Maintaining price stability with unconventional monetary policy measures

The euro area continues to experience a solid, broad-based and resilient recovery. Deflationary risks have disappeared and some measures of underlying inflation have ticked up over recent months. But overall inflation developments, despite the solid growth, have remained subdued.

Accordingly, while we remain confident that inflation developments will eventually return to levels below, but close to, 2% our medium-term objective, the evidence still shows insufficient progress towards a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation towards those levels. Such “sustained adjustment” is the principal contingency that has guided and will be guiding the introduction and withdrawal of our asset purchase programme (APP) and, indirectly, of all the main components of our present policy.
In my remarks today, I would like to outline the central role monetary policy plays in underpinning this recovery and to discuss the main mechanisms by which our measures have impacted on the economy. I will start from a brief overview of the monetary policy toolkit that the Governing Council has adopted over the last years, and I will sketch out the elements that are most relevant for the Governing Council’s deliberations about calibration of our policy measures. I will then highlight the key channels by which this toolkit transmits to financial conditions. Finally, I will focus on the APP, which plays a central role among the policy instruments.
The ECB’s monetary policy toolkit
Over the last three years, the Governing Council has had to take bold measures to maintain price stability. The context in which we launched this package of measures, in June 2014, was one in which a sustained period of disinflation could have morphed into one of outright deflation. The Governing Council had to move beyond its conventional policy instruments and instead deploy a set of unconventional tools that were tailored to the specific challenges of that time. The first challenge related to the “zero” lower bound on interest rates. The leeway to cut policy-controlled short-term interest rates was insufficient to provide the degree of accommodation that was necessary to support the economy and fight off the threats to our objective. The second challenge related to a dysfunctional monetary transmission. Bank intermediation was significantly impaired, which had caused the transmission of policy stimulus to the broader economy to be too slow and uncertain.
The unconventional tools were designed to act both on the quasi-risk-free yield curve and on bank lending margins. By “yield curve” I mean the term structure that we observe in the money market for overnight indexed interest rate swaps, as well as the curves in the markets for the national sovereign debts, which traditionally constitute an important benchmark for pricing credit to the entire economy. Due to this benchmark function, the level and shape of the yield curve are crucial determinants of prices of a whole range of longer-term financial assets, including those most closely tied to economic activity, such as bank lending rates, corporate bonds and mortgages. Our policy to influence intermediate and long-term yields has been instrumental in bringing the whole structure of credit conditions for households and companies to the accommodative levels necessary to arrest disinflation and strengthen the recovery.
As a complement to the impact of our measures on yield curves, our targeted longer-term refinancing operations (“TLTROs”) were specifically designed to compress bank lending rates – a key intermediate objective of the policy toolkit, given the important role that bank credit plays in financing the euro area economy. Through a number of mechanisms, the TLTROs have successfully bid down the level of bank lending rates on loans to households and companies while preserving banks’ overall margins.
But the decision process is never mechanical. All along, the Governing Council combines the indications coming from models and past empirical regularities with its own judgement. In engaging in this layer of judgemental deliberations, our intent is to come to a firm assessment of the balance between the likely efficacy of our measures and their potential costs in term of financial distortions.
How do our main policy instruments work?
Ensuring an appropriate interest rate environment throughout the yield curve is instrumental in fostering the financing conditions that are most conducive to our objective. A central bank can seek to influence the level and shape of the yield curve by acting on two components of the long-term interest rates: the expectations component and the term premium. The expectations component reflects market expectations of the future path of the policy-controlled short-term interest rates. All else equal, a path that is lower and shallower tends to produce a lower level of the long-term yield and a flatter curve. The term premium reflects the excess return that an investor demands as a compensation for holding a bond with a long, say ten-year, residual maturity relative to rolling over a short-term bill for ten years. Locking themselves into a long-dated fixed income investment for a period of time is not equivalent to rolling over a short-term investment for the same period, because holding a long-dated bond exposes the investor to the risk that interest rates may increase unexpectedly during the holding period. An unexpected increase in interest rates causes a loss on the portfolio. So, the term premium – the excess return – is typically positive: it compensates investors for taking on such interest rate (or duration) risk.
How does the interplay between the APP and our short-term interest rate policy enter this simple logic? Suppose the level and shape of the yield curve prevailing at a given point in time is judged to be inconsistent with a set of financing conditions that are sufficiently accommodative to foster a return of inflation to levels below and close to 2% over the medium term. How could the two main instruments of current policy be deployed to change this state of affairs in an environment in which the short-term interest rate cannot be lowered meaningfully?
Simplifying a great deal, one could say that the forward guidance on short-term interest rates – our stated expectation that the ECB’s key interest rates will remain “at their present levels for an extended period of time” – should be calibrated in a way to anchor the short-to-medium maturities of the yield curve – those portions most sensitive to short-term interest rate expectations and, therefore, to forward guidance – around levels that are sufficiently steady and low. In this respect, a mildly negative DFR has proved to be particularly powerful in controlling and anchoring these maturities, which are key to pricing bank credit in the euro area. The notion that zero was not the effective lower bound has exerted additional flattening pressure on the short-to-intermediate maturities of the yield curve, those to which banks tend to index loans with adjustable interest rates. This has amplified the reach-out potential of the stimulus relative to a situation in which our policy rates had been reduced to levels no lower than zero.
The APP applies further pressure on longer-term interest rates along the curve, mainly by compressing the term premium. Why does the APP influence the term premium? The mechanism operates principally by extracting duration risk from the market. Markets see duration risk as a potential source of portfolio losses, so they want to hedge against it, and the compensation for hedging is precisely what we call the term premium. If this premium is high, it makes long-term borrowing more expensive than short-term borrowing. If, at times of disinflation and weak growth, long-term borrowing is to be made more affordable so as to promote investment and durable consumption, then the central bank can try to absorb part of the duration risk that otherwise would have to be held by private investors. This can be done by purchasing long-dated bonds, as the ECB did under its APP. With less long-dated bonds to hold in the aggregate, private investors have more balance sheet capacity to hedge against the amount of duration risk that remain in the market, and more risk-bearing power to re-deploy funds to other investments, including the acquisition and financing of productive capital. As a consequence, the desired compensation for hedging will decrease, which will drive down the term premium and the whole yield curve. This same mechanism will spur propagation. Duration extraction is the catalyst for the portfolio rebalancing channel, which is the chief mechanism by which easing through quantitative interventions propagates through the entire economy.
Calibrating APP
While fostering the appropriate interest rate environment is a critical intermediate condition enabling the transmission of our policies, in the end we do not control the yield curve. We can influence the yield curve only indirectly, through forward guidance and, notably, via modulating the size and intensity of our asset purchases. This process is mediated and to some extent difficult to forecast: we change our instruments and let markets determine the asset price implications of our actions. But, importantly, this process preserves the ability of markets to express views about the creditworthiness of the financial assets that are to be priced. Indeed the last year has demonstrated that, despite the ECB’s forward guidance on short-term interest rates and its continuing presence in the market as a large investor, market prices have tended to reflect investors’ evolving views about the prospective standing of sovereign issuers’ credit.
With this in mind, let me turn now to the challenge of calibrating the size and duration of purchases that can deliver that yield constellation and, indirectly, the set of financing conditions consistent with our objective. For this, we rely on the current theory and empirics of quantitative interventions by central banks. The theory available today stipulates that it is primarily by announcing that the central bank will withdraw a certain stock of long-term bonds at a certain horizon, and thus a share of duration risk that otherwise would have to be borne by the market, that an asset purchase programme can impact on the term premium and on the yield curve in general.
It is important to emphasise that it is the amount of duration that we extract relative to the amount of duration that otherwise would be in the market that produces the impact. In this respect, keeping the size of the APP portfolio constant at a certain nominal level does not necessarily safeguard a given amount of accommodation. By keeping the portfolio of assets acquired under the APP constant in nominal terms, it is difficult to prevent the ageing of the portfolio, i.e. its gradual loss of duration as the securities held in the portfolio mature. Although re-investments of the proceeds from principal payments of the maturing securities can, to a certain extent, offset this endogenous decay of the average portfolio duration – by replacing short-term expiring securities with the purchase of longer-term securities – this substitution effect is generally not strong enough to maintain the average maturity of the portfolio relative to that of the market portfolio at a level consistent with a given amount of accommodation. In addition, of course, the amount of duration that is supplied to the market by public and private issuers is not constant and indeed typically trends up. Thus, keeping the central bank portfolio steady at a certain nominal level means that, in relative terms, the fraction of duration risk that is withdrawn from the market tends to fall. As time passes, the endogenous loss of duration in the central bank portfolio is bound to exert increasing upward pressure on the term premium.
Conclusion
While the euro area recovery remains solid, broad-based and resilient, the economy has yet to make sufficient progress towards a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation to levels that are consistent with the Governing Council’s aim. To support such sustained adjustment the ECB has resorted to a package of complementary policy measures and recalibrated this package at various occasions in line with the evolving macroeconomic conditions, most notably the outlook for price stability, and the state of monetary policy transmission. This autumn the Governing Council will again assess how all these factors can be expected to influence the monetary policy stance and will re-calibrate its instruments accordingly, with a view to delivering the monetary policy impulse that is still necessary to secure a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation in a way that is consistent with our monetary policy aim.
Summary of the speech by Peter Praet, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, at the MMF Monetary and Financial Policy Conference, London
Source: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/