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Notices
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Anders (not verified)
25th April 2012 | 3:52am

Ron - I do agree this is uncharted territory, but just trying to elicit any points of disagreement; I suppose there are three separate things:

1. do you at least believe that Bernanke's 'yield ceilings' idea would work to limit yields, even if it meant potentially unleashing inflationary forces (which one would need to look to fiscal policy to restrain)?
2. I trust you would be dubious about the ability of fiscal policy to restrain inflationary forces, but is this more because you believe it does not work, or that institutionally politicians won't implement the requisite tax increases in time?
3. It sounds like you do believe inflationary forces are inevitable. Here you and MMT obviously differ; MMT might concede that excess liquidity would lead to asset price booms, but wouldn't see a stick-to-flow effect of increasing asset prices to higher aggregate demand.

On #1, I see very little discussion on this particular point; BB himself doesn't seem to have written any formal paper on yield ceilings.

It might seem academic since BB hasn't I believe mentioned it explicitly since Jackson Hole in 2002 (and a follow-up speech in 2003); but when I look at the equation:

"public debt/GDP = F(nominal growth, primary budget balance, prior period debt/GDP, interest rate on debt)"

it seems appropriate to rearrange it to define that interest rate that marks the threshold of stable debt/GDP. In other words, I think fiscal sustainability is going to be seen more and more as managing down interest rates - so yield ceilings simply have to come back on to the agenda.

Best wishes