Fra Washington Post:
In a somewhat stunning admission of the truth in central planning (that the Swiss just experienced first hand – and perhaps Venezuela has been experiencing for years), The Philly Fed’s Charles Plosser explains the following…
“It may work out just fine, but there’s a risk to that strategy, and the risk is that we wait until the point where markets force us to raise rates and then we have to react quickly and aggressively. I believe that if we wait too long, then we run the risk of falling very far behind the curve or disrupting the economy by rapid rate increases.
The history is that monetary policy is not ultimately a very effective tool at solving real economic structural problems. It can try for a while but the problem then is that it’s only temporarily effective, and when you can’t do it anymore you get the explosion yesterday in the Swiss market.
One of the things I’ve tried to argue is look, if we believe that monetary policy is doing what we say it’s doing and depressing real interest rates and goosing the economy and we’re in some sense distorting what might be the normal market outcomes at some point, we’re going to have to stop doing it. At some point the pressure is going to be too great. The market forces are going to overwhelm us. We’re not going to be able to hold the line anymore. And then you get that rapid snapback in premiums as the market realizes that central banks can’t do this forever. And that’s going to cause volatility and disruption.
…I think the jury is still out on the costs. Because the cost I was worried about was the longer-term cost of unraveling all of this. So maybe I was right, maybe I was wrong. That remains to be seen.
I do worry about the longer-term implications for the institution. Part of my criticism has been that we have pushed the boundaries into fiscal rather than monetary policy. That has brought us praise and opprobrium. Perhaps justifiably on both counts. I do wonder as I look down the road five or 10 years, how will that shape the institution? What happens to our independence? What happens to our ability to do things effectively? Given all that we’ve done — maybe it was all for the best, but even if it was — are there going to be longer-term ramifications that we may end up regretting later?”
