The paper reviews the current literature on the subject in both the New Consensus and Post Keynesian frameworks. It shows that both approaches give to central banks a wrong goal (inflation, distribution, curbing speculation, and so on) and a wrong instrument (interest rate rule). The paper...

Milton Friedman said that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Most people, when they think of inflation, think in terms of the goods and services that they buy. In fact, Friedman’s dictum can be extended to include inflated home prices, stock prices, commodity prices, or...

This paper studies the actions of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank during the financial crisis from 2007-2012. Whereas the first two parts concentrate on asset bubble theory and the development of the housing bubble, the third part rates the performance of the Federal Reserve during the crisis. The...

Considerable debate rages about whether Federal Reserve policy was too lax in the early part of the 2000s, thereby fueling the home-price bubble that was the proximate cause of the global financial crisis. We present evidence that the view that modest alterations to monetary policy have vast...

Modern central bankers are the risk managers of the financial system. They take actions based not only on point forecasts for growth and inflation, but based on the entire distribution of possible macroeconomic outcomes. In numerous instances monetary policymakers have acted in ways designed to...

This paper investigates the welfare consequences of bubble policy in a greater-fool bubble model with rational, risk averse investors in an asset market. Some investors may be informed that the asset is overpriced, and try to sell to uninformed buyers. A central bank prevents speculative bubbles...

This paper studies whether and how the central bank should prick asset price bubbles, if the effect of interest rate policy on bubbles can significantly vary across periods. For this purpose, I first construct a financial accelerator model with an agent-based financial market that can...