When Every Problem is a Nail

It is increasingly hard not to fulminate at the latter day lunacy of blind CPI targeting. It seems hard to imagine that, 25 years ago, the brave little RBNZ was breaking new ground by adopting the goal of keeping price rises to  0-2% p.a. in order both to provide an anchor for its own broader policy aims and, believe it or not, as a way for it and the government of the day to wean the wider public sector off the levels of increasingly obstructive interventionism which had long been its practice to undertake.

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ECB Excesses

With last week’s report of monetary developments in the Eurozone, we again have evidence both of Draghi’s monetary monomania and of the sheer futility of his constant refrain that the ECB is just buying time until member states undertake the ever-promised, but never-delivered ‘structural reforms’ which they all so patently require.

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