Global Monetary Policy in the 21st Centu

This SIPA seminar will study, analyze, and assess global monetary policy since 2000 with a primary focus on the challenges faced, policies pursued, and repercussions flowing from the actions taken by Federal Reserve, the ECB, and the Bank of England during the first two decades of the 21st century. These twenty plus years have been marked by the two deepest global downturns since the Great Depression, a Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, a global pandemic, and recently, the largest sustained surge in inflation since the 1970s. Confronting these challenges subject to the constraint of an effective lower bound on interest rates , major central banks introduced a number of unconventional – and controversial – policy tools and expanded substantially their presence in financial markets and in their economies.

The format of the course will combine lectures by the instructor with student presentation on recent central bank policy decisions and will conclude in the final weeks within class seminar presentations by teams of students of term papers that critically assesses the pandemic policy reponse and the post pandemic policy normalization plans pursued by a major central bank.