The BIS on "The Limits of Monetary Policy"

Each year the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) hosts the world’s central bankers--the BIS shareholders--at their Annual General Meeting in Basel, Switzerland. At the meeting held today, the BIS issued their Annual Report which addresses key monetary policy issues. BIS analyses often contain useful warnings, including their prescient warning in the years around 2003-2005 that monetary policy was too easy, which turned out to be largely correct, as the boom and the subsequent bust made so clear. So the Annual Report is always worth reading.

This is especially true of the Annual Report released today because it devotes a whole chapter to serious concerns about the harmful “side effects” of the current highly accommodative monetary policies “in the major advanced economies” where “policy rates remain very low and central bank balance sheets continue to expand.” Of course these are the policies now conducted at the Fed, the ECB, the Bank of Japan, and the Bank of England. The Report points out several side effects:

• First, the policies “may delay the return to a self-sustaining recovery.” In other words, rather than stimulating recovery as intended, the policies may be delaying recovery.
• Second, the policies “may create risks for financial and price stability globally.”
• Third, the policies create “longer-term risks to [central banks’] credibility and operational independence.”
• Fourth, the policies “have blurred the line between monetary and fiscal policies” another threat to central bank independence.
• Fifth, the policies “have been fueling credit and asset price booms in some emerging economies,” thereby raising risks that the unwinding of these booms “would have significant negative repercussions” similar to the preceding crisis, which in turn would feed back to the advanced economies.

The BIS analysis which leads to these concerns is summarized in a series of charts and tables contained in the fascinating chapter “The Limits of Monetary Policy,” which concludes with the warning that “central banks need to beware….”