– John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own –

It is time to add another victim to the ever-growing list of institutions (Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers) and theories (value at risk, fair value accounting and originate to distribute) which have been tested by the financial crisis and found wanting. The central bank practice of inflation targeting — the jewel in the crown of modern monetary economics — has palpably failed.

Over the last two decades, inflation targeting has emerged as the most popular strategy for monetary policy among the world’s major central banks, and become something of a state-of-the-art choice among theorists and central bankers.

Even the Fed, long skeptical, considered announcing a formal target for inflation last year. Senior officials considered whether it would be a useful way to counter the threat of deflation by providing an “anchor” for expectations about future prices. In the end the central bank ducked the decision and decided to press ahead with long-term inflation forecasts instead, as a form of “soft” targets.

But the experience of major central banks over the last five years — both those pursuing formal targets and those like the Fed which have been employing “shadow” ones — suggests inflation targeting has failed and will need to be overhauled once the immediate crisis has passed.

CENTRAL BANK PERFORMANCE

Controlling inflation has been the central objective for monetary policy for the last 30 years. But using interest rates to target the inflation rate directly emerged only in the early 1990s. In many countries, it was something of a default choice after strategies targeting intermediate variables (such as the money supply and the exchange rate) had been tried and failed.

In its own (narrow) terms, inflation targeting has been successful. In the United Kingdom, consumer prices have increased broadly in line with the Bank of England’s target since the central bank was given operational independence to set interest rates in May 1997.

Evidence from the United States is more mixed. The Fed has long insisted it does not have a formal inflation target (preferring to retain flexibility for what it calls a “risk-management” approach). But senior officials have defined the “price stability” component of its dual mandate as an inflation rate of about 1.5-2.0 percent per annum.

Both the all-items consumer price index and the core index excluding food and energy have consistently risen faster than the Fed’s implied target since 1997. Access PDF here.

In fact, the performance of inflation and the Fed’s interest rate decisions suggest the Fed has actually been targeting a core inflation rate of about 2.25 percent per year, or an all-items rate of 2.50 percent.

While this is slightly faster than officials have been prepared to admit publicly, it is still respectable by historical standards.

The real problem is that a narrow obsession with hitting inflation targets blinded central bankers around the world to the build up of other problems, including bubbles in the bond and real-estate markets, as well as the build up of excessive levels of household and corporate debt.

Moderate growth in each month’s consumer price numbers provided false comfort even as distortions built up in other parts of the financial system (overvalued asset markets) and economy (a gaping trade imbalances and surging commodity prices).

If the ultimate purpose of inflation targeting was to provide a stable economic framework for long-term decision-making by households and businesses, it has failed. Bubbles and over-indebtedness have caused far greater output losses when they collapsed than any amount of moderate consumer price inflation.

FLAWED THEORY

The excessively narrow focus of inflation targeting reflects conceptual shortcomings.

In 1952, Professor Jan Tinbergen proved that to achieve two independent policy objectives simultaneously, policymakers must employ two independent policy instruments.

Tinbergen’s rule implies monetary and fiscal policy work best when coordinated to achieve the optimal joint outcome for inflation and growth, or between internal balance (inflation-growth-employment) and external balance (the trade deficit and exchange rate).

But in a curious inversion, modern economics has sought to separate them, assigning monetary policy the role of pursuing price stability, while leaving fiscal policy to worry about growth and employment.

It reflects the impact on the discipline of Milton Friedman’s famous comment about inflation being “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” amplified by the impact of the rational expectations revolution, which seemed to indicate monetary policy could not have an enduring impact on the level of business activity and employment, only on prices.

From this stemmed the idea monetary policy should focus on choosing a desirable (low) rate of inflation, leaving other aspects of demand-management and employment policy to fiscal policy.

The discipline has gone further, and sought to implement an institutional separation between the fiscal and monetary authorities. Most theorists have supported establishment of “independent” central banks able to set monetary policy at arms length from the fiscal authorities.

This reflects a mistaken view that monetary policy is essentially a technical academic exercise that can and should be insulated from other aspects of the policymaking process.

Reflecting this technocratic approach, modern monetary economics has been dominated by a debate over rules versus discretion — with a rule-based system generally held up as superior.

The history of the discipline since the late 1970s can be summed up as the perfect monetary “rule,” specifying how much the central bank should adjust the instruments under its control (reserves and interest rates) to achieve some intermediate variable (money growth and the exchange rate) or direct target (consumer prices) and ensure the ultimate goal of price stability is met.

PRACTICAL SHORTCOMINGS

But focusing monetary policy on consumer prices encouraged central banks to ignore signs of growing instability in other parts of the financial system (such as asset prices and lending). The target was too narrow and needs to be broadened in future.

It was a mistake to separate monetary policy and fiscal policy and assume monetary policy could somehow operate in isolation from tax and spending decisions and other interventions in the economy. Macro management would be more effective if monetary policy and fiscal policy were coordinated.

Elsewhere, I have suggested the authorities might need to go further and supplement existing monetary and fiscal policies with a third, distinct policy to govern the quantity of credit and build up of debt to ensure that internal balance, external balance and financial balance can all be achieved simultaneously.

Finally, it was a mistake to pretend monetary policy is a technocratic exercise. Decisions about interest rates have distributional effects (between savers and borrowers, more and less growth, more and less employment) and are inherently political.

This is not an argument for interference. But it is an argument for greater honesty about the social trade offs involved.

It is also an argument for allowing discretion back in. Rather than mechanically applying rules targeting a single variable such as consumer prices, central banks need freedom to respond to changing circumstances. That means freedom to cut interest rates dramatically in response to a financial panic. But it also means freedom to raise them during a boom to prevent wider distortions in the financial system even when there are no obvious signs of consumer price inflation.

Inflation targeting needs to be reworked in favor of a more holistic approach that gives central bankers more discretion to pursue a complex set of goals (including financial stability. But they must also be held more accountable, and accept this not just a technical exercise but one which involves difficult choices for society as a whole.

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

It works more like a sprinkler than a power hose, but the European Investment Bank has a role to play in preventing a financial inferno from sweeping across central and eastern Europe.

The trouble is that politicians have overloaded the European Union’s long-term lending arm with exaggerated expectations, calling on it like a fire brigade in every emergency, from saving credit-starved small firms to greening the car industry, combating the energy crisis and fighting climate change.

The need to serve many masters and focus on many priorities limits its impact, but the EIB now has more resources to back economic stimulus programs in the 27-nation bloc.

Philippe Maystadt, president of the Luxembourg-based bank, has received so many pleas for billions since the credit crisis struck that he starts by listing what the EIB cannot do.

It is not a central bank. It cannot provide liquidity. It cannot take equity stakes in banks and it cannot fund budgets. Its role is to finance investment projects that are aligned with the 27-nation EU’s policy objectives.

“What we can do is provide finance as intensely and rapidly as possible for investment. That’s what we’re doing (and) we aim to do more, better and faster,” Maystadt, a former Belgian finance minister, said in an interview.

The EIB plans to lend more than 7.5 billion euros to small and medium-size enterprises and local authorities in central and eastern Europe this year through local intermediary banks. That is three times last year’s volume, and on more flexible terms.

The bank has a triple-A credit rating because it is owned and backed by the EU’s solvent sovereign governments. So it borrows at cheap rates and lends the money on the same terms to clients who would otherwise have to pay far more to borrow.

Firms may now use the cash as working capital, for research and development and to buy patents and not just to buy goods.

The EIB is also working to address the special problems of eastern Europe. From Warsaw to Kiev, floating currencies have sunk against the euro, punishing hard-currency borrowers, while governments are struggling to raise funds as capital flows from parent banks in western Europe to eastern subsidiaries dwindle.

With the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), Maystadt is looking to support banks in eastern Europe.

“For example one could imagine combining equity stakes from the EBRD with bigger credit lines provided by the EIB, using the specific instruments of each institution in a coordinated way to increase efficiency. If the EBRD comes in to reinforce a bank’s capital, it means we can lend more to that bank,” he said.

EU finance ministers agreed in December to raise the EIB’s capital by 67 billion euros to 232 billion euros so it can boost lending by 30 percent this year and in 2010 to help economic recovery. That is a stretch for the bank’s 1,400 staff.

The extra 15 billion euros a year will be targeted at SMEs, fighting climate change and speeding disbursements for projects in the new member states in central and eastern Europe.

Under EU rules, national governments or local authorities have to finance 35 percent of EIB-backed projects. The newcomers often lack the funds, especially during the credit crunch, so the EIB is also helping fund the local share.

However, the obligation to be even-handed among EU member states makes it hard to concentrate a large amount of lending on a few priorities or countries.

“It’s true we are an EU institution, so we have to work for all member states and our interventions have to be well balanced,” Maystadt said.

So far, the EIB has had no trouble borrowing on capital markets, but things could get tighter and more expensive as the bank raises its extra funds just as governments are tapping the market massively to finance national recovery plans.

That raises the question of whether the EIB could borrow from the European Central Bank, which is not allowed to lend money directly to member states.

“This question hasn’t yet been posed,” Maystadt said. “For the moment we don’t call on the ECB. It’s a question that would have to be examined with the ECB. That hasn’t yet been done.”

Pressed to say whether the idea was topical, he laughed and fell silent.

– James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

With the U.S., Japan and Britain — nearly 40 percent of the global economy — facing the threat of deflation, it’s going to be just too easy for one, two or all three of them to get the policy response horribly wrong.

The global economy is so connected, and our experience with similar situations so limited that the scope for error is huge.

Think of it as having three pilots flying a jet plane, one each operating a wing and the third managing the tail.

Oh yeah, and they all work for different airlines.

Though there will be much talk of international coordination in the next year, and though the central banks and governments of the world will likely be rowing in the same direction, their ability to gauge the effects of monetary policy and government spending on their own economies will be pretty limited, and even more so on the whole.

Failure when fighting a global recession, a global balance sheet adjustment, a global banking recapitalization, debt deflation and very possibly actual deflation can take many forms.

“It’s very hard to calibrate and it’s awfully easy to overshoot or undershoot, both of which would be disastrous,” said Lena Komileva, London-based strategist at Tullett Prebon.

Under clubbing the response to falling prices means you could slip into a self-reinforcing deflation, making your debts, be they consumer, housing or government, heavier and setting up a cycle where businesses and consumers defer consumption and investment.

Over-reacting risks fomenting a new bout of inflation and potentially causing a new bubble. (Who knows what that would be — dirt, water, baseball cards?)

And remember too, when deflation was last an issue on this scale globally during the 1930s, the global economy was nowhere as near as integrated.

As for now, the signs are clear: deflation is a growing threat in much of the world’s economy, though still to be sure not the central forecast.

U.S. producer prices dropped by 2.8 percent in October, the largest decline on record. Core intermediate goods and core crude goods prices, which show inflation at earlier stages in the production cycle, fell by a big 1.7 and a staggering 17 percent, respectively.

Consumer prices, which are usually sticky on the way down, fell at a record rate in October, down one percent and even falling by 0.1 percent in the month when plunging food and energy prices are excluded. That will kill corporate profits and shows a business community racing with consumers to see who can capitulate fastest.

HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE

Inflation is falling rapidly in Britain too, with overall consumer price inflation down 0.2 percent in October, the first monthly fall since the annual January sales and the first in October since 2001, just after 9/11.

Japan meanwhile has slipped back into recession, domestic demand is weakening, wages are falling and deflation may develop some time next year, a scenario Barclays Capital rates as a 40 percent chance.

Even China, where inflation has tumbled to 4.0 percent in October from a 12-year peak of 8.7 percent in February, has moved its focus to averting deflation.

Be in no doubt, central banks have the tools to fight deflation; while interest rates can only be cut so much, officials can step up the quantitative easing now happening, they can commit to hold rates at zero for an extended period of time, they can drive down their own currency by purchasing foreign bonds or finally, simply print money and drop it from the famous helicopters.

The issue is not the tools, but the speed of the printing presses or size of the bond purchases needed to get the right result, especially when it is interacting with what will be huge tax cuts and deficit spending.

A mix of monetary and fiscal policy will work, but it’s got to be the right mix and it has to be reasonably well coordinated internationally.

None of this is without risk. Remember the last deflation scare in the U.S. in the early part of this decade, which in retrospect caused the monetary bubble which was nursemaid to the housing bubble.

Print money or borrow excessively and you could lose the confidence of the currency market and experience a run, which certainly will help to fight deflation but is no-one’s idea of good policy.

In theory the amount the state will need to borrow will be in part offset by the amount individuals save, or more to the point pay down in debt and decline to invest privately. That theory will be put to the test by the number of governments who are going to be selling a very large number of bonds, which will after all have to be paid back.

Next year is looking as if it will be as unconventional as it is scary.

– At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund –

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