Stronger initial cushions against stress reduces the need to hedge risk dynamically in a crisis, reducing the broader risk of a self-reinforcing, pro-cyclical margin spiral, such as we have seen in this crisis. 4  BIS Review 74/2008  How should we decide where to set these constraints on risk-taking? This is hard, but the objective should be to offset the benefits and the moral hazard risk that come from access to central bank liquidity in crises, without setting the constraint at a level that will only result in pushing more capital to the unregulated part of the financial system. Risk management and oversight now focuses too much on the idiosyncratic risk that affects an individual firm and too little on the systematic issues that could affect market liquidity as a whole. To put it somewhat differently, the conventional risk-management framework today focuses too much on the threat to a firm from its own mistakes and too little on the potential for mistakes to be correlated across firms. It is too confident that a firm can adjust to protect itself from its own mistakes without adding to downward pressure on markets and takes too little account of the risk of a flight to safety – a broad-based, marketwide rush for the exits as the financial system as a whole de-leverages and tries collectively to move into more liquid and lower risk assets of government obligations.
Should it now be the case that we are entering a longer period of persistently higher inflationary pressures – which we do not know yet, of course – then my assessment is that the framework of wage-formation we have today will act as a built-in and useful brake in the system. Thirdly, a stricter and more robust fiscal policy framework was introduced after the crisis in the early 1990s. This has contributed to public finances now being in a much better shape than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. A large and growing sovereign debt may raise inflation expectations, if agents suspect that the government may eventually try to solve the problem of by inflating the debt away. This means is that the central government reduces the real value of the debt by letting inflation rise. However, unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, we have now a number of control mechanisms in place, which means that this potential source of excessive inflation has in practice been eliminated. My reflections on the current situation So, in conclusion, how do I view the current situation more specifically? And what can we learn from history? During many of the periods of high inflation in connection with war, the effects of monetary policy have been heavily dependent on the expectations of companies and households regarding future economic developments. There is an example of a deflation spiral after the First World War when expectations of lower prices in the future led to falling aggregate demand.