پاسخگویی و استقلال بانک مرکزی: آیا آن‌ها ناسازگار هستند؟

The language of discretion offers little information about monetary policy beyond the assurance that policymakers always “do the right thing at the right time”. This language renders problematic the reconciliation of central bank independence with accountability. Monetary policymakers should articulate an analytical framework using the language of economics that allows them to respond to the question, “What variables does the central bank control and how does it exercise that control”.

Using the provocative title “Has the Fed Been a Failure?”, Selgin and White (2012) criticized the long-run performance of the Federal Reserve System. I prefer the criticism that from colonial times through the present monetary arrangements have periodically created instability. The latter statement directs attention away from the individuals who have run the Fed and toward the difficulty of creating the institutional arrangements that can prevent money creation from being a source of instability. The hypothesis advanced here is that the ongoing competition for control over money creation has prevented an evolutionary development of monetary arrangements conducive to economic stability. The reason is that this competition causes policymakers to package their policy actions as the optimal discretionary response to external shocks. While this packaging builds in a defense against political attacks, it also limits the ability to learn from historical experience. Bad outcomes are always a consequence of bad shocks, never bad policy. At the same time, arrangements that would eliminate competition for control over the monetary system would remove oversight and ultimate control of the political system over the Fed. Even if possible in principle through a constitutional change that would make the Fed into a fourth branch of government, absolute independence of the central bank would be incompatible with democratic institutions. The issue is how to create institutional arrangements that improve the accountability of monetary policy while limiting political pressures to use monetary policy to aid in achievement of a political agenda. There is a need to require monetary policymakers to move beyond ritualistic repetition of the “price stability” and “maximum employment” phrases of the 1946 Full Employment Act by requiring them to be explicit about the nature of the monetary standard they have created. That explicitness requires communication with the language of economics. In that way, the United States would move toward an “economist standard”. (The phrase is from Marvin Goodfriend.) Use of the language of economics for communication with the academic community would allow an ongoing dialogue and informed monitoring that would act as a check on episodes of monetary disorder. A dialogue using the language of economics would answer the question, “What have policymakers learned since the Fed’s creation?” The analytical framework of economics explains causation through models, policy rules, and shocks. At present, because policymakers do not use this framework to communicate, there is no way to answer the question of what they understand and have learned about the monetary standard they have created. The argument here is that this void in public knowledge derives from the latent competition for control over the monetary system. That competition leads to the language of discretion rather than that of economics, which disentangles the simultaneity in causation between the behavior of policymakers and the behavior of the economy.