Four Lectures on Central Banking

These four lectures on central banking topics were presented in London between September and December 2013. The lectures were delivered as part of Arthur Grimes’ NZ-UK Link Foundation Visiting Professorship, based at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. They followed his stepping down as Chair of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand in September 2013 after ten years in that role. The four lecture topics (and the institution at which they were delivered) are: Inflation Targeting: 25 Years’ Experience of the Pioneer (Bank of England); A Floating Exchange Rate is the Worst Exchange Rate Regime (except for all the others that have been tried) (University College London); How Prudent are Macroprudential Policies? (London School of Economics); Responsibility and Accountability in the Financial Sector (Institute of Advanced Legal Studies). A key theme across all four lectures is the importance of ensuring that central bank policies and actions are time consistent. Time consistency requires that a central bank can commit to implementing the policies that it says it will implement. For instance, if a central bank commits to delivering low inflation, it will not use its powers to deliver other goals at the expense of low inflation. Similarly, if it commits not to bail out banks in the event of failure, then it (and other official bodies) will not bail out a failed bank.