Martin Wolf writes on “unorthodox” fiscal and monetary policy responses to the recession in this morning’s FT. The article highlights the work of Agustin Benetrix, Kevin O’Rourke and co-authors (IIIS Discussion Paper version here).
Category: Monetary policy
There is an extensive interview with Olivier Blanchard on the IMF website, and a link to his recent paper on the future of macroeconomic policy making (co-authored with Giovanni Dell’Ariccia and Paolo Mairo), here. I can see this one ending up on lots of undergraduate reading lists.
Update: Krugman likes the paper, which makes sense. He alo cites a completely different argument in favour of moderate levels of inflation, which made quite a splash a few years ago: given that it is hard to cut nominal wages, inflation can be very useful in lowering real wages, when that is what is required.
Real wage reductions are required in Ireland, but nominal wage reductions remain elusive here, despite the spin. Can anyone doubt that Irish real wage adjustment would be easier if we could rely on higher inflation rates to do the bulk of the work?