The Continuing Validity of Monetary Policy Autonomy Under Floating Exchange Rates

Edward Nelson

No 2017-112, Finance and Economics Discussion Series from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: Economic research in recent years has given considerable prominence to the issue of whether a floating exchange rate provides autonomy with regard to monetary policy to a central bank whose economy is highly open. In particular, Rey (2016) has argued that inflation-targeting advanced economies lack monetary policy autonomy by pointing to results suggesting that U.S. monetary policy shocks matter for the behavior of key financial variables in these economies. In contrast, it is argued in this paper that monetary autonomy does prevail in inflation-targeting advanced economies, notwithstanding the reaction of these economies? asset prices to U.S. monetary policy developments. The reason is that the monetary-autonomy argument, as advanced by Milton Friedman and as embedded in new open-economy models, rests on the fact that the monetary base is insulated from foreign influences under floating rates. This fact allows the home monetary authority to pursue a stabilization policy in which it has a decisive influence on nominal variables in the long run, as well as a short-run influence on real variables. The result that rest-of-world monetary policy is among the other factors affecting the short-run behavior of real variables (including real asset prices) in a small, floating-rate open economy turns out to be consistent with the traditional and appropriate concept of monetary policy autonomy under floating exchange rates. It follows that such effects of rest-of-world monetary policy on the home economy are consistent with the celebrated open-economy trilemma.

Keywords: Monetary policy autonomy; Trilemma; Floating exchange rates; Inflation targeting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E51 E52 F41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2017-11-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-mac, nep-mon and nep-opm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The Continuing Validity of Monetary Policy Autonomy under Floating Exchange Rates (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2017-112

DOI: 10.17016/FEDS.2017.112

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