How Robust Is the New Conventional Wisdom in Monetary Policy?
How Robust is the New Conventional Wisdom in Monetary Policy? The surprising fragility of the theoretical foundations of inflation * ** targeting and central bank independence Willem H. Buiter, Professor of European Political Economy European Institute London School of Economics and Political Science, Universiteit van Amsterdam, NBER and CEPR April 15, 2007 * Paper to be presented at the Bank of England’s Chief Economists' Workshop, 16-18 April 2007. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2006 Central Bank Governors’ Symposium “Challenges to Monetary Theory”, at the Bank of England on June23, 2006. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Norges Bank’s Conference on Monetary Policy 2006, Evaluating Monetary Policy, 30 March 2006, and at the 37rd Konstanz Seminar on Monetary Theory and Policy, May 30 - June 2. 2006. I would like to thank Gianluca Benigno, Pierpoalo Benigno, Jarle Bergo, Mario Blejer, Guillermo Calvo, Stephen Cecchetti, Vittorio Corbo, Lawrence Christiano, Casper de Vries, Stefan Gerlach, Svein Gjedrem, Kjersti Haugland, Rachel Lomax, Manfred Neumann, Jorunn Paulson, Huw Pill, Robert Rasche, Martin Redrado, Irma Rosenberg, Michael Saunders, Anne Sibert, Zdenek Tuma, Jurgen von Hagen, Axel Weber and Fredrik Wulfsberg for helpful comments. Alan Blinder offered wide-ranging and insightful comments on an earlier version of the paper, and I am greatly in his debt. None of the aforementioned bear any responsibility for the content of this paper. ** © Willem H. Buiter 2006, 2007. Abstract Flexible inflation targeting - the minimisation of the expected discounted sum of current and future period losses, with the period loss function given by the weighted sum of squared deviations of inflation from a constant target rate and the squared output gap - cannot be rationalised, except in a single, practically uninteresting special case, using conventional welfare economic criteria.
[Show full text]