Université de Lausanne
Ecole des HEC
Département d'économétrie et d'économie politique

DEEP-EPFL Seminars in Macroeconomics

Thursday December 11, 2008, 13:00
Extranef, Dorigny, room 126

Chris SIMS
(Princeton University, USA)

Fiscal-Monetary Coordination in a Time of Crisis

Abstract
The US Federal Reserve System's balance sheet has undergone a drastic expansion and change in character in the last several months. The notion that monetary policy is control of "high-powered money", which then generates changes in the money stock via a "money multiplier" is obsolete. The notion that monetary policy is a separate domain from fiscal policy and by itself controls inflation is also obsolete. This seminar talk will discuss the change in the Fed balance sheet as well as models that allow us to think about monetary and fiscal policy as jointly determining the inflation process.

Web site of the seminar (with paper online): http://www.hec.unil.ch/deep/evenements-english/e-sem-all-2007-08.htm