IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedlwp/2015-002.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Scarcity of Safe Assets, Inflation, and the Policy Trap

Author

Listed:
  • David Andolfatto
  • Stephen D. Williamson

Abstract

We construct a model in which all consolidated government debt is used in transactions, with money being more widely acceptable. When asset market constraints bind, the model can deliver low real interest rates and positive rates of inflation at the zero lower bound. Optimal monetary policy in the face of a financial crisis shock implies a positive nominal interest rate. The model reveals some novel perils of Taylor rules.

Suggested Citation

  • David Andolfatto & Stephen D. Williamson, 2015. "Scarcity of Safe Assets, Inflation, and the Policy Trap," Working Papers 2015-2, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedlwp:2015-002
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2015/2015-002.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Benhabib, Jess & Schmitt-Grohe, Stephanie & Uribe, Martin, 2001. "The Perils of Taylor Rules," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 96(1-2), pages 40-69, January.
    2. Ricardo Lagos & Randall Wright, 2005. "A Unified Framework for Monetary Theory and Policy Analysis," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 113(3), pages 463-484, June.
    3. Leeper, Eric M., 1991. "Equilibria under 'active' and 'passive' monetary and fiscal policies," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(1), pages 129-147, February.
    4. Sanches, Daniel & Williamson, Stephen, 2010. "Money and credit with limited commitment and theft," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 145(4), pages 1525-1549, July.
    5. Bansal, Ravi & Coleman, Wilbur John, II, 1996. "A Monetary Explanation of the Equity Premium, Term Premium, and Risk-Free Rate Puzzles," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 104(6), pages 1135-1171, December.
    6. Woodford, Michael, 1995. "Price-level determinacy without control of a monetary aggregate," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 43(1), pages 1-46, December.
    7. Gorton, Gary B., 2010. "Slapped by the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199734153.
    8. Lawrence J. Christiano & Martin S. Eichenbaum & Mathias Trabandt, 2015. "Understanding the Great Recession," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 7(1), pages 110-167, January.
    9. Stephen D. Williamson, 2018. "Low Real Interest Rates, Collateral Misrepresentation, and Monetary Policy," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 10(4), pages 202-233, October.
    10. Timothy J. Kehoe & David K. Levine, 1993. "Debt-Constrained Asset Markets," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 60(4), pages 865-888.
    11. Ennis, Huberto M., 2018. "A simple general equilibrium model of large excess reserves," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 98(C), pages 50-65.
    12. Gauti B. Eggertsson & Paul Krugman, 2012. "Debt, Deleveraging, and the Liquidity Trap: A Fisher-Minsky-Koo Approach," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 127(3), pages 1469-1513.
    13. Shouyong Shi, 1997. "A Divisible Search Model of Fiat Money," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 65(1), pages 75-102, January.
    14. Lucas, Robert E, Jr & Stokey, Nancy L, 1987. "Money and Interest in a Cash-in-Advance Economy," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 55(3), pages 491-513, May.
    15. Stephen D. Williamson, 2012. "Liquidity, Monetary Policy, and the Financial Crisis: A New Monetarist Approach," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(6), pages 2570-2605, October.
    16. Ivan Werning, 2011. "Managing a Liquidity Trap: Monetary and Fiscal Policy," 2011 Meeting Papers 1435, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    17. Williamson, Stephen D., 2016. "Scarce collateral, the term premium, and quantitative easing," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 164(C), pages 136-165.
    18. Michael Woodford, 2012. "Methods of policy accommodation at the interest-rate lower bound," Proceedings - Economic Policy Symposium - Jackson Hole, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pages 185-288.
    19. Lucas, Robert Jr., 1990. "Liquidity and interest rates," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 50(2), pages 237-264, April.
    20. Taylor, John B., 1993. "Discretion versus policy rules in practice," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 195-214, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Williamson, Stephen D., 2016. "Scarce collateral, the term premium, and quantitative easing," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 164(C), pages 136-165.
    2. Rocheteau, Guillaume & Wright, Randall & Xiaolin Xiao, Sylvia, 2018. "Open market operations," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 98(C), pages 114-128.
    3. Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe & Jess Benhabib & Martin Uribe, 2001. "Monetary Policy and Multiple Equilibria," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(1), pages 167-186, March.
    4. Azariadis, Costas & Bullard, James & Singh, Aarti & Suda, Jacek, 2019. "Incomplete credit markets and monetary policy," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 103(C), pages 83-101.
    5. Chao Gu & Fabrizio Mattesini & Randall Wright, 2016. "Money and Credit Redux," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 84, pages 1-32, January.
    6. Schmitt-Grohe, Stephanie & Uribe, Martin, 2000. "Price level determinacy and monetary policy under a balanced-budget requirement," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 45(1), pages 211-246, February.
    7. Gordon, David B. & Leeper, Eric M. & Zha, Tao, 1998. "Trends in velocity and policy expectations," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 49(1), pages 265-304, December.
    8. Athanasios Geromichalos & Lucas Herrenbrueck, 2017. "The Liquidity-Augmented Model of Macroeconomic Aggregates," Discussion Papers dp17-16, Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University.
    9. Athanasios Geromichalos & Lucas Herrenbrueck, 2022. "The Liquidity-Augmented Model of Macroeconomic Aggregates: A New Monetarist DSGE Approach," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 45, pages 134-167, July.
    10. Leeper, E.M. & Leith, C., 2016. "Understanding Inflation as a Joint Monetary–Fiscal Phenomenon," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 2305-2415, Elsevier.
    11. Philip Arestis & Alexander Mihailov, 2011. "Classifying Monetary Economics: Fields And Methods From Past To Future," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 25(4), pages 769-800, September.
    12. Kiyotaki, Nobuhiro & Lagos, Ricardo & Wright, Randall, 2016. "Introduction to the symposium issue on money and liquidity," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 164(C), pages 1-9.
    13. Williamson, Stephen D., 2018. "Can the fiscal authority constrain the central bank?," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 89(C), pages 154-172.
    14. Campbell Leith & Eric Leeper, 2016. "Understanding Inflation as a Joint Monetary-Fiscal Phenomenon," Working Papers 2016_01, Business School - Economics, University of Glasgow.
    15. Stephanie Schmitt‐Grohé & Martín Uribe, 2009. "Liquidity traps with global Taylor Rules," International Journal of Economic Theory, The International Society for Economic Theory, vol. 5(1), pages 85-106, March.
    16. Gianluca Benigno & Luca Fornaro, 2018. "Stagnation Traps," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 85(3), pages 1425-1470.
    17. Semyon Malamud & Andreas Schrimpf, 2016. "Intermediation Markups and Monetary Policy Passthrough," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 16-75, Swiss Finance Institute.
    18. Francesco Bianchi & Leonardo Melosi, 2017. "Escaping the Great Recession," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(4), pages 1030-1058, April.
    19. Bénassy, Jean-Pascal, 2008. "The Fiscal Theory Of The Price Level Puzzle: A Non-Ricardian View," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 12(S1), pages 31-44, April.
    20. Stephen D. Williamson, 2018. "Low Real Interest Rates, Collateral Misrepresentation, and Monetary Policy," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 10(4), pages 202-233, October.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E4 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates
    • E5 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedlwp:2015-002. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Anna Oates (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbslus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.