As Jordà, Schularick and Taylor (2011, p. 1) observe, it was “an historical mishap that just when the largest credit boom in history engulfed Western economies, consideration of the influence of financial factors on the real economy had dwindled to the point where it no longer played a central role in macroeconomic thinking.”  1  See for example Taylor (1998) and Bernanke (2004). BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Few traces of the debate on leaning against the wind A few years before the crisis a debate had arisen on whether central banks should raise their policy rates to counteract the rapid increases in asset prices that had been observed in several regions. Should central banks, as it was often expressed, “lean against the wind” to “burst bubbles” on the asset markets? But this debate made little mark on practical policy. The dominant opinion at this time, among both researchers and representatives of central banks, was that the central banks should not try to take preventive action, but make do with “cleaning up afterwards” if a crisis did occur. 2 It was considered too difficult and too costly to use the policy rate for preventive purposes. Moreover, it was considered – possibly with Japan as the exception that proves the rule – that it need not be so difficult to clean up after a crisis.
4 -Greenwood Hanson Stein (2016), The Federal Reserve’s Balance Sheet as a FinancialStability Tool, Jackson Hole Symposium -Hamilton Harris Hatzius West (2019), The Equilibrium Real Funds Rate: Past, Present, and Future, IMF Economic Review Vol. 64, No. 4 -Hartmann Smets (2018), The first twenty years of the European Central Bank: monetary policy, ECB Working Paper Series -Holsten Laubach Williams (2017), Measuring the natural rate of interest: International trends and determinants, Journal of International Economics 108, S59–S75  Page 11 sur 11 -Monnet (2014), Monetary Policy without Interest Rates: Evidence from France's Golden Age (1948 to 1973) Using a Narrative Approach, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Vol. 6, No. 4 (October 2014), pp. 137-169 -Monnet and Vari (2019), Liquidity Ratios as Monetary Policy Tools: Some Historical Lessons for Macroprudential Policy, IMF Working Paper 19/175 -Nakamura Steinsson McKay (2016), The Power of Forward Guidance Revisited, American Economic Review, Vol. 106, No. 10 -Orphanides van Norden (2002), The Unreliability of Output-Gap Estimates in Real Time, Review of Economics and Statistics 84(4), p. 569-583 -Rostagno et al. (2019), A Tale of Two Decades: the ECB’s Monetary Policy at 20, forthcoming -Stein (2012), Monetary Policy as Financial-Stability Regulation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127, pp. 57-95. -Stein (2013), Overheating in Credit Markets: Origins, Measurement, and Policy Responses, Speech -Svensson (2017), Cost-benefit analysis of leaning against the wind," Journal of Monetary Economics, vol. 90(C), pages 193-213. -Woodford (2016), Quantitative easing and financial stability, Journal Economía Chilena (The Chilean Economy), Central Bank of Chile, vol.