Mugur Isărescu: The future of central banking
Address by Mr Mugur Isărescu, Governor of the National Bank of Romania, during the
plenary session "The future of central banking", 8th World Policy Conference, Montreux,
20 November 2015.
* * *
Parts of this address have been presented by Governor Mugur Isărescu during the plenary
session "The future of central banking", which also featured as speakers:
• Jean-Claude Trichet - former President of the European Central Bank
• Jacob Frenkel - Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International, former Governor of the
Bank of Israel
• Marek Belka - President of the National Bank of Poland
Ladies and gentlemen,
It is a great honour to address the audience during this symposium on the future of central
banking, although I must confess from the very beginning that the topic itself is not easy to
tackle. We all know that economists seldom reach a consensus when analysing the past. It is
all the more difficult for them to agree on the future, especially when we refer to central
bankers, who are known to be among the most cautious economists...
Personally, I think I have enough reasons to be wary of any predictions of what is in store for
us, particularly over the medium and long term. I started my career as an economist in a
research institute back in August 1971, when the Bretton Woods System was just collapsing.
In 1990, shortly after the fall of communism, I became Governor of the National Bank of
Romania, having to put into practice the transition from a monobank-type system to a two-tier
system, while the country's economy was going through major changes from the ruinous
central planning to a market economy. As a matter of fact, in retrospect, I can say that my
entire career has spanned several decades marked by truly ground-breaking policy and
paradigm shifts. Some of the recent ones, such as quantitative easing and close to zero or
even negative monetary policy rates, would have been inconceivable even a few years (not
decades) before they occurred!
The experience acquired through the years, both as a researcher and as governor, makes
me reluctant to engage in speculations on the future of central banking in 10 or 20 years'
time, particularly at the current juncture when the global economy is in a state of flux.
Nevertheless, there are a few old and new things about central banking which I believe will
continue to be relevant in the future.
I would start by pointing out that, in the extremely complex post-crisis economic and financial
environment, the mission of a central bank cannot be simple. There are so many
transformations going on right now, after the global crisis not only invalidated certain
elements of mainstream economics, but also changed the order of priorities on policymakers'
agenda.
Still, I do not believe the crisis has shattered the consensus on what central banks should be
pursuing - central banking has always been about the preservation of, to quote Charles
Goodhart, "the three aspects of stability", namely price stability, (external) currency stability
and financial stability. Nor has the crisis brought about the sudden realisation that these
aspects of stability do in fact condition each other - central bankers, maybe even more so
emerging-market central bankers, have long been keenly aware that failure to ensure one
kind of stability is bound to jeopardise the achievement of the others. What the crisis has
indeed challenged is the widespread conviction that meeting one particular stability criterion,
while necessary in order to achieve the others, is also a sufficient condition to do so - after
all, maintaining price stability, while valuable in itself, has proved insufficient to ward off major
financial or macroeconomic instability. As a matter of fact, Andrew Crockett claimed ever
since 2003 that the "peace dividend" yielded by the successful war against inflation had not
lived up to expectations and therefore the battlefront against financial instability should not be
overlooked.
Nevertheless, it is widely accepted that price stability should remain the overriding objective
of a central bank and I do not see this approach changing in the future, at least in Europe. It
is expected, however, that central banks will make more explicit their concern for all the
"three aspects of stability" in their policy decisions, realising that price stability and financial
stability are much more intertwined than we used to think. I believe this development has
farther-reaching consequences when it comes to the future of central banking. I can easily
imagine, some years down the road, a more "normal" world in which unconventional
monetary policy tools are a thing of the past, since their relevance is ultimately
circumstantial, but I cannot imagine a future where the explicit concern for financial stability
and the macroprudential policy are not central banking fixtures.
To be frank, the NBR has never had the luxury of being concerned exclusively with price
stability and interest rate setting in the belief that financial stability and exchange rate stability
will follow. In a world with freely moving capital, the idea of being able to manage aggregate
demand exclusively via interest rates would have been an illusion: the interest rate hikes
required to manage aggregate demand and anchor expectations would have entailed further
capital inflows and an unsustainable nominal appreciation, thus boosting foreign currency
lending and creating vulnerabilities on the financial stability front.
That is why, when introducing inflation targeting in 2005, the NBR opted for the "light" version
of the strategy, which meant retaining the managed float feature of the exchange rate
regime. The actual form inflation targeting took in Romania thus matched the
"managedfloating plus" concept introduced by Goldstein in 2002, considered the most suitable choice
for an emerging-market economy involved in the global capital market, as it combines the
managed float part, allowing for FX market interventions in order to smooth out excessive
volatility, with an inflation targeting monetary policy strategy and an active pursuit of
measures to limit the degree of currency mismatches in the economy.
What are the challenges of adding explicit concern about financial stability to the standard
objective of price stability? Should monetary policy lean against the wind sooner and possibly
harder than it would normally? Even though now, with the benefit of hindsight, one could say
that higher interest rates in the run-up to the crisis may have alleviated some of the issues
that led to it, I believe that it is best to let monetary policy focus on price stability and deal
with the objective of financial stability via dedicated macroprudential policy instruments -
doing otherwise is likely to severely complicate communication with the public, complicating
expectations management and ultimately undermining monetary policy credibility and
effectiveness.
It is indeed of critical importance to make sure that the tasks entrusted to the central bank
are feasible. Not as clear-cut or simple as before the global crisis, but feasible! Otherwise, if
the monetary authorities are overburdened with possibly conflicting goals, the major risk is to
render them inefficient and unable to deliver a single one of their objectives.
Before the crisis, when talking about the policy mix anyone would think of the coordination
between monetary and fiscal policies. Afterwards, when financial instability has undermined
macroeconomic stability, despite low and stable inflation, it became obvious that additional
tools are needed in complementing monetary policy in countercyclical management. As
macro-prudential tools emerged as the most important candidates, it makes sense to assign
the objective of financial stability to the central bank, if the central bank is given control of the
supervisory and regulatory instrument.
In the recent period some economists have asserted that central banks tend to fuel
speculative bubbles by keeping monetary policy rates too low. This behaviour can create
incentives for banks to overleverage or reduce efforts in screening borrowers, or can lead
other economic agents to seek more risks in order to yield higher returns. The effects are
likely to be worse if monetary policy is too accommodative for too long during expansions.
This led to the conclusion that other instruments, which can directly affect leverage or risk
taking, are required.
Because the cost of cleaning up after an asset-price bubble burst can be very high, as
proved by the recent financial crisis, early interventions by the central bank might be needed
when a severe bubble is identified. In this context, macro-prudential instruments are the best
option, without excluding de plano the recourse to monetary policy instruments.
Given the fact that the policy rate is an inadequate tool to deal with overleverage, excessive
risk taking, or apparent deviations of asset prices from fundamentals, there are other
instruments at the policymaker's disposal: countercyclical regulatory tools. Thus, if leverage
appears excessive, regulatory capital ratios can be increased; if liquidity appears too low,
regulatory liquidity ratios can be introduced and, if needed, increased; to dampen housing
prices, loan-to-value ratios can be decreased; to limit stock price increases, margin
requirements can be increased.
As I said earlier, the NBR has always had to juggle the "three aspects of stability" and that
called for the deployment of alternative instruments, such as the full use of the reserve
requirement ratios and recourse to administrative measures. Reserve requirement ratios
were increased up to 20 and 40 percent for lei- and forex-denominated liabilities respectively,
and the list of administrative measures included: enforcing a maximum loan-to-value ratio,
introducing debt service ceilings relative to households' monthly disposable income, setting
limits on banks' forex exposure vis-à-vis unhedged borrowers, using differentiated
coefficients in stress tests (higher for exposures to EUR than lei, with even stricter
coefficients for CHF- and USD-denominated credit).
Even though at the time our modus operandi was seen as deviating from the orthodoxy of
central banking, during the global crisis or in its aftermath, macroprudential instruments are
now part of the mainstream and forex interventions re-entered the arsenal of many central
banks, including some of those using a free floating regime before the crisis.
If the importance of macro-prudential instruments was revealed by the global crisis and the
forex interventions of central banks went back in fashion during the same period, there is a
fact well known from the conventional economic wisdom, but highlighted once again by the
crisis: the countercyclical stance of both monetary and fiscal policies is essential for ensuring
a smooth trajectory of the economy. We all saw how unsustainable public finances and high
levels of debt have impeded the effectiveness of a stability-oriented monetary policy. This
was also the case of Romania, where the fiscal impulse was positive during the period of
rapid growth before the financial crisis, contributing to the overheating of the economy and
fuelling the imbalances accumulated in the economy. Moreover, the pro-cyclicality of the
fiscal policy during the pre-crisis period exhausted the fiscal space needed to stimulate the
economy in recession, leading to the need to reduce the budget deficit during the crisis
(primarily due to financing constraints) and to perpetuating the pro-cyclicality of fiscal policy.
As stated by Fritz Zurbrügg (2012), successful monetary policy is predicated on healthy fiscal
policy, and vice versa, and to achieve stability and prosperity in the long term, fiscal and
monetary policies must both focus on sustainability.
In the past, the high fiscal deficit has resulted in the fiscal dominance of monetary policy with
its inevitable monetisation of the government debt, but nowadays most central banks no
longer directly finance government expenditure. Today, this kind of dominance is manifested
through the inability or unwillingness of fiscal authorities to control long-run expenditure/GDP
ratio.
The recent period has outlined a different form of dominance: financial dominance, defined
as the inability or unwillingness of the financial sector to absorb its losses. The presence of
financial dominance constrains the manoeuvre room of both fiscal and monetary policies,
due to the fact that fiscal authorities and/or central banks have to bail-out the financial sector.
As pointed out by Benoît Coeuré (2015), for monetary policy, the problem stems mostly from
inadequate supervision, at both micro-level (if supervisors show too much forbearance to
under-capitalised banks, they can end up effectively shifting the burden onto monetary
policy) and at macro-level (if supervisory policies allow banks to grow too rapidly, and then
deleverage too slowly, it can also push the central bank into doing more), which can turn out
in the ineffectiveness of monetary policy transmission mechanism.
Let me say a few words about the issues of central bank independence in the context of
required cooperation with the government in the post-crisis world. As we all know, from a
historical perspective the prevalence of central bank independence is a relatively new
institutional development, seen as a solution to the problem of time inconsistency of
monetary policy and the stagflation of the '70s. Is the post-crisis reality likely to dissolve the
consensus about central bank independence? After all, the danger of inflation is hardly a
pressing concern nowadays (but rather the lack of it) and the pursuit of financial stability is
ultimately a shared responsibility, since it implies close cooperation with the government and
other authorities and may ultimately involve recourse to public funding.
I share Stanley Fisher's view that it would be a costly mistake to give up central bank
independence. That would mean "the benefits of having a central bank that can take a longer
term and apolitical view of what is good for the economy and take actions in support of that
view will be lost". If a long-term perspective and a shield against political pressure are
required for achieving price stability, these may be even more important if explicit concern for
financial stability is added. And frankly, I do not see the need for close cooperation with the
government as something that implies abandoning central bank independence, but rather as
a pre-requisite - which has always been there - for promoting effective policies. Irrespective
of how well-designed the policies of the central bank may be, they cannot substitute for a
consistent macroeconomic policy mix, and in the absence of this consistency they are likely
to achieve at best sub-optimal outcomes.
Having said that, I think there are a few questions worth asking - I must confess I do not
have the answers, but I believe that the future of central banking hinges upon them.
• Would it be necessary to promote a certain tactical flexibility in the conduct of
monetary policy, so that central banks might carry out adjustments in terms of
objectives as well, not only instrument-wise? Such an approach would diminish
the predictability of monetary policy, but would allow, when need be, for financial
stability considerations to prevail over the inflation objective.
• Is the reassessment of the desirable level of inflation suitable? How low is too
low? The same as for capital inflows, we can ask ourselves in the case of price
stability as well: how much of a good thing is too much?
Will the policy instruments which have been resorted to in the context of the
•
global crisis become an integral part of the new conventional framework? If
macroprudential tools are here to stay, the future of non-conventional monetary
policy instruments is less certain. Will the central banks keep using these
instruments or will they abandon them at some point in time? I fully share the belief
of the Governor of Banco de España Luis Linde (2013) that monetary policy -
conventional or not - cannot solve the ultimate causes behind the loss in investors'
confidence or the tensions in financial or banking markets; in fact, its main role is to
provide time to adopt the necessary measures to reform and/or adjust.
• How much room for trade-off among different goals is available? I believe that
we should try to learn as much as possible from the past mistakes. And I refer here
not only to the recent past! The lessons of the last 7 years, while important, should
not make us forget the lessons of the last 50 years, among which, to name but
three, are the following:
- Accommodating other objectives should not put in danger price stability on the
medium-run;
- Inflation expectations cannot be ignored;
- The independence of central banks is connected with their performance in
delivering price stability.
Irrespective of how we see now the future of our profession and institutions, it is apparent
that the central bankers cannot afford to live in an ivory tower. They have to stay
openminded and to keep close contact with the shifting economic and financial reality in order to
be able to articulate and implement efficient policies. And if you still want me to foretell the
future, I will end my speech by making a prophecy: what a central bank can or cannot do will
remain a topic of heated debate for many decades.
References
Coeuré, B., "Independence and Interdependence in a Monetary Union", Lamfalussy Lecture
Conference organised by Magyar Nemzeti Bank in Budapest, 2 February, 2015.
Crockett, A., "International Standard Setting in Financial Supervision", Lecture at the Cass
Business School, City University, London, February 5, 2003.
Goodhart, C., "The Changing Role of Central Banks", BIS Working Papers No 326, 2010.
Goldstein, M., "Managed Floating Plus and the Great Currency Regime Debate", Institute for
International Economics Policy Analyses in International Economics, No. 66, 2002.
Linde, Luis M., "The Changing Role of Central Banks", the 4th Future of Banking Summit,
organised by Economist Conferences, Paris, 26 February, 2013.
Zurbrügg, F., "Fiscal and Monetary Policy - Interdependence and Possible Sources of
Tension", the University of Lucerne, Lucerne, 21 November, 2012.