Modern Monetary Policy and Central Bank Governance: A Story of Two Tales

The objective of this note is to present the evolution of both the economics and the political economy of monetary policy in the last three decades – first the Great Moderation and then the Financial Crisis – as a story of two intertwined tales: on the one side the tale of how to govern money and interest rates in the short run; on the other side the tale of how to design in a longer horizon the monetary architectures. In the tradition the two tales are told separately, where the academic scholars preferred to focus essentially on the first perspective while only the central bankers and partially the policymakers were also sensible to the engineering of the monetary settings. The big innovation in the modern monetary policy was the progressive merger of the analysis of the macroeconomic effects of the public choices in the monetary games played day by day (monetary policy) with the study of the structural features that characterized both the monetary players – governments and central bankers – as well as the rules and institutions of the monetary games that shape goals and incentives of the players (central bankers and other economic agents).