Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Rogoff on World Trade and Central Banking

My Harvard colleague Ken Rogoff has a nice piece in today's FT. He argues:
one should think of the modern era of rapidly expanding trade and technology progress as providing a spectacularly favourable milieu for monetary policy. With hugely positive underlying trends, central banks have been able to establish and maintain low inflation while delivering growth results that have often outperformed expectations.... But precisely because globalisation has produced such a steady stream of upward surprises, there is an element of illusion to central banks’ success.