Unifying monetary and macroprudential policy

Julia Giese, Michael McLeay, David Aikman and Sujit Kapadia

Central banks have been using a range of monetary policy and macroprudential tools to maintain monetary and financial stability. But when should monetary versus macroprudential tools be used and how should they be combined? Our recent paper develops a macroeconomic model to answer these questions. We find that two instruments are better than one. Used alone, interest rates can control inflation, but are ineffective for financial stability. Policymakers can do better by also deploying the countercyclical capital buffer, a tool that varies the amount of additional capital banks must set aside. The appropriate combination of tools can vary: both should tighten to counter a joint expansion of credit and activity, but move in opposite directions during an exuberance-driven credit boom.

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Slow recoveries, endogenous growth and macroprudential policy

Dario Bonciani, David Gauthier and Derrick Kanngiesser

Following the global financial crisis in 2008, central banks around the world introduced tighter banking regulations to increase the resilience of the financial sector and reduce the risks of severe financial disruptions during economic downturns. This fact has motivated a large body of literature to assess the role that macroprudential (MacroPru) policies play in mitigating the severity of recessions. One common finding is that the benefits of MacroPru are relatively minor within standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. In a new paper, we show that MacroPru becomes significantly more important in a model that accounts for the long-term negative consequences of financial disruptions.

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Uncertainty is no excuse for not using macroprudential tools

Angus Foulis and Saleem Bahaj

The macroprudential toolkit available to policymakers across several central banks is new and largely untested. For example, in the UK, the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee (FPC) has, since the financial crisis, received powers to alter bank capital requirements and to place restrictions on the terms of household mortgages for macroprudential purposes. These policy tools have not been used systemically in the past, so their impact and the FPC’s reaction function remain unclear. Moreover, in contrast to monetary policy, where price stability can be judged against inflation, the objective of macroprudential policymakers – the stability of the financial system – is inherently unobservable. Thus macroprudential policymakers face a high degree of uncertainty over the impact and effectiveness of their tools and a target variable they cannot perfectly observe.

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