2  See, inter alia, Neri and Notarpietro (2015). 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  needs to look at the counterfactual and not, or not only, at the data. The question is not whether we are happy with the current levels of growth and inflation, but whether we would be happier if the interventions had not taken place at all.
This complicates the issue, making it more dependent on the assumptions one makes to get an answer, but it is the only serious way to perform a policy assessment.3 The unconventional measures adopted by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have proven effective in supporting asset prices and in narrowing inflation and output gaps (Williams, 2014; see Table 1). Casiraghi et al.