Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • A clutch of new central bank governors are settling into their seats, or about to, from Australia and India, to Malaysia and Turkey

  • but do investors care about them anymore?

  • There was a time when these appointments would move markets and have longer-term consequences, but in a world of ultra-low interest rates

  • do these great and serious people make any difference?

  • Monetary policy best operates when central banks are doing different things, rather than all following the same herd instinct

  • When policies differ, and one central bank cuts rates while another raises them, then capital is on the move, but now, central banks look incapacitated

  • It is the unintended consequence of the G20 meeting of policy makers in Shanghai in February,

  • when they all accepted the need to avoid competitive currency devaluations in order to calm some volatile markets

  • Now, markets are so calm and volatility so low that central banks worry that a slight policy tweak will have too big a market impact

  • Who would've thought at the start of the year that the Fed, which was then plotting four rate hikes for 2016, would become so allergic to the idea of a stronger dollar?

  • It means some markets are looking bubbly

  • Is this year's rally in emerging markets FX really a sensible affirmative bet, or one based on a lack of meaningful alternatives?

  • And is the idea of fiscal stimulus as a solution to global low growth being floated around, simply because nothing else seems to work

  • At least there is one voice bucking the trend

  • The San Francisco Fed chief John Williams last week said that the Fed needed to think out of the box, and raise its inflation target in order to give it more room for maneuver

  • Now, central bank governors, whether they are incoming or incumbent, will welcome that

  • After all, the Fed is paralyzing them

  • What's more important, their own data or the data coming out of the US?

  • Now investors know the answer to that. They would like to care what the next governor of the Reserve Bank of India says, but they have little reason to look beyond the Fed

  • We used to talk about globalization and interdependence

  • Strange then, dependent on one set of policymakers, the world has now become

A clutch of new central bank governors are settling into their seats, or about to, from Australia and India, to Malaysia and Turkey

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it