La política monetaria cercada por un movimiento de pinzas

Monetary policy has been in the grip of a pincer movement, caught between growing financial cycles, on the one hand, and an inflation process that has become quite insensitive to domestic slack, on the other. This two-pronged attack has laid bare some of the limitations of prevailing monetary policy frameworks, particularly in the analytical notions that have guided much of its practice. We argue that the natural rate of interest as a guidepost for monetary policy has a couple of limitations: the concept, as traditionally conceived, neglects the state of the financial cycle in the definition of equilibrium; in addition, it underestimates the role that monetary policy regimes may play in persistent real interest rate movements. These limitations may expose monetary policy to blindsiding by the collateral damage that comes from an unhinged financial cycle. We propose a more balanced approach that recognises the difficulties monetary policy has in finetuning inflation and responds more systematically to the financial cycle.