Oversimplistic rules such as raising nominal interest rates until inflation returns to target would fall in this category. But this approach ignores the fact that monetary policy is subject to time lags - of up to two years to pass through fully to inflation - and that other factors can affect future inflation. It would put us at risk of overreacting. Making decisions on a meeting-by-meeting basis and the latest available data does not mean that we should be short-sighted, on the contrary forward-looking. At a bit of a stretch of my definition, another example of the “empiricist approach” would be to simply follow the US Federal Reserve, perhaps with a gap to reflect different long-term neutral rates. This is obviously what countries with exchange rates pegged to the dollar do. Of course central banks are aware of what their peers are doing and there are undoubtedly some spill-overs from the actions of the Fed, not least through the effect on the exchange rate, on which I will have more to say later. But it would not make sense for the ECB to blindly follow the Fed: although inflation has dramatically accelerated in both economies, the underlying causes are not the 4  Page 5 sur 14  same and hence the monetary policy stance should be different too. On the one hand, the energy supply shock is considerably more intense in the euro area which is a large energy net importer while the US is a net exporter.
That said, I wouldn’t conclude that we are not at risk of coordination failures. Let me share two reflections in this regard: 1. Our collective “doctrine” on monetary policy, in the G7 and G20, remains valid: that we central banks target domestic price stability and not exchange rates. But it implies as a counterpart an in-depth and confident dialogue, in Washington, Basel and elsewhere, on our intentions: there should be mutual predictability of policy making. We will achieve the closest to a cooperative solution if we avoid significant surprises between policy makers. As Jay Powell rightly said in 2019 in Paris “Pursuing our domestic mandates in this new world requires that we understand the anticipated effects of these interconnections and incorporate them into our policy decision making.”ix Lael Brainard reiterated this welcome statement no later than yesterday: “The combined effect of concurrent global tightening is larger than the sum of its parts. The Federal Reserve takes into account the spillovers of higher interest rates, a stronger dollar, and weaker demand from foreign economies into the United States, as well as in the reverse direction”. x  2. But there can be market misperceptions of policy intentions or overshooting, and exchange rates can become fundamentally misaligned. Under such circumstances, there were G7 interventions in the past. Several of them were 12  Page 13 sur 14  effective, which we shouldn’t forget.