Spencer Dale: Inflation targeting – learning the lessons from the financial crisis Speech by Mr Spencer Dale, Executive Director and Chief Economist of the Bank of England, at the Society of Business Economists’ Annual Conference, London, 23 June 2009. I would like to thank Rohan Churm, Jens Larsen and Rob Wood for their considerable help in preparing these remarks. The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of other members of the Monetary Policy Committee. *  *  *  We are in the midst of a deep recession. Unlike recessions of the late twentieth century, this twenty-first century version is not the result of deliberate, but belated, attempts to slow the expansion of money spending in order to bring down inflation from very high levels. Inflation is close to the Government’s 2% target. This recession has at its heart a crisis in the banking system; a crisis that has strangled the supply of credit and undermined public confidence. For the first time in fifty years, the total amount of money spent in our economy during the first quarter of this year was lower than a year earlier. The era of “Great Stability” is over. The Great Stability followed hot on the heels of the introduction of the inflation targeting framework for monetary policy. Some attributed part of the improvement in economic performance to better policymaking. The abrupt end to that stability has, in turn, led the inflation targeting framework to be questioned.
There were manifest conflicts of interest, originators and brokers had limited interest in ensuring continued monitoring of products and credit ratings were inflated, conveying a false sense of security. A euphoric bubble thus developed, based, in Alan Greenspan’s words, on “the complexity of the interactions of asset markets and the economy”, and which concealed a massive global under-pricing of risk. Market participants seem to have been aware of the growing risks but were unwilling to retrench. You might recall Citibank’s Chuck Prince’s memorable words during the onset of the crisis that “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing”. Market players failed to appreciate the speed at which demand could evaporate and risk aversion could increase. This soon resulted in record-high risk premia, seized-up interbank markets, acute liquidity and credit shortages, bank failures and a widespread loss of confidence. Meanwhile the high degree of financial market integration had created the premise for a simultaneous build-up of systemic risk. Financial institutions did not internalise the costs arising from the too-big-to-fail and too-interconnected syndrome. Central banks had been monitoring these trends, but it turned out that the regulatory tools were not designed to address systemic risk. Neither was the strength of the feedback loop between the financial  BIS Review 67/2010  1  system and the economy fully anticipated. Unfortunately, these all proved to be critical weaknesses.