Central bankers and the rationale for unconventional monetary policies: Reasserting, renouncing or recasting monetarism?

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the rationale for the unconventional monetary policies adopted by central banks in response to the Global Financial Crisis. Quantitative easing appears to be a return to monetarist principles. Indeed, the Bank of England emphasised a causal chain running from increases in broad money to spending and inflation, while the Bank of Japan later pointed to a theorised relation between base money and expected inflation. Some aspects of monetarism have been renounced, albeit not necessarily with convincing reasoning. Monetarist principles can also be discerned in the 'credit view' associated with the research of two-term US Federal Reserve Chair, Ben Bernanke. An understanding of the banking system and the channels of monetary transmission is still a work in progress.