Economists agree much more often than not. But that doesn't seem to matter, even when nearly 100% of economists agree on something, the public think it knows better...
You are looking at a car driving on a hilly road.
The car's engine is not powerful enough.
You observe that on the uphills, the driver is flooring the gas pedal and yet the speed of the car is decreasing.
Confusing correlation and causation leads to the faulty conclusion => the gas pedal must really be the brake pedal
Enabling (arbitrarily) negative rates is equivalent to lifting the power limit on the engine and would simply allow the driver to keep the car at constant speed on all hills (the brakes already have unlimited power)
The stance of monetary policy can't be assessed by looking at the level of interest rate (or the amount QE) -- otherwise you'd conclude that inflationary basket case Argentina has much tighter monetary policy than deflationary basket case Eurozone.
I'm not inventing this, this is from Milton Friedman.
You judge monetary policy by its result: where are the variables you are targeting vs your targets?
The Fed's target is "low inflation and full employment". Since over the past decade we've had very little inflation and high unemployment, we can conclude that Fed monetary policy was tight.
You might blame the less-than-specific target that the policy makers have chosen for this and you'd be right, it's way too vague and not that useful.
A much better target would be the level of average nominal wage per capita, or highly related but simpler: level of nominal GDP.
Based on these targets, monetary policy has been very tight over the past few years, particularly in the Eurozone.
Monetary policy is neutral if nominal GDP remains on a 5%/year growth path. Big drops in NGDP is basically equivalent to the central bank punching the economy in the stomach.
> Maybe if you think government and society are the same thing.
No, I just think that neutral monetary policy which leads to full employment (defined as natural employment under given tax/regulatory regime) is good for society.
Also good for govt's ability to manage budget, but that's secondary.
Every currency can have low interest rates at the same time. It's not rates relative to each other that matters that impacts nominal activity, it's the absolute rate of each.
All currencies could have -10% rate at the same time (if they all introduced an exchange rate between cash and digital deposits).
Hard to claim that credit is the problem because we know for a fact that monetary policy is too tight right now (as indicated by where the nominal aggregates are). In any case the govt should largely not attempt to influence credit.
Until monetary policy is back to neutral, all other problems most economic ills are likely to be a consequence of bad money policy.
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21569378...