Todo lo que quisiera saber

Y ni se le ocurriría preguntar sobre el QE de Draghi. El más completo y fino análisis leído hasta ahora. Destaco un par de párrafos que se refieren a cualquier QE, pasado, presente y futuro:



How Could QE Boost GDP and Inflation?

Perhaps surprisingly this many years into the QE experience, I have heard a number of commentators discuss how the money created via QE will produce additional bank lending. It won’t. At least not in any direct fashion.

The basic money multiplier simply doesn’t describe how actual banks behave. European banks are being very careful with bank lending for a whole host of reasons (Basel 3, concerns about credit risk, caution based on past mistakes) and they don’t behave like the banks in Principles of Macro who seek to constantly satisfy minimum reserve requirements. Instead, they set the size of their balance sheet with capital adequacy requirements in mind and QE has little impact on this. Note the US money multiplier plummeted when QE was introduced and is now well below one.

So what does QE do? Lots of careful research (such as this) has been done on the effects of the Fed’s QE program. To be clear, QE isn’t something that had to work but the evidence suggested it did reduce yields on Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities. Ben Bernanke has joked "The problem with QE is it works in practice, but it doesn’t work in theory." At the same time, it didn’t reduce the targeted yields by a huge amount so it’s best not to over-hype its potential in Europe based on the US experience.

Still, QE may do a bit more to reduce sovereign yields in Europe because there is a margin that it can work on that didn’t exist in the US: Default risk. Unlike OMT, it’s not a specific program designed to stop euro area member states from defaulting but it’s another sign of Draghi’s "whatever it takes" commitment and we may well see sovereign yields of high-debt countries decline by more than the effects estimated by the Fed studies.

So there will be some effect in reducing sovereign yields. This will reduce costs for euro area governments and may get passed on a bit to private sector lending rates. The net effect of these lower yields on growth and inflation will be positive but probably fairly small.

Probably more important than the kind of "liquidity premium" effect generally stressed in the Fed research is that QE provides a new kind of "open mouth operation" to influence expectations. It provides a way of structuring policy so that markets can see that you really are not going to raise rates soon—the ECB has always had such a ridiculously high level of "credibility" that many market analysts assume that it is only a small upward tick in inflation away from getting "vigilent" again (a la the rate hikes of 2008 and 2011).

QE signals the following: "We’re not going to increase rates until our QE program finishes and watch this space, we might even increase the pace from €60 billion if we’re not happy with inflation developments." So it helps a bit to increase the credibility that Draghi is now concerned about: The credibility of the ECB’s commitment to get inflation back close to two percent. This should help to increase inflation expectations, which can pave the way for an increase in actual inflation.

The immediate impact of the QE announcement in triggering a long-overdue swoon in the value of the euro suggests that the program is already having some of the desired impact.

So what will be impact on the economy? Modest enough, I would guess. But it crosses a Rubicon of sorts and leads to the possibility of even more "radical" policies later. To go into cliche overdrive, it may be too little and it’s definitely too late but better late than never.