These notes are based on parts of a keynote address to the Fourth Annual Conference on Money and Finance at Chapman University on 6-7 September 2019. Quantitative easing (QE) policies have been pushed to extremes and extended well beyond their use-by dates to little plausible effect in achieving...

The U.K. monetary policy framework, which combines inflation targeting with operational independence, provides a suitable arrangement for focused and credible monetary policy. However, potential weaknesses could result from features that have not yet been fully tested: the credibility and...

The main objective of this paper is to identify a set of leading indicators of inflation for the United Kingdom, and discuss the conceptual issues pertaining to inflation targeting. The main conclusions are that narrow money has strong leading indicator properties for inflation, while broad...

This paper examines and compares the instruments and procedures currently employed by the central banks of France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States for implementing monetary policy in the short run. The analysis indicates that the monetary authorities of these five...

This paper examines whether the clarity of central bank communication about inflation has changed with the economic environment. We use readability statistics and content analysis to study the clarity of communication on the inflation outlook by seven central banks between 1997 and 2010....

Deleveraging has two components--shrinking of balance sheets due to increased haircuts/shedding of assets, and the reduction in the interconnectedness of the financial system. We focus on the second aspect and show that post-Lehman there has been a significant decline in the interconnectedness...

Using a variant of the IMF''s Global Economy Model (GEM), featuring energy as both an intermediate input into production and a final consumption good, this paper examines the macroeconomic implications of large increases in the price of energy. Within a fully optimizing framework with nominal...

In the context of the U.K. government’s EMU entry condition of cyclical convergence, this paper (i) provides further evidence suggesting that historically the U.K.’s business cycle has been more volatile than, and relatively independent of, the cycles in the euro-area countries; and (ii)...

The Bank of England''s current ""quantitative easing"" strategy has given rise to a controversial debate about the effects and risks of unconventional monetary policy. The present paper makes two contributions to this debate. First, it provides a systematic overview of unconventional policy...