The Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) or Zero Nominal Lower Bound (ZNLB) is a macroeconomic problem that occurs when the short-term nominal interest rate is at or near zero, causing a liquidity trap and limiting the central bank's capacity to stimulate economic growth.
The root cause of the ZLB is the issuance of paper currency by central banks, effectively guaranteeing a zero nominal interest rate and acting as an interest rate floor. Central banks cannot encourage spending by lowering interest rates, because people would simply hold cash instead. Miles Kimball suggested that a modern economy either fully relying on electronic money or defining electronic money as the unit of account could eliminate the ZLB. [1] Even without such measures, however, several central banks are able to reduce interest rates below zero; for example, the Czech National Bank estimates that the lower limit on its interest rate is below -1%. [2]
The problem of the ZLB returned to prominence with Japan's experience during the 90's, and more recently with the subprime crisis. The belief that monetary policy under the ZLB was effective in promoting economy growth has been critiqued by Paul Krugman, Gauti Eggertsson, and Michael Woodford among others.
Milton Friedman, on the other hand, argued that a zero nominal interest rate presents no problem for monetary policy. According to Friedman, a central bank can increase the monetary base even if the interest rate vanishes; it only needs to continue buying bonds. [3] Friedman also coined the term "helicopter drops" to illustrate how central banks could always generate spending and inflation. Friedman used the example of a helicopter flying over a town dropping dollar bills from the sky, which households then gathered in perfectly equal shares. Economists have argued that real-world versions of this idea would work at the zero lower bound. Typically, helicopter drops have been interpreted as involving the central bank directly financing the budget deficit. [4]
The economist Willem Buiter has argued that helicopter drops can always raise demand and inflation. [5] Following the repeated struggles of the European Central Bank to revive the Eurozone economy and meet its inflation objective, a number of economists have taken a more literal interpretation of Friedman's parable and suggested that the European Central Bank should transfer cash directly to households. [6] [7] [8]
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. For example, using interest rates, taxes, and government spending to regulate an economy's growth and stability. This includes regional, national, and global economies.
In economics, inflation is an increase in the general price level of goods and services in an economy. When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation corresponds to a reduction in the purchasing power of money. The opposite of inflation is deflation, a decrease in the general price level of goods and services. The common measure of inflation is the inflation rate, the annualized percentage change in a general price index. As prices faced by households do not all increase at the same rate, the consumer price index (CPI) is often used for this purpose. The employment cost index is also used for wages in the United States.
Monetarism is a school of thought in monetary economics that emphasizes the role of governments in controlling the amount of money in circulation. Monetarist theory asserts that variations in the money supply have major influences on national output in the short run and on price levels over longer periods. Monetarists assert that the objectives of monetary policy are best met by targeting the growth rate of the money supply rather than by engaging in discretionary monetary policy. Monetarism is commonly associated with neoliberalism.
The Phillips curve is an economic model, named after William Phillips, that predicts a correlation between reduction in unemployment and increased rates of wage rises within an economy. While Phillips himself did not state a linked relationship between employment and inflation, this was a trivial deduction from his statistical findings. Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow made the connection explicit and subsequently Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps put the theoretical structure in place.
An interest rate is the amount of interest due per period, as a proportion of the amount lent, deposited, or borrowed. The total interest on an amount lent or borrowed depends on the principal sum, the interest rate, the compounding frequency, and the length of time over which it is lent, deposited, or borrowed.
Monetary policy is the policy adopted by the monetary authority of a nation to control either the interest rate payable for very short-term borrowing or the money supply, often as an attempt to reduce inflation or the interest rate, to ensure price stability and general trust of the value and stability of the nation's currency.
Zero interest-rate policy (ZIRP) is a macroeconomic concept describing conditions with a very low nominal interest rate, such as those in contemporary Japan and in the United States from December 2008 through December 2015. ZIRP is considered to be an unconventional monetary policy instrument and can be associated with slow economic growth, deflation and deleverage.
The causes of the Great Depression in the early 20th century in the United States have been extensively discussed by economists and remain a matter of active debate. They are part of the larger debate about economic crises and recessions. The specific economic events that took place during the Great Depression are well established.
The Taylor rule is a monetary policy targeting rule. The rule was proposed in 1992 by American economist John B. Taylor for central banks to use to stabilize economic activity by appropriately setting short-term interest rates.
A liquidity trap is a situation, described in Keynesian economics, in which, "after the rate of interest has fallen to a certain level, liquidity preference may become virtually absolute in the sense that almost everyone prefers holding cash rather than holding a debt which yields so low a rate of interest."
In monetary economics, the quantity theory of money is one of the directions of Western economic thought that emerged in the 16th-17th centuries. The QTM states that the general price level of goods and services is directly proportional to the amount of money in circulation, or money supply. For example, if the amount of money in an economy doubles, QTM predicts that price levels will also double. The theory was originally formulated by Renaissance mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus in 1517, and was influentially restated by philosophers John Locke, David Hume and Jean Bodin. The theory experienced a large surge in popularity with economists Anna Schwartz and Milton Friedman's book A Monetary History of the United States, published in 1963.
Neutrality of money is the idea that a change in the stock of money affects only nominal variables in the economy such as prices, wages, and exchange rates, with no effect on real variables, like employment, real GDP, and real consumption. Neutrality of money is an important idea in classical economics and is related to the classical dichotomy. It implies that the central bank does not affect the real economy by creating money. Instead, any increase in the supply of money would be offset by a proportional rise in prices and wages. This assumption underlies some mainstream macroeconomic models. Others like monetarism view money as being neutral only in the long run.
The Federal Reserve System has faced various criticisms since it was authorized in 1913. Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman and his fellow monetarist Anna Schwartz criticized the Fed's response to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 arguing that it greatly exacerbated the Great Depression. More recent prominent critics include former Congressman Ron Paul.
The Friedman rule is a monetary policy rule proposed by Milton Friedman. Friedman advocated monetary policy that would result in the nominal interest rate being at or very near zero. His rationale was that the opportunity cost of holding money faced by private agents should equal the social cost of creating additional fiat money. Assuming that the marginal cost of creating additional money is zero, nominal rates of interest should also be zero. In practice, this means that a central bank should seek a rate of inflation or deflation equal to the real interest rate on government bonds and other safe assets, to make the nominal interest rate zero.
The Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT) is an economic theory developed by the Austrian School of economics about how business cycles occur. The theory views business cycles as the consequence of excessive growth in bank credit due to artificially low interest rates set by a central bank or fractional reserve banks. The Austrian business cycle theory originated in the work of Austrian School economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Hayek won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 in part for his work on this theory.
In macroeconomics, inflation targeting is a monetary policy where a central bank follows an explicit target for the inflation rate for the medium-term and announces this inflation target to the public. The assumption is that the best that monetary policy can do to support long-term growth of the economy is to maintain price stability, and price stability is achieved by controlling inflation. The central bank uses interest rates as its main short-term monetary instrument.
Helicopter money is a proposed unconventional monetary policy, sometimes suggested as an alternative to quantitative easing (QE) when the economy is in a liquidity trap. Although the original idea of helicopter money describes central banks making payments directly to individuals, economists have used the term "helicopter money" to refer to a wide range of different policy ideas, including the "permanent" monetization of budget deficits – with the additional element of attempting to shock beliefs about future inflation or nominal GDP growth, in order to change expectations. A second set of policies, closer to the original description of helicopter money, and more innovative in the context of monetary history, involves the central bank making direct transfers to the private sector financed with base money, without the direct involvement of fiscal authorities. This has also been called a citizens' dividend or a distribution of future seigniorage.
Market monetarism is a school of macroeconomic thought that advocates that central banks target the level of nominal income instead of inflation, unemployment, or other measures of economic activity, including in times of shocks such as the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2006, and in the financial crisis that followed. In contrast to traditional monetarists, market monetarists do not believe monetary aggregates or commodity prices such as gold are the optimal guide to intervention. Market monetarists also reject the New Keynesian focus on interest rates as the primary instrument of monetary policy. Market monetarists prefer a nominal income target due to their twin beliefs that rational expectations are crucial to policy, and that markets react instantly to changes in their expectations about future policy, without the "long and variable lags" postulated by Milton Friedman.
Negative interest on excess reserves is an instrument of unconventional monetary policy applied by central banks to encourage lending by making it costly for commercial banks to hold their excess reserves at central banks so they will lend more readily to the private sector. Such a policy is usually a response to very slow economic growth, deflation, and deleveraging.
The shadow rate is an interest rate in some financial models. It is used to measure the economy when nominal interest rates come close to the zero lower bound. It was created by Fischer Black in his final paper, "Interest Rates as Options".
{{cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(help)