The transparency revolution in central banking proved unstoppable for three decades. Gone were the days when global monetary institutions operated as temples of secrecy. Gone was the Bank of England\u2019s philosophy of \u201cnever explain, never excuse.\u201d Gone, too, were the days when Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan could willfully obfuscate in front of Congress (or in his own words, \u201cmumble with great incoherence.\u201d) After Jerome Powell took the reins of the Fed in 2018, he declared that the culture of disclosure had become \u201cfirmly entrenched\u201d around the world.<\/p>\n
Powell was wrong, and his successor Kevin Warsh is intent on turning back the clock. He has refused to commit to regular news conferences; declined to follow his colleagues in providing economic and policy forecasts; and conveyed a broad sense of disdain for anything that might be construed as \u201cforward guidance,\u201d or where central banks see monetary policy heading. He told investors last year that the Fed should simply \u201cstop talking so much.\u201d It\u2019s worrisome that he seems to be finding sympathy from global peers.<\/p>\n
Some reassessment is healthy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of central banks made public promises about how they\u2019d conduct policy in the months and years ahead even though nobody, not even medical experts or scientists, was confident at the time of what the future held. When global inflation rates soared in 2021 and 2022, some policymakers said those commitments curtailed their flexibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The transparency revolution in central banking proved unstoppable for three decades. Gone were the days when global monetary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76422,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[31862,49083,49084,1713,49085,7793,40990,18043,1106,8,2170,24119],"class_list":["post-76421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-alan-greenspan","tag-bank-of-england","tag-ben-bernanke","tag-boj","tag-christine-lagarde","tag-covid-19","tag-ecb","tag-fed","tag-global-economy","tag-japan","tag-jerome-powell","tag-kevin-warsh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}