After the switch to a floating exchange rate in 1973, the Swiss National Bank at first adopted annual monetary targets and in the 1990s shifted to a medium-term targeting strategy. In this paper I review the SNB’s internal policy analysis, an aspect of Swiss monetary targeting that has...

Since the late 1980s the Fed has implemented monetary policy by adjusting its target for the overnight federal funds rate. Money’s role in monetary policy has been tertiary, at best. Indeed, several influential economists suggest that money is irrelevant for monetary policy because central...

In recent years, the industrial organization of the banking system has received a large amount of attention. In particular, it is generally viewed that the size distribution of the banking sector has changed where it is dominated by a small number of large institutions. In this paper, we develop...

Solving the problem of stabilizing the economy is directly tied to the necessity of keeping the main macroeconomic variables stable. However, macroeconomic stability is not in the general case a purely fiscal or a purely monetary problem. How the central bank and the government interact is of...

Harry Johnson’s 1971 ideas about the factors affecting the success of the Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counter-revolution are summarised and extended to the analysis of the Rational Expectations - New Classical (RE-NC) Revolution. It is then argued that, whereas Monetarism brought...

An important concern of macroeconomic analysis is how interest rates affect the cash balance demanded at a certain level of nominal income. In fact, the interest-rate- elasticity of the liquidity demand determines the effectiveness of monetary policy, which is useless under absolute liquidity...

This paper examines the usefulness of considering monetary aggregates when assessing monetary policy stance, and contrasts monetary analysis to the current mainstream monetary policy analysis. Monetary developments, unlike interest rate stance measures, are shown to provide quantitative...

Using a simple single-equation approach, many studies have shown that the term structure of interest rates or its approximation - the term spread - is a useful indicator of future inflation and/or future real economic activity. However, this paper argues that shortcomings of the single-equation...

This paper argues that a stable broad money demand for the euro area over the period 1980–2011 can be obtained by modelling cross border international portfolio allocation. As a consequence, model-based excess liquidity measures, namely the difference between actual M3 growth (net of the...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of the ‘quantitative easing’ policy, as officially implemented by the Bank of England since March 2009. A policy of the same name had previously been implemented in Japan, which serves as a reference. While the majority of the previous literature has...