The pre-crisis monetary policy consensus has been challenged on a number of fronts. Even the nominal target, around which the modern consensus developed, has been called into question, with a vigorous recent debate ensuing about nominal income targeting as an alternative. This paper contributes...

The conventional view is that a monetary policy shock has both supply-side and demand-side effects, at least in the short run. Barth and Ramey (2001) show that the supply-side effect of a monetary policy shock may be greater than the demand-side effect. We argue that it is crucial for monetary...

This paper uses an SVAR approach to discuss the cyclicality of fiscal and monetary policy in South Africa since 1994. There is substantial South African literature on this topic, but much disagreement remains. Though not undisputed, there is growing consensus that monetary policy has contributed...

This paper examines asymmetries in the impact of monetary policy on the middle segment of the South African housing market from 1966:M2 to 2011:M12. We use Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MS-VAR) in which parameters change according to the phase of the housing cycle. The results suggest...

The instrument problem in monetary policy is back on the agenda. Until recently interest rate policy was widely thought to be sufficient for the attainment of appropriate monetary policy goals. No longer. In the wake of the international financial crisis there is much pressure on monetary...

This paper is the story of success and failure in the financial markets, the markets for goods and services and in politics. It is a difficult story to tell because the crisis had many causes, but the focus here is on three main factors. First, the incentives that contributed to a credit-fuelled...

Monetary authorities have been implicated in the financial crisis of 2007-2008. John Muellbauer, for example, has blamed what he thought was initially inadequate policy responses by central banks to the crisis on their models, which are, in his words, “overdue for the scrap heap”. This paper...