Can monetary policy fix inflation caused by climate change? The RBA isn’t sure

Among an otherwise predictable paper from the Reserve Bank review team is one issue that promises some interesting and thorny questions for all involved.

The paper from Carolyn Wilkins, Renée Fry‐McKibbin and Gordon de Brouwer hits all the notes you’d expect of an RBA review: what its goals should be; what kind of inflation target should it pursue; what monetary policy tools it should use; how monetary policy should complement fiscal and macroprudential policy; who should be on the board and how the board should be structured; how the bank should communicate, etc.

Under monetary policy arrangements, however, the reviewers dip into somewhat more controversial waters. They point out the historical fall in interest rates over the past 30 years has cramped central banks for room in responding to low inflation or high unemployment — a nice problem to have, but undoubtedly a problem for policymakers who know they will have to deal with economic crises in the future.

However, they also discuss supply-side shocks.

As Crikey recently noted, central bankers everywhere face a future in which their traditional model of hitting demand in response to rising inflation might not work when inflation is driven by external factors. The reviewers clearly have similar concerns.

“For much of the time that inflation targeting has been in place, the most significant economic disturbances have been related to the demand for goods and services. In that environment, a central bank can set monetary policy to stabilise demand and in doing so broadly meet both its employment and inflation objectives. However, at times economies can also experience substantial disruptions to the supply of goods and services … It is possible that supply disruptions will be more prevalent in the future, for example because of further pandemic-related impacts, changes in the extent of global economic integration, geopolitical tensions or natural disasters related to climate change.”

To put it another way, what happens when the problems are no longer nails but the only solution you’ve got is a hammer?

The climate crisis, for instance, threatens to become a permanent source of inflation, but one of unpredictable frequency and intensity depending on the nature of the more frequent weather extremes it will create. Traditionally the RBA has been inclined to ignore one-off spikes in, for example, food prices that have resulted from natural disasters. What happens when those spikes start occurring more frequently, and in combination with other supply-side disruptions?

It’s not the kind of question enthusiasts for an RBA review might have wanted — inflation hawks see it as an opportunity to push for harsher inflation targeting even at the cost of employment, while progressives blame the RBA for keeping rates too high in the years of stagnation before the pandemic.

It will be interesting to see which submissions properly engage with the idea that not all problems can be fixed by raising rates.

This article was first published by Crikey.