Renewing our Monetary Vows: Open Letters to the Governor of the Bank of England

Over the past 20 years, considerable progress has been made in the science of monetary policy. This is under threat from a new era of economic populism. There is a clear danger that in the absence of an open and deep debate about the fundamental objectives of the central bank, the political system will try to offload its obligations onto the central bank balance sheet and seek to unwind genuine progress by arguing that we need a new direction from the problems of the past, or perhaps worse still, that those old objectives were the root cause of the problems we now face. To be clear, they were not. Monetary and financial stability does not cause economic strife, but its absence surely will. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research commissioned a number of expert UK-based economists to survey the monetary landscape. When doing so, we chose to move to the next generation and asked a set of younger monetary economists to outline their views. The views in this book are offered on a personal basis and do not necessarily represent those of any of the institutions for which they work or NIESR. But they are new voices to which we should listen.