bank credibility on forward guidance in an estimated New Keynesian model

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Cole ◽  
Enrique Martínez-García
Keyword(s):  
Central Bank ◽  
Rational Expectations ◽  
New Keynesian ◽  
New Keynesian Model ◽  
Survey Of Professional Forecasters ◽  
Forward Guidance ◽  
Keynesian Model ◽  
The Us ◽  
Imperfect Credibility ◽  
Central Bank Credibility

Abstract This paper examines the effectiveness of forward guidance shocks in the US. We estimate a New Keynesian model with imperfect central bank credibility and heterogeneous expectations using Bayesian methods and survey data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). The results provide important takeaways: (1) The estimated credibility of the Fed’s forward guidance announcements is relatively high, but anticipation effects are attenuated. Accordingly, output and inflation do not respond as favorably as in the fully credible counterfactual. (2) The so-called “forward guidance puzzle” arises partly from the unrealistically large responses of macroeconomic variables to forward guidance under perfect credibility and homogeneous fully informed rational expectations, assumptions which are found to be jointly inconsistent with the observed US data. (3) Imperfect credibility provides a plausible explanation for the empirical evidence of forecasting error predictability based on forecasting disagreement found in the SPF data. Thus, we show that accounting for imperfect credibility and forecasting disagreements is important to understand the formation of expectations and the transmission mechanism of forward guidance.

Central Bank Planning

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Braun
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Central Bank ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Structural Break ◽  
Central Banks ◽  
State Agency ◽  
Policy Interventions ◽  
Forward Guidance

Central banks have increasingly used communication to guide market actors’ expectations of future rates of interest, inflation, and growth. However, aware of the pitfalls of (financial) central planning, central bankers until recently drew a line by restricting their monetary policy interventions to short-term interest rates. Longer-term rates, they argued, reflected decentralized knowledge and should be determined by market forces. By embracing forward guidance and quantitative easing (QE) to target long-term rates, central banks have crossed that line. While consistent with the post-1980s expansion of the temporal reach of monetary policy further into the future, these unconventional policies nevertheless mark a structural break—the return of hydraulic macroeconomic state agency, refashioned for a financialized economy. This chapter analyses the theoretical and practical reasoning behind this shift in the governability paradigm and examines the epistemic and reputational costs of modern central bank planning and the non-market setting of long-term bond prices.

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