Unconventional monetary policy: How well did it work?

After pushing short-term interest rates down to zero, the Federal Reserve Bank and the central banks in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan experimented over the past decade with an unprecedented set of monetary tools that come to be known as “unconventional monetary policy” – forward guidance about future policies, quantitative easing or large-scale asset purchases, negative interest rates. The time has come to step back and ask how well these unconventional monetary policies worked, and whether central banks should use them in the future. To answer those questions, the Hutchins Center on Fiscal & Monetary Policy has commissioned two papers that are forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

On Wednesday, October 17, the Hutchins Center hosted an event at which the authors of those papers – Ken Kuttner of Williams College, who wrote about the United States, and Giovanni Dell’Ariccia, Pau Rabanal, and Damiano Sandri of the International Monetary Fund, who wrote about the rest of the world – presented their findings and discussed them with a panel of monetary policy experts.