Alternative Monetary Standards (1992)

During the course of the past two decades the interplay of the pressure of events, together with the development of academic and informed thinking, led the major Central Banks of the industrialised world to experiment with various alternative methods of monetary management and control - different monetary standards or regimes as they are usually termed. In particular, Central Banks responded to the worsening inflation of the 1970s by adopting quantitative monetary targets as their main intermediate monetary objective. Such targets were ‘intermediate’ in the sense that they lay between the operational instruments of Central Banks (e.g. open market operations to vary either prices, i.e. interest rates, or quantities, the monetary base, in money markets) on the one hand, and the ultimate objectives of policy, especially the control of inflation, on the other. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.