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откъс от статия за natural rate
The curiosity of such complaints is the idea that central banks have the arbitrary power to set interest rates at whatever level they like.
In the short-run, that may be true. But over any reasonable period of time, central banks cannot fix interest rates and still keep control over prices. Far more than is commonly appreciated, central banks are servants of underlying trends in the economy, not their masters. To blame monetary policy for rising house prices or growth in debt is to assume, mistakenly, that central banks had any alternative.
For more than a century, a central concept in economics has been the “natural rate of interest”, variously defined as the rate that balances savings and investment, the return on an extra dollar of capital investment, or the real interest rate consistent with price stability. The natural rate can, and does, move about. A new invention may provoke an investment boom and move it up; a recession might move it down. But there is nothing a central bank can do to influence it. Something similar would exist even in a barter economy. The rate is, as Ms Shelton likes it, “organically, market-supply determined”.
What happens if the central bank tries to fix interest rates above or below this natural level? In his 1967 presidential address to the American Economic Association, the conservative economist Milton Friedman famously argued that central banks cannot use monetary policy to keep unemployment below its “natural rate”. But in the same speech, he was adamant that they cannot peg interest rates either.
If a central bank tried to hold interest rates down below their natural rate, then surging demand for credit would push prices up. “The monetary authority can make the market rate less than the natural rate only by inflation. It can make the market rate higher than the natural rate only by deflation,” Friedman said.
[...]
The test of whether central banks have kept market interest rates in line with the natural rate is whether they have kept inflation at its target. In the US, the average inflation rate from 2000-2019 was 1.8 per cent, and fell to 1.6 per cent in the period after 2008 during the long struggle to recover from the recession. In the eurozone, it was 1.7 per cent falling to 1.3 per cent. In other words, inflation was consistently below the figure of 2 per cent by which price stability is widely defined.
откъс от статия за natural rateThe curiosity of such complaints is the idea that central banks have the arbitrary power to set interest rates at whatever level they like.
In the short-run, that may be true. But over any reasonable period of time, central banks cannot fix interest rates and still keep control over prices. Far more than is commonly appreciated, central banks are servants of underlying trends in the economy, not their masters. To blame monetary policy for rising house prices or growth in debt is to assume, mistakenly, that central banks had any alternative.
For more than a century, a central concept in economics has been the “natural rate of interest”, variously defined as the rate that balances savings and investment, the return on an extra dollar of capital investment, or the real interest rate consistent with price stability. The natural rate can, and does, move about. A new invention may provoke an investment boom and move it up; a recession might move it down. But there is nothing a central bank can do to influence it. Something similar would exist even in a barter economy. The rate is, as Ms Shelton likes it, “organically, market-supply determined”.
What happens if the central bank tries to fix interest rates above or below this natural level? In his 1967 presidential address to the American Economic Association, the conservative economist Milton Friedman famously argued that central banks cannot use monetary policy to keep unemployment below its “natural rate”. But in the same speech, he was adamant that they cannot peg interest rates either.
If a central bank tried to hold interest rates down below their natural rate, then surging demand for credit would push prices up. “The monetary authority can make the market rate less than the natural rate only by inflation. It can make the market rate higher than the natural rate only by deflation,” Friedman said.
[...]
The test of whether central banks have kept market interest rates in line with the natural rate is whether they have kept inflation at its target. In the US, the average inflation rate from 2000-2019 was 1.8 per cent, and fell to 1.6 per cent in the period after 2008 during the long struggle to recover from the recession. In the eurozone, it was 1.7 per cent falling to 1.3 per cent. In other words, inflation was consistently below the figure of 2 per cent by which price stability is widely defined.
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