Gulf Cooperation Council

Effective liquidity management is important to promote macro-financial stability in the GCC countries. Fixed exchange rate regimes provide credible nominal anchors in the GCC countries, but combined with open capital accounts, they also entail limited monetary policy independence. At the same time, high dependence on hydrocarbon revenue has made the region vulnerable to oil price-driven liquidity swings. And the latter can affect monetary policy implementation, including by exacerbating credit and asset price cycles. This highlights the importance of frameworks aimed at forecasting liquidity and ensuring appropriate liquidity levels through the timely absorption or injection of liquidity by central banks. Over the past decade, liquidity management in the GCC countries has been based mainly on passive instruments. Abundant liquidity during times of high oil prices have placed liquidity absorption at the center of the central bank operations. Reserve requirements have helped absorb liquidity but have not been used very actively. Standing facilities, another key instrument, are more passive in nature, with the amount of liquidity absorbed or injected driven by banks rather than monetary authorities. Central banks bills or other instruments have also been used, but issuance has not systematically been based on market principles. In addition, these operations have been constrained by limited liquidity forecasting capability and the shallow nature of interbank and domestic debt markets.

BOLHAS RACIONAIS, CICLO DE PREÇOS DE ATIVOS E RACIONALIDADE LIMITADA: UMA AVALIAÇÃO CRÍTICA DOS MODELOS NEOCLÁSSICOS DE BOLHAS ESPECULATIVAS

The objective of this article is to criticize neoclassical models of asset price bubbles and to argue that a general theory of asset price cycles demands the substitution of rational expectations hypothesis for bounded rationality assumption. In order to do that we will initially present the two neoclassical approaches for the problem of asset price bubbles. The first one, based on models of multiple equilibria with rational expectations, take financial markets as competitive and investors's behavior as based on perfect and complete information. In this setting, asset bubbles are a logically possible but unprobable phenomenon since their ocurrence will be associated with problems of dynamic ineficience which are not a relevant problem for most of capitalist economies. The second approach, initially developed by Krugman, take as a starting point the idea that financial market are far from perfect. In fact, these markets have a great number of imperfections as, for example, moral hazard. In this approach, asset price bubbles are the result of trading in assets with low supply-price elasticity as, for example, equities and land. Although this second approach is more realistic than the first, it is not capable to explain in a unified framework the appearance, propagation and burst of the speculative bubble; i.e the phenomenon of asset price cycles. This second approach is only capable to show the conditions for the existence of an asset bubble; but it is not capable to explain the dynamic evolution of the bubble. This question is better adressed by heterodox literature based on the hypothesis of bounded rationality.