I have recently been giving a lot of attention to the work of David Eagle and his Arrow-Debreu based analysis of monetary policy rules. This is because I think David’s work provides a microfoundation for Market Monetarism and adds new dimensions to the discussion about NGDP targeting – particularly in regard to financial stability.

I have now come across a paper that is using a similar model as David’s model. However, this might be a slightly more interesting for the conspiratorial types as this paper is written by a Federal Reserve economist – Evan F. Koeing of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Here is that abstract of Koeing’s paper “Monetary Policy, Financial Stability, and the Distribution of Risk”:

“In an economy in which debt obligations are fixed in nominal terms, but there are otherwise no nominal rigidities, a monetary policy that targets inflation inefficiently concentrates risk, tending to increase the financial distress that accompanies adverse real shocks. Nominal- income targeting spreads risk more evenly across borrowers and lenders, reproducing the equilibrium that one would observe if there were perfect capital markets. Empirically, inflation surprises have no independent influence on measures of financial strain once one controls for shocks to nominal GDP.”

This paper obviously is highly relevant and as the euro crisis just keeps getting worse day-by-day we can always hope that some influential European policy makers read this paper.

After all the euro crisis is mostly a monetary crisis rather than a fiscal crisis – which David Beckworth forcefully demonstrates in a recent comment.

HT Arash Molavi Vasséi