On the last day of 1945, with World War II finally behind it, Finland's government announced a new and very strange policy.

All Finns were required to take out a pair of scissors and snip their banknotes in half. This was known in Finland as setelinleikkaus, or banknote cutting. Anyone who owned any of the three largest denomination Finnish banknotes — the 5000 markka note, the 1000, or the 500 — was required to perform this operation immediately. The left side of the note could still be used to buy things, but at only half its value. So if a Finn had a 1000 markka note in their wallet, henceforth he or she could now only buy 500 markka worth of items at stores. As for the right side, it could no longer be spent and effectively became a bond (more on this later).

Source: Hallitus kansan kukkarolla, by Antti Heinonen

Setelinleikkaus was Finland's particular response to the post-War European problem of "monetary overhang," described in a 1990 paper by economists Rudi Dornbusch and Holger Wolf. After many years of war production, price controls, and rationing, European citizens had built-up a substantial chest of forced savings, or involuntary postponed consumption, as Dornbusch & Wolf refer to it. With WWII now over, Europeans would soon want to begin living as they had before, spending the balances they had accumulated on goods and services. Alas, with most factories having been configured to military purposes or having been bombed into dust, there wasn't nearly enough consumption items to make everyone happy.

It was plain to governments all across Europe what this sudden making-up of postponed consumption in a war-focused economy would lead to: a big one time jump in prices.

This may sound familiar to the modern day reader, since we just went through our own wartime economy of sorts: the 2020-21 battle against COVID and subsequent return to a peacetime economy. The supply chain problem caused by the COVID shutdowns combined with the big jump in spending as lockdowns expired, spurred on by a big overhang of unspent COVID support cheques, led to the steepest inflation in decades. 

According to Dornbusch and Wolf, European authorities fretted that the post-WWII jump in prices could very well spiral into something worse: all-out hyperinflation, as had happened after the first World War. Currencies were no longer linked to gold, after all, having lost that tether when the war started, or earlier, in response to the Great Depression. 

To prevent what they saw as imminent hyperinflation, almost all European countries began to enact monetary reforms. Finland's own unique reform — obliging their citizens to cut their stash of banknotes in two — would reduce the economy's stock of banknotes to just "lefts," thereby halving spending power and muting the wave of post-wartime spending. After February 16, 1946 the halves would be demonetized, but until then the Finns could continue to make purchases with them or bring them to the nearest bank to be converted into a new edition of the currency.

As for the right halves, they were to be transformed into a long-term investment. Finns were obligated to bring each right half in to be registered, upon which it would be converted into a Finnish government bond that paid 2% interest per year, to be repaid four years later, in 1949. It was illegal to try and spend right halves or transfer their ownership to anyone else (although it's not apparent how this was enforced).

In theory, turning right halves into bonds would shift a large part of the Finnish public's post-war consumption intentions forward to 1949, when the bonds could finally be cashed. By then, the economy would have fully transitioned back to a civilian one and would be capable of accepting everyone's desired consumption spending without hyperinflation occurring.

To our modern sensibilities, this is a wildly invasive policy. Had setelinleikkaus been proposed in 2022-23 as a way to dampen the inflationary effects of the reopening of COVID-wracked economies, and we all had to cut our dollar bills or yen or euros in half, there probably would have been a revolt.

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that setelinleikkaus didn't work very well. Finland continued to suffer from high inflation in the years after the war, much more so than most European countries did.

Why the failure? As Finish economist Matti Viren has pointed out, the reform only affected banknotes, not bank deposits. This stock of notes only comprised 8% of the total Finnish money supply, (Finns being  uncommonly comfortable with banks) so a major chunk of the monetary overhang was left in place.

Another glitch appears to have been the public's anticipation of setelinleikkaus. According to
former central banker Antti Heinonen, who wrote an entire book on the subject, banks began to advertise their services as a way to avoid the dangers of the upcoming monetary reform (see images below). So Finns deposited their cash prior to the final date, the monetary overhang to some degree evading the blockade.

Finnish bank advertisements warning of the upcoming note cutting Left: "Bank accounts are fully secured in the banknote exchange." Right: "Depositors are protected." Source: Hallitus kansan kukkarolla, by Antti Heinonen (Translations via Google Translate)

If the Finnish experiment was a dud, other European responses to the post WWII overhang — either  redenominations, temporarily blocking of funds, or all-out write offs of bank accounts — were more successful. Germany's monetary reform of 1948, which introduced the Deutschmark and was later dubbed the "German economic miracle", is the one that captures the most attention, but here I want to focus on a lesser known reform.

Belgium's Operation Gutt, named after Belgium's Minister of Finance, Camille Gutt, was the earliest and perhaps the most dramatic of the post-war monetary operations. Taking place over four days in October 1944, Belgium contracted its entire money supply, both banknotes and deposits, from 165 billion to 57.5 billion francs. That's a two-thirds decline! You can see it illustrated in the chart below, along with the monetary reform enacted by the Dutch the following year, inspired by the Belgians.

A chart showing the incredible contraction of Belgium's money supply in 1944 Source: Federal Reserve Bulletin, October 1946 (red arrow is my emphasis)

It's not just the size of Operation Gutt that is striking to the modern eye. It's also the oddity of the tool being used. Today, we control inflation with changes in interest rates, not changes in the quantity of money. To soften the effect of the global COVID monetary overhang, for instance, central banks in the U.S., Canada, and Europe began to raise rates in 2022 from around 0% to 4-5% in 2024. 

By making it more lucrative for everyone to save and less attractive to borrow, central bankers were trying to reduce our propensity to spend our COVID support payments, and with less spending, prices wouldn't get pushed up as fast. This reliance on interest rates as our main tool of monetary policy is a relatively new phenomenon. In times past, central banks tended to lean heavily on changes in the supply of money, which may explain why in 1945, their main response — in Europe at least —  was to obliterate the public's money balances rather than to jack up interest rates to 25% or 50%.   

It's worth exploring in some more detail how Operation Gutt was designed. On October 9, 1944, Belgian bank depositors had 90% of the money held in their accounts frozen, leaving just 10% in spendable form.

As for holders of banknotes, there was no Finnish-style cutting. Rather, Belgians had four days, beginning October 9, to bring all their banknotes to the nearest bank, only the first 2,000 francs qualifying for conversion to newly printed versions. All notes above that ceiling got blocked in a separate account (along with excess deposits), some of which would be released slowly over the next few years—while the rest would remain frozen forever, subject to whether the owner was deemed to have been a collaborator who got rich during the occupation. (Finland's setelinleikkaus also had this same "cleansing" motivation.)

In 1944, a line forms at the National Bank of Belgium to exchange notes. Source: National Bank of Belgium on Flickr

In this sense, the post-WWII European monetary reforms were not only designed to reduce inflation, but also had a moral basis. Think of them as progenitors to India's 2016 demonetization, which was designed to catch so-called "black money," although it failed to do so.

Did Operation Gutt work? Incredibly, the decimation of two-thirds of the money supply in just a few days did not cause an immediate fall in Belgian prices. According to Belgian economic historians Monique Verbreyt and Herman Van der Wee, the Belgian retail price index stood at 260 the month of the reform, but had risen to 387 by September 1945. So it would seem that the whole operation failed. This surely draws into question the quantity theory of money, one of the basic tenets of monetary economics. A decline in the money supply, all things staying the same, is supposed to cause a fall in prices. Here is a glaring case in which it didn't.

However, the National Bank of Belgium (NBB), the country's central bank, strikes a more constructive tone. In a recent retrospective on Operation Gutt, the NBB describes the reform as a gamble that paid off over time, eventually inspiring the "Belgian Economic Miracle", a period of low inflation and fast growth lasting from 1946-1949. By contrast, France did not embark on its own monetary reforms, the NBB takes pains to point out, and it thereby "paid the consequences of post-World War II inflation well into the 1960s." Belgium's inflation rate was also much lower than Finland's in the four or five years after the war. 

Which gets us back to Finland. Unlike the Belgian central bank, Finland's central bank — Suomen Pankki — notably avoids almost all mention of its post-war reform on its website. According to Matti Viren, setelinleikkaus led to "distrust towards the authorities and economic policy for decades," so there may be some sheepish reticence on the part of the central bank to draw attention to it.

But setelinleikkaus and Operation Gutt aren't just archaic monetary policy dead-ends. One day I suspect they'll be back. Not just as a special tool for responding to emergencies, but as a day-to-day policy wrench, albeit in a new and refined form. 

Cash, which is awkward to immobilize for policy reasons, will be gone in a decade or two, leaving the public entirely dependent on bank deposits and fintech balances which, thanks to digitization and automation, can be easily controlled by the authorities. To rein in a jump in inflation, central bankers will require commercial banks and companies like PayPal to impose temporary quantitative freezing on their clients'  accounts, but unlike Finland's 1945 blockade, the authorities will be able to rapidly and precisely define the criteria, say by allowing for spending on necessities — food, electricity, and gas— while embargoing purchases of luxury cars and real estate.

The future version of setelinleikkaus won't be clumsy, it'll be a precise and surgical inflation-fighting tool, albeit a controversial one.

What role do changes in the supply of banknotes play in contributing to a central bank's ability to carry out monetary policy? Put differently, to what degree does "printing," or creating new physical currency and issuing it into the economy, contribute to generating a central bank's desired inflation rate of 2-3%?

In a recent blog post at Econlog, Scott Sumner suggests that printing physical cash and "forcing" or "injecting" it into the economy has been an important part of central banks hitting their inflation targets, albeit less so now than in times past. I'm not so sure.

Having imbibed Scott's blog posts for more than a decade, I think I'm 99% on the same page as he is when it comes to thinking about monetary policy. We both agree that a central bank must either reduce the interest rate that it pays on the monetary base, or inject more monetary base into the economy, in order to push up prices. Using either of these two methods, the central bank sets off a hot potato effect in which a long chain of market participants do their best to unload their excess money balances, a process that only comes to an end when all prices have risen to a new and higher equilibrium such that no one feels any additional urge to spend away their extra money. Scott once described the hot potato effect as the the "sine qua non of monetary economics."

The monetary base is comprised of two central bank financial instruments: physical banknotes (a.k.a. cash) and digital clearing balances, sometimes known as reserves, a type of money used by banks.

Reading through Scott's post, I think the one spot where we may disagree is on the relative role played by the two types of base money in the hot potato process.

For my part, I don't think that cash has ever had much of a primary role to play in setting off a hot potato effect. All of the initial uumph necessary for driving prices towards target has typically been provided by reserves, either via a change in the interest rate on reserves or a change in their quantity. Once that initial uumph has been delivered, a whole host of other money types – physical currency, bank deposits, checks, money market funds, and PayPal balances – helps convey the forces originally unleashed by reserves to all corners of the economy.

An example of the hot potato effect in action may help illustrate.

Let's start with a central bank that needs to push inflation up to target. It reduces the interest rates on reserves. The first reaction to lower rates is a flight out of reserves into other assets, say shares.

As a result, share prices quickly rise. Those existing shareholders who realized their gains by selling at the new and higher price now find themselves with a hot potato on their hands; they have too many monetary balances in their possession and not enough non-monetary things.

Some of these ex-shareholders may choose to spend their excess deposits to go on, say, a vacation. As a result, airline ticket prices rise. Others transfer their extra money to their PayPal account in order to send it to friends and family, who may in turn make purchases, pushing up the prices of whatever they buy. Another group of ex-shareholders decides to buy used cars. They withdraw banknotes, their banks in turn asking the Fed to print new banknotes and ship them over. Used car prices rise.

The point is, the initial uumph is delivered by the change in reserves, and this gets conveyed to all prices by a daisy-chain of spenders offloading an array of different types of excess money.

In this story, note that cash isn't being actively "injected" into the economy by central banks, nor by commercial banks. Rather, people are choosing to draw cash out as their preferred method for getting rid of unwanted money, in response to a set of forces initiated by reserves. Reserves are the central bank's lever for change; cash is merely responsive.

Consider too that in a world where cash no longer exists, and has been replaced by digital payments options, monetary policy is still effective. In this world, the response to a reduction in the interest rate on reserves gets conducted to all the economy's nooks and crannies via non-cash types of monies, like fintech balances and bank deposits. (I'd be curious to hear if Scott is of the same opinion about monetary policy in a world without cash.)

Here's an interesting thought experiment. Would it be possible to redesign cash and reserves in such a way that cash takes over the initiatory role in monetary policy from reserves? That is, can we turn cash into the active part of the monetary base, the one that drives changes in monetary policy, and relegate reserves to the passive role?  

One step we could take is to pay interest on cash. This may sound odd, but it's possible to do so by setting up a serial note lottery to pay, say, 3% per year to holders of cash. (I wrote about this idea here and here.) Simultaneously, reserves would be rendered less important by no longer paying interest on them.

Now when a central bank needs to raise consumer prices in order to hit its targets, it reduces the interest rate on cash from 3% to 2%. This ignites the hot potato process as the entire economy suddenly tries to offload its unwanted $20 and $100 bills, which at 2% just aren't as lucrative as before.

Another change we could enact would be to modify the mechanism by which central banks inject base money into the economy. As it stands now, central banks inject base money by purchasing assets with new reserves. Since reserves are digital, they are a lot more convenient for making billion dollar asset purchases than physical money. These extra reserves become hot potatoes in the hands of asset sellers, which sets off the process of price adjustments described in previous paragraphs. If central banks were to buy assets with cash rather than reserves, that would put cash in the driver's seat, albeit at the expense of convenience.

It's an interesting thought experiment, but in the end I don't think it's very helpful to get bogged down over which type of base money has more monetary significance. As Scott says, the key point is that the central bank controls the price level via its control over base money in general. They can raise prices by either adding to the supply of base money, or by reducing the demand for base money with a cut in the interest rate paid on reserves. "It's basic supply and demand, nothing more." 

As crypto continues to move into the public's consciousness, curious people who aren't familiar with it often ask me if central bankers at the Bank of Canada or the Federal Reserve should be worried that crypto may replace the dollar. 

In this short blog post I'll suggest that they should not be worried.

For central bankers like the Fed's Jay Powell or the Bank of Canada's Tiff Macklem, controlling national monetary policy is probably their most important task. By altering the money supply or shifting interest rates, Powell influences the value of U.S. dollar. These policy changes get transmitted across the entire country thanks to the ubiquity of the U.S. dollar as a unit for expressing prices. (For his part, Macklem relies on the Canadian dollar's dominance as a unit-of-account in Canada to exercise monetary policy). 

Monetary policy is important. First, it keeps the dollar's purchasing power stable. Since our wages and contracts are denominated in dollars, a degree of sameness and consistency is important. Second, monetary policy is an important tool for offsetting broader economic shocks, say the pandemic or the '08 financial crisis.

Given that crypto is often marketed as a dollar replacement, might Powell and Macklem be losing some sleep? After all, if crypto starts to replace the dollar as America or Canada's unit-of-account then neither central banker can carry out national monetary policy.

Luckily for Powell and Macklem, crypto is not a threat to the dollar.

Crypto is no longer a very useful term, since it encompasses so many different types of phenomena. There is bitcoin, programmable blockchains like Ethereum, stablecoins, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi), and more.

Let's start with Bitcoin. In this category I've included other volcoins like Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin. I call them volcoins because they are incredibly volatile.

In the early days, many of us thought it possible that Bitcoin might develop into a legitimate threat to the dollar. But enough time has passed now that we know this isn't case. The dominant reason people have for owning volcoins is to get exposure to their exciting price moves. That is, volcoins are a gambling technology, not a monetary technology. Rather than competing for dominance with the relatively stable payments instruments issued by central banks, volcoins serve as substitutes for casinos, meme stocks, lotteries, poker, and OTM options. None of these bets will ever be a credible threat to Fed or Bank of Canada dollars.

Let's move onto stablecoins. Whereas volcoins are wildly unstable, stablecoins are the tamer version of crypto. The stability of stablecoins means that they could credibly replace banknotes issued by the Fed and Bank of Canada.

Even if stablecoins become widely used, they won't subvert Powell and Macklem's ability to conduct monetary policy. Because they are pegged to central bank money, stablecoins effectively do the opposite: they extend central bank monetary policy power into blockchain environments. Stablecoins are therefore allies of the Fed and Bank of Canada policy makers, not enemies, in the same way that regular banks such as TD Bank or Wells Fargo are allies because they extend the range of central bank monetary policy into the regular economy.

[Yes, stablecoins involve financial stability issues. But this post is about monetary policy, not financial stability.]

Nor is decentralized finance, or DeFi, a threat to monetary policy. DeFi is just another component of a nation's financial edifice, albeit more decentralized than the other bits. If a stock exchange like the NYSE or Toronto Stock Exchange is no threat to monetary policy, then neither does a decentralized exchange such as Uniswap pose a threat.

Finally, NFTs are a hyperfinancialized claims on underlying digital art. Art never has been a threat to monetary policy and never will be.

In sum, Jay Powell and Tiff Macklem may have reasons to worry about crypto, but concerns of monetary policy impotence should not be one of those worries. Crypto is not going to replace the dollar anytime soon.

Ever since the coronavirus hit, the Bank of Canada's balance sheet has been exploding. In late February its assets measured just $118 billion. Eight weeks later the Bank of Canada has $440 billion in assets. That's a $320 billion jump!

To put this in context, I've charted out the Bank of Canada's assets going back to when it was founded in 1935. (Note: to make the distant past comparable to the present, the axis uses logarithmic scaling.)


The rate of increase in Bank of Canada assets far exceeds the 2008 credit crisis, the 1970s inflation, or World War II. Some Canadians may be wondering what is going on here. This blog post will offer a quick explanation. I will resist editorializing (you can poke me in the comments section for more colour) and limit myself to the facts.

We can break the $320 billion jump in assets into three components:

1) repos, or repurchase agreements
2) open market purchases of Federal government bonds
3) purchases of Treasury bills at government auctions.

Let's start with repos, or repurchase operations. Luckily, I don't have to go into much detail on this. A few weeks back Brian Romanchuk had a nice summary of the Bank of Canada's repos, which have been responsible for $185 billion of the $320 billion jump.

With a repo, the Bank of Canada temporarily purchases securities from primary dealers, and the dealers get dollars. This repo counts as one of the Bank of Canada's assets. Some time passes and the transaction is unwound. The Bank gets its dollars back while the dealers get their securities returned. The asset disappears from the Bank of Canada's balance sheet.

The idea behind repos is to provide temporary liquidity to banks and other financial institutions while protecting the Bank of Canada's financial health by taking in a suitable amount of collateral. If the repo counterparty fails, at least the Bank of Canada can seize the collateral that was left on deposit. This is the same principle that pawn shops use. The reasons for providing liquidity to banks and other financial institutions is complex, but it goes back to the lender of last resort function of centralized banking. This is a role that central banks and clearinghouses inherited back in the 1800s.

How temporary are repos? And what sort of collateral does the Bank of Canada accept? In normal times, repos are often  unwound the very next day. The Bank also offers "term repos". These typically have a duration of 1 or 3-months. The list of repo collateral during normal times is fairly limited. The Bank of Canada will only accept Federal or provincial debt. That's the safest of the safe.

But in emergencies, the Bank of Canada is allowed to extend the time span of its repos to as long as it wants. It can also expand its list of accepted collateral to include riskier stuff. Which is what it did in March 2020 as it gradually widened the types of securities it would accept to include all of the following:

Source: Bank of Canada

That's a lot of security types! (The list is much larger if you click through the above link to securities eligible for the standing liquidity facility, see here. Nope, equities are not accepted as collateral.)

As for the temporary nature of these repos, many now extend as far as two years into the future. See screenshot below:

Source: Bank of Canada

(Note that the Bank of Canada has a very specific procedure for moving from "regular" purchases to "emergency" purchases. Part of this was implemented due to its initial reaction in 2007 to the emerging credit crisis. It accidentally began to accept some types of repo collateral that were specifically prohibited by the Bank of Canada Act. The legislative changes implemented in 2008 remedied some of the problems highlighted by this episode and codified the process for going to emergency status. Yours truly was involved in this, click through the above link.)

Anyways, we've dealt with the $185 billion in repos. Now let's get into the second component of the big $320 billion jump: open market purchases of long-term government bonds, or what the Bank of Canada refers to as the Government of Canada Bond Purchase Program (GBPP). This accounts for another $50 billion or so in new assets.

Whereas a repo is temporary, an outright purchase is permanent. Some commentators have described the purchases that the GBPP is doing as "quantitative easing". But the Bank of Canada has been reticent to call it that. When it first announced the GBPP, it said that the goal was to "help address strains in the Government of Canada debt market and enhance the effectiveness of all other actions taken so far."

This is a non-standard reason. Large scale asset purchases are normally described by central bankers as an alternative tool for stimulating aggregate demand. Usually central banks use interest rate cuts to get spending going. But when interest rates are near 0% they may switch to large scale asset purchases. (The most famous of these episodes were the Federal Reserve's QE1, QE2, and QE3). But the Bank of Canada seems to be saying that its large scale purchases are meant to fix "strains" in the market for buying and selling government bonds, not to stoke the broader economy. 

Together, the GBPP and repos account for $235 billion of the $320 billion jump.

Let's deal with the last component. Another $65 or so billion in new Bank of Canada assets is comprised of purchases of government Treasury bills (T-bills). A T-bill is a short term government debt instrument, usually no more than one year. This is interesting, because here the Bank of Canada can do something a lot of central banks can't.

Most central banks can only buy up government debt in the secondary market. That is, they can only purchase government bonds or T-bills that other investors have already purchased at government auctions. The Bank of Canada doesn't face this limit. It can buy as much government bonds and T-bills as it wants in the primary market (i.e. at government securities auctions).

Since the coronavirus crisis began, the Federal government under Justin Trudeau has revved up the amount of Treasury bills that it is issuing. As the chart below illustrates, in the last two Treasury bill auctions (which now occur weekly instead of every two weeks) it has raised $35 billion each.


For its part, the Bank of Canada bought up a massive $14 billion at each of these auctions. That's 40% of the total auction. In times past, the Bank of Canada typically only bought up around 15-20% of each auction. This 15-20% allotment was typically enough to replace the T-bills that the Bank already owned and were maturing.

By moving up to a 40% allotment at each Treasury bill auction, the Bank of Canada's rate of purchases far exceeds the rate at which its existing portfolio of T-bills matures. And that's why we're seeing a huge jump in the Bank of Canada's T-bill holdings.

(So who cares whether the Bank of Canada buys government bonds/T-bills directly at government securities auctions instead of in the secondary market, as it is doing with the GBPP?  It's complicated, but part of this controversy has to do with potential threats to the independence of the central bank. But as I said at the outset, I'm resisting editorializing.)

These three components get us to $300 billion. The last $25 billion is due to other programs. I will list them below and perhaps another blogger can take these up, or I will do so in the comments section or in another blog post:

+$5 billion in Canada Mortgage Bonds
+$5 billion in purchases via the Provincial Money Market Purchase Program (PMMP)
+$1 billion in Provincial bonds
+$8 billion in bankers' acceptances via the Bankers' Acceptance Purchase Facility (BAPF)
+$2 billion in commercial paper
+$1 billion in advances

And that, folks, is how the Bank of Canada's assets grew to $440 billion in just two months.

To soften the blow of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bank of Canada is running what it sees as an expansionary, or loose, monetary policy. I think an expansionary policy makes a lot of sense.

The problem is this. The Bank of Canada has several tools it can use to loosen. Some are better than others. But it has stopped trying to use its best tool.

What is its best tool? Well, there are three ways that the Bank of Canada can loosen monetary policy.

Say interest rates are at 4%. Stephen Poloz, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, can either...

1) Cut the interest rate, say to 3.75%
2) Keep rates at 4% but do $20 billion or so in quantitative easing. This is just a fancy term for buying up assets like government bonds.
3) Keep rates at 4%, but promise to maintain them at 4% for extra-long. This is known as forward guidance.

Let me explain the third, forward guidance, because it's complicated. Basically, Poloz says that he will keep the Bank of Canada's interest rate at 4%, but promises to maintain it at that level for longer than would otherwise be warranted. The intuition here is that by committing to keep interest rates extra loose in the future, he can loosen monetary policy now.

I like to think about forward guidance in terms of raising children. Say that I want to modify the behaviour of my three-year old kid. To do so I might reward him with an M&M. Unfortunately I don't have any M&Ms on me. So I promise to give him an extra M&M after the next trip to the grocery store. Hopefully this "guidance" about future M&Ms is enough to get him to do what I want, now.  

So which of these three is the Bank of Canada's best tool?

The Bank of Canada's actual behaviour over the last few decades hints at what tool it considers to be the most useful. In 99% of the cases, it has chosen to loosen policy by dropping interest rates, not by embarking on quantitative easing or forward guidance. It usually does so in 0.25% increments, but when the economic shock is large, it'll resort to large interest rate cuts. For instance, after 9/11 it chose a 0.5% reduction.

What about the current episode? The Bank of Canada describes the coronavirus fallout as "unprecedented". In its recent monthly monetary policy report, the Bank says that the severity of the current shocks has inspired it to roll out a "bold policy response."

But if the Bank's policy response is so bold, why has it stopped using its favorite monetary policy tool? Having reduced interest rates to 0.25%, the Bank of Canada says it won't drop them anymore. According to Poloz, interest rates now sit at Canada's "effective lower bound." The implication of his  phrasing is that not even a force of nature could move rates below 0.25%.

But that's simply not true. The Bank of Canada's favorite tool isn't stuck at a lower bound. It would be pretty easy to implement another four interest rate cuts. This would take the Bank of Canada's interest rate from 0.25% to 0%, then to -0.25%, -0.5%, and -0.75%.

Don't take it from me. In this 2015 Bank of Canada working paper, researchers Jonathan Witmer and Jing Yang estimate that the Canadian effective lower bound is likely between -0.25% and -0.75%, with a midpoint estimate of -0.5%. Canada would hardly be unique if it went into negative interest rate territory. Other countries have tried negative rates, including Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and the European Union. 

There's a good chance we'll need it. If we look at previous recessions, we generally got about 4% in interest rate cuts. During the 2001 tech meltdown, the Bank cut from 5.75% to 2%. In 2008 it went from 4.5% to 0.25%. But in our current recession, we've gone from 1.75% to 0.25%. So all the Bank of Canada wants to give us in 2020 is a paltry 1.5%. What a gyp.


What about the Bank's other options for easing? In the last week of March, the Bank of Canada announced a quantitative easing program of $5 billion per week. But by the Bank of Canada's own demonstrated preferences, quantitative easing can't be a great tool—in previous easing periods, the Bank of Canada didn't bother with it.

The problem is that quantitative easing doesn't do much. It sounds big and hefty. But in actuality, big purchases of government bonds are a bit like trying to move a jet plane with a fan. They're certainly no substitute for another rate cut.

As for forward guidance, the Bank of Canada hasn't announced it yet. But any parent knows that a promise of future M&Ms just isn't good as M&Ms in the present. Kids are skeptical of promises, and for good reason.

Stephen Poloz has described negative rates as "not sensible". Here's what is not sensible. We are currently in the midst of the fastest slowdowns in Canadian history, and the Bank of Canada staidly refuses to even consider the possibility of using its favorite and most effective instrument; interest rate cuts. I'm not saying that another rate cut is warranted. But Poloz should at least unshackle his best tool.

---

P.S. I've been down this rabbit-hole before.

In that post, I speculate why Canadian policy makers seem loath to consider further rate cuts into negative territory.

Look, Canadian regulators have always had a close working relationship with the big banks. This certainly had its benefits. But here we are seeing one of its drawbacks. Canada's big banks are conservative and afraid of change. They probably don't want to incur the frictional costs associated with transitioning to a negative rate environment. And they have probably voiced their concerns to the Bank of Canada. And so the Bank is supporting the banks by declaring the effective lower bound to be at 0.25%. This decision comes at the expense of all Canadian citizens. We all benefit from the ongoing usage of the Bank of Canada's strongest tool: variations in the rate of interest. QE and forward guidance are poor fill-ins.

P.P.S. I just stumbled on Luke Kawa's series of tweets from a few weeks back on the topic of the Bank of Canada's effective lower bound. He captures my thoughts too.

Imagine if the Fed came out of nowhere and dropped a bombshell that it lost 75 basis points of policy space without even acknowledging it.

— Luke Kawa (@LJKawa) March 27, 2020

It's healthy to ask others for a sound check every now and then. I'm going to give a short description of how I see the monetary policy transmission process working, then readers can tell me how far off I am. Hopefully this sound check will bring some more rigour to my thought process.

Briefly, the story from start to end it goes like this...

1. A central bank reduces interest rates.

2. After a delay, consumer prices will be higher than they would have been without the rate cut.

Here's some more detail on how I get from 1 to 2.

A) In the first moment after the rate cut, banks find themselves earning a smaller return on balances held at the central bank than on competing short term/safe financial assets (like government bills and commercial paper). Central bank balances are overpriced, government bills and commercial paper are underpriced.

B) To maximize their profits, banks all try to sell their overpriced balances, driving the prices of government bills and commercial paper up and their expected returns down. The relative mispricing has been fixed; returns on central bank balances are once again equal to returns on other short-term/safe financial assets. What about other financial assets?

C) In the next moment the reaction spreads to the rest of the financial universe. Financial market participants (many of whom don't have an account at the central bank) observe that the returns on government bills and commercial paper in their portfolios have been reduced relative to returns on other financial assets. They try to sell their bills & paper and buy underpriced risky assets like stocks, gold, and bitcoin, driving the prices of these instruments higher and returns lower until the arbitrage window is closed.

D) Very quickly, these adjustments brings the expected returns on all financial assets into balance with each other. What about goods markets?

E) In the next moment the reaction spreads beyond financial markets. Investor begin to notice that the returns on the financial assets in their portfolios have suddenly become inferior to the return they can expect on consumer goods and services. Investors try to re-balance by selling their financial assets and buying underpriced consumer goods.

F) Unlike financial prices, goods prices may be slow to adjust. This means that the window for enjoying artificially underpriced consumer goods stays open for a period of time. With people flocking to enjoy free lunches, the quantity of consumer goods and services sold speeds up relative to the pace that would have prevailed without a rate cut. We get a boom.

G) At some point, shops increase prices and close the arbitrage window. We've now arrived at 2 and the story is complete.

You may notice that I didn't include bank lending in my sound check. That's because I'm not convinced that bank loans are vital to the monetary transmission process. That being said, we can introduce an optional step between F and G.

i) To take advantage of underpriced consumer goods, investors may take on bank debt in order to buy more goods than they might otherwise have afforded, so the quantity of debt increases.

But even if people choose not to take on additional debt, or for some reason the banks decide to hold back lending, the arbitrage process ignited by a rate cut will still play itself out with an increase in consumer prices being the final result. The key role banks play in the transmission process is at A & B, the effort to sell reserves for alternative safe assets, not at the i) level. And no matter how sick a bank is, it won't forgo arbitrage at the A & B level.

So the purpose of the Bank of Japan's recently-announced negative interest rate policy is not to make Japanese banks lend more. The point is to set off an arbitrage process out of Bank of Japan deposits and into goods & services through a series of other intervening assets, eventually leading to higher prices.

/soundcheck

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Previous posts on the transmission process:

Robin Hood Central Banking
Toying with the Monetary Transmission Mechanism