Interessante artigo do Feldstein sobre o G20. Mais uma leitura obrigatória.
Talk about “exit strategies” will be high on the agenda when the heads of the G-20 countries gather in Pittsburgh a few days from now. They will promise to reverse the explosive monetary and fiscal expansion of the past two years, to do it neither too soon nor too late, and to do it in a coordinated way.
These are the right things to promise. But what will such promises mean?
Consider first the goal of reversing the monetary expansion, which is necessary to avoid a surge of inflation when aggregate demand begins to pick up. But it is also important not to do it too soon, which might stifle today’s nascent and very fragile recovery.
But promises by heads of government mean little, given that central banks are explicitly independent of government control in every important country. The US Federal Reserve’s Ben Bernanke, the Bank of England’s Mervyn King, and the European Central Bank’s Jean-Claude Trichet will each decide when and how to reverse their expansionary monetary policies. Bernanke doesn’t take orders from the US president, and King doesn’t take orders from the British prime minister (and it’s not even clear who would claim to tell Trichet what to do).
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