Commentary: Monetary Policy in Troubled Times

The Commentary in this Review has touched on the mix of monetary and fiscal policies regularly since the Brexit referendum. The timeless issues relating to the framework for monetary and fiscal policy and their appropriate degree of co-ordination have been exposed by the Covid-19 crisis. We have previously argued that the sequence of arbitrary fiscal rules that have been formulated by successive governments in the past decade do not make much economic sense as they do not match a well-defined social welfare criterion. We have also argued that the framework for monetary policy needs a close examination after the experiences of the global financial crisis and nearly 23 years of operational independence of the Bank of England.