This partly explains the feeble economic recovery and declining potential GDP growth trend in the US (Chart 2). 6. The weak recovery in the US in recent years fell outside the expectations of many economists at the Fed. Because of the lacklustre growth, QE was extended and expanded, feeding an addiction from “low for long”, to “low for longer” and then to “low forever”, and developing a dependence on QE by the market. When the then Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke hinted at the possibility of scaling down the asset purchase programme in May 2013, the market panicked in an episode we later called the “Taper Tantrum”. 7. So, why is the present recovery weaker than in previous cycles? This is a complicated and controversial subject. I believe that both cyclical factors and structural factors, such as household de-leveraging, the high home inventory levels after the bursting of the housing bubble and structural changes in the population and labour market, are at play. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  External factors are also involved, including the European sovereign debt crisis in 2011. However, due to time constraints, I will focus on how QE may have supported US economic recovery and affected the global financial environment. 8. The prevailing mainstream view, including the major advanced economies such as the US, Europe and Japan, as well as the International Monetary Fund, is that QE is the right policy response to prop up the economy and stave off deflation.
Typically, when the source of an inflationary shock is stemming mainly from demand, monetary policy will respond proactively to prevent the economy from overheating. And when faced with supply shocks, to the extent that such shocks are seen to have no lasting impact on inflation, central banks will “look through” and extend the medium-term policy horizon if necessary. But such a neat categorisation does not adequately capture the situation we are facing in the euro area today. We are not seeing the type of demand-led overheating that is visible in the United States and, despite a tight labour market, the risk of a wage-price spiral so far seems to remain contained. Instead, the euro area is seeing an increase in inflation driven by two unprecedented shocks. These shocks have constrained global supply, but they have also shifted demand and led to a large and persistent inflation response. The first shock was the pandemic. Pandemic-related supply bottlenecks and rising prices have reinforced each other, with firms reacting to the threat of shortages by ordering more and earlier. This “bullwhip effect”[1] has driven up prices along the pricing chain. At the same time, the fiscal and monetary policy response to the pandemic has succeeded in protecting nominal incomes, thereby supporting a fast recovery of demand when our economies reopened. The resilience of incomes has, in turn, triggered large swings in demand across sectors. During the lockdown period, and thanks notably to e-commerce, consumption was concentrated on durable goods.