Back to the Future: Intellectual Challenges for Monetary Policy*

Abstract

The central banking community is facing major challenges – economic, intellectual and institutional. A key economic challenge is the need to rebuild room for policy manoeuvre, which has fallen drastically over time. This lecture focuses on the intellectual challenge, that is, facts on the ground are increasingly testing the long-standing analytical paradigms on which central banks can rely to inform their policies. It argues that certain deeply held beliefs underpinning those paradigms can complicate the task of regaining policy headroom.