The European Central Bank, for instance, continued to place great value on the usefulness of a monetary pillar. And, as discussed below, there were some who believed that central banks should also use their constrained discretion to lean against incipient asset-price bubbles and credit growth. But the set of beliefs above were, we believe, held sufficiently widely in policymaking and academic circles to be described as a consensus. In the rest of this paper, we re-visit some aspects of this consensus in the light of the crisis. It is not possible to cover all the elements of the consensus, though we shall offer some more wide-ranging observations at the end. In particular, we focus on: whether the experience with unorthodox policies during the crisis has changed our view of the appropriate policy instruments in normal times; whether the target rate of inflation should be increased or a shift to price-level targeting is warranted; and what the experience of the crisis has taught us about how monetary policy should respond to credit/asset-price booms. 1 As a precursor to  1  2  Some of these themes already figured in the contributions to the conference held here eleven years ago. BIS Review 111/2010  that discussion, however, we ask whether monetary policy decisions contributed materially to the crisis. 2. Monetary policy and the crisis  It is worth stressing at the outset that a multitude of factors, both microeconomic and macroeconomic, played into the crisis.
In the past five years, the National Bank has achieved an average yield of 2.9%. This more or less corresponds to the earnings forecasts underlying the agreement between the Swiss Confederation and the National Bank regarding the distribution of profits. 2/2