I don’t particularly feel an obligation to comment on today’s ECB monetary policy announcement and I think my regular readers have a pretty good idea about how I feel about the ECB these days. However, ECB chief Mario Draghi pulled out a traditional ECB phrase on the outlook on monetary policy that I think pretty well describes the ECB’s problem and why we are in mess we are in.

Mario Draghi said – as Trichet used to before him – that “we never pre-commit” to any particular future monetary policy action. My reply to Draghi would be isn’t that exactly your problem!?

Yesterday, I did a post on the importance of the expectational channel in monetary policy and how the Chuck Norris effect or what Matt O’Brien has called the Jedi mind trick can be a tremendous help in the conduct of monetary policy. If you have a credible target and credible reaction function the markets are likely to do most of the lifting in terms of monetary policy implementation. However, when Draghi is saying that the ECB is not pre-committed on monetary policy then he is effectively saying “We don’t want to tell you what your target is and we are not going to reveal our reaction function”. That of course means that the ECB will get no help from Chuck Norris (the markets) to implement policy.

On the other hand if Draghi had said “The ECB is pre-committed to use whatever instruments in our arsenal to achieve our nominal targets and will do unlimited amounts of buy or selling of assets to achieve these targets” then Draghi would not have to do much more. Chuck Norris would help him so he could spend more time golfing.

However, you get the feeling that the ECB on purpose wants to be ambiguous on what monetary policy action it will take and what it want to target. From a monetary policy perspective this makes no sense at all. Why would a central bank do something like that? What monetary theory is telling the ECB that it is a good idea not to pre-commit?  I think the answer is nothing to do with monetary theory and everything to do with public choice theory. The special ECB lingo like “we never pre-commit” seem to be designed to ensure the legitimacy of the ECB. The lingo is simply rituals that should convince us that the ECB is a legitimate institution and it’s powers should not be questioned. See more on this topic here.