Reassessing the Role of Stock Prices in the Conduct of Monetary Policy

Author(s):  
Pierlauro Lopez
Keyword(s):  
2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 145-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milton Friedman

The third of three episodes in a major natural experiment in monetary policy that started more than 80 years ago is just now coming to an end. The experiment consists in observing the effect on the economy and the stock market of the monetary policies followed during and after three very similar periods of rapid economic growth in response to rapid technological change: the booms of the 1920s in the United States, the 1980s in Japan and the 1990s in the United States. In this experiment, the quantity of money is the counterpart of the experimenter's input. The performance of the economy and the level of the stock market are the counterpart of the experimenter's output. The results of this natural experiment are clear, at least for major ups and downs: what happens to the quantity of money has a determinative effect on what happens to national income and to stock prices. The results strongly support Anna Schwartz's and my 1963 conjecture about the role of monetary policy in the Great Contraction. They also support the view that monetary policy deserves much credit for the mildness of the recession that followed the collapse of the U.S. boom in late 2000.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-167
Author(s):  
Sidra Mariyam ◽  
Wasim Shahid Malik

Monetary policy in the contemporary world reacts, through short term interest rate, to deviations of inflation rate and output from their respective targets, while asset prices are responded to the extent they contribute to these deviations. This practice significantly affects transmission of asset prices into goods prices, which has serious implications for income distribution. This paper sets the objectives of estimating transmission of asset prices into goods prices and the role of monetary policy in influencing this transmission. In this regard, the paper hypothesizes that inflation rate positively responds to asset prices and this response weakens if interest rate leans against the winds of inflation, output and asset prices. To test these hypotheses, we have estimated different specifications of vector autoregressive (VAR) model and impulse response functions have been found after identifying structural shocks. Data of Pakistan’s economy on inflation rate, large scale manufacturing index, interest rate and asset price index – comprising house prices, stock prices and exchange rate – are used for the time period 2000m01 to 2019m06. We find evidence in support of both hypotheses; asset price inflation positively transmits into goods price inflation and this transmission intensifies if interest rate does not respond to other variables in the model. Moreover, transmission of asset prices into inflation rate, as compared to output, is influenced more by monetary policy. Finally, we find that the transmission of exchange rate and house prices to inflation rate are very much affected by monetary policy while in case of stock prices the influence of policy is moderate.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Jarociński ◽  
Peter Karadi

Central bank announcements simultaneously convey information about monetary policy and the central bank's assessment of the economic outlook. This paper disentangles these two components and studies their effect on the economy using a structural vector autoregression. It relies on the information inherent in high-frequency co-movement of interest rates and stock prices around policy announcements: a surprise policy tightening raises interest rates and reduces stock prices, while the complementary positive central bank information shock raises both. These two shocks have intuitive and very different effects on the economy. Ignoring the central bank information shocks biases the inference on monetary policy nonneutrality. (JEL D83, E43, E44, E52, E58, G14)


1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Oldroyd

Previous authors have argued that Roman coinage was used as an instrument of financial control rather than simply as a means for the state to make payments, without assessing the accounting implications. The article reviews the literary and epigraphic evidence of the public expenditure accounts surrounding the Roman monetary system in the first century AD. This area has been neglected by accounting historians. Although the scope of the accounts supports the proposition that they were used for financial control, the impetus for keeping those accounts originally came from the emperor's public expenditure commitments. This suggests that financial control may have been encouraged by the financial planning that arose out of the exigencies of funding public expenditure. In this way these two aspects of monetary policy can be reconciled.


2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Kolasa

AbstractThis paper studies how macroprudential policy tools applied to the housing market can complement the interest rate-based monetary policy in achieving one additional stabilization objective, defined as keeping either economic activity or credit at some exogenous (and possibly time-varying) levels. We show analytically in a canonical New Keynesian model with housing and collateral constraints that using the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio, tax on credit or tax on property as additional policy instruments does not resolve the inflation-output volatility tradeoff. Perfect targeting of inflation and credit with monetary and macroprudential policy is possible only if the role of housing debt in the economy is sufficiently small. The identified limits to the considered policies are related to their predominantly intertemporal impact on decisions made by financially constrained agents, making them poor complements to monetary policy, which also operates at an intertemporal margin. These limits can be overcome if macroprudential policy is instead designed such that it sufficiently redistributes income between savers and borrowers.


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