New Books In Economics

In July 2021, nine summers after its then president saved the euro with three choice words (“whatever it takes”), the European Central Bank published the results of a thoroughgoing review of its strategy. A policy framework built for times when inflation posed a modest upside challenge had coped – but only just – with successive financial, sovereign-debt, banking and health crises that threatened chronically weak inflation at best and deflation at worst. Essential to the review was research conducted to mark the 20th anniversary of the ECB in 2019 and now updated and published as a book: Monetary Policy in Times of Crisis: A Tale of Two Decades of the European Central Bank (Oxford UP, 2021) by Massimo Rostagno, Carlo Altavilla, Giacomo Carboni, Wolfgang Lemke, Roberto Motto, Arthur Saint Guilhem and Jonathan Yiangou. This exhaustive analytical history concludes that the ECB operated two policy regimes – one from 1999 to 2012 and a second crisis-informed strategy until the narrative ends before the onset of th