Things I Won’t Have Time to Say II: Rethinking Macro Policy III Conference, Washington D.C., April 15-16

Rethinking Macro Policy III: Progress or Confusion?

Things I am almost surely not going to have time to say II:

Take the mechanics of demand stabilization and management off the table. Move, in our imagination at least, into a world in which short-term safe nominal interest rates rarely if ever hit the zero nominal bound. In that world, as a result, the full employment and price stability stabilization-policy mission could be left to central banks and monetary policy. Furthermore, confine our thinking to the North Atlantic, possibly plus Japan.

It seems to me then that there are four big remaining questions:

  1. Can, in a political-economy sense, central banks be trusted with this mission? Are they not captured, to too great an extent, by the commercial-banking sector that, myopically, favors higher nominal interest rates to directly improve bank cash flows and indirectly dampen inflation and so redistribute wealth to nominal creditors–like banks?

  2. What is the proper size of the twenty-first century public sector?

  3. What is the proper size of the public debt for (a) countries that do possess exorbitant privilege because they do issue reserve currencies, and (b) countries that do not?

  4. What are the real risks associated with the public debt in the context of historically-low present and anticipated future interest rates?

April 15, 2015

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