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The world around central banks has shifted. Europe is confronting an unprecedented combination of environmental, economic, and social challenges. Reducing carbon emissions to zero fast enough to avoid catastrophic global warming is difcult; doing so while also reducing economic inequality so as to avert social disintegration and democratic backsliding is very difcult. Addressing this twin challenge will require the state – and the European Union – to deploy all economic policy instruments already at its disposal, and to develop new ones and coördinate their use in new ways. …
The paper proceeds in three steps. Section 1 discusses three distinct challenges – legal, political, and ideational – for the debate on the future of central banking. The remainder of the paper will tackle the two main ideational challenges, namely, institutional amnesia (forgetting the past realities of central banking) and strategic ignorance (ignoring the present realities of central banking). To overcome institutional amnesia, Section 2 briefy reviews the history of central banking, showing that price stability is only one of several goals that central banking has, historically, been associated with. To overcome strategic ignorance, Section 3 reviews three mandate-remote, or “extracurricular” areas of ECB activity, showing that the ECB does, in fact, have many more instruments at its disposal than just short-term (or, more recently, long-term) interest rates. …
Quelle / Link: Central banking beyond inflation