درس هایی برای سیاست پولی از بحران منطقه یورو

The earlier 2007/2008 financial crisis generated the main lessons for monetary policy, notably that price stability does not necessarily guarantee financial stability. Nevertheless, the on-going Eurozone crisis has pointed to further lessons, notably that a single currency covering diverse states does need a Banking Union; and to problems of zero risk-weighting for sovereign debts. Without such a Banking Union, economic divergences between the Eurozone states have continued and look likely to persist.

The crisis with the most lessons for monetary policy was the original 2007/2008 crisis, not the subsequent Eurozone crisis. This initial 2007/2008 crisis, however, originated in the US housing market, and was not specifically European. Nevertheless the resulting financial debacle entailed numerous important lessons for monetary policy. Amongst these were: (i) Price stability does not necessarily guarantee financial stability. As Hyman Minsky demonstrated, price stability may even conflict with financial stability, rather than complement it. This is because a reduction in macro-economic volatility may seem to reduce risk, and therefore make financial institutions raise their leverage, and reach for yield. Hence there is a need for counter-cyclical macro-prudential instruments. The use of these would be relatively new, and remains unproven. In particular, macro-prudential counter-cyclical measures would have to be imposed against the momentum and grain of the market. If an asset price boom was perceived to be unsustainable, it would immediately subside under its own weight. Accordingly, the majority of those involved must be believing that further price increases in the relevant asset market(s) may well continue. Politicians may believe that the asset markets have risen because of their own successful policies. Consequently, macro-prudential counter-cyclical policies would have to be introduced at a time when they are likely to be opposed by many politicians, most borrowers and lenders, and many, probably most, commentators in the Press. It will be hard enough to be counter-cyclical in a boom; it will be almost impossible to do so in a bust. In a bust, counter-cyclical measures would suggest reducing capital and liquidity requirements. But the availability of bank capital and liquidity has just been shown, almost by definition, to have been insufficient in the preceding bust. In a boom, macro- and micro-prudential measures go hand-in-hand; but in a bust, the micro-prudential authorities will want to toughen regulations, while counter-cyclical macro-prudential measures would need to involve the opposite. The banking industry fears that macro-prudential measures will be tightened in the boom period, but not then relaxed in the bust period; so that such macro-prudential measures would get continuously ratcheted up. Moreover, since they would be operating against the trend of the market, the likelihood is that they would not be sufficiently vigorously and aggressively introduced in order to provide much of a mitigation of the cycle. The example of the Spanish dynamic pre-provisioning scheme comes to mind; this was a well-designed counter-cyclical measure, but of insufficient scale and extent to provide much of a mitigant to the Spanish housing cycle.