A monetary malaise

From The Economist print edition Central bankers helped cause today’s mess. Will they be able to clean it up? FOUNDED in 1930, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is the oldest and chummiest of the international financial institutions. Based in Basel (with its famously good food), the central bankers’ club is the nerve centre for international co-operation on monetary technicalities. How ironic, then, that the BIS’s economists put much of the blame for the current mess on central bankers and financial supervisors. For years, BIS reports have given warning about excess global liquidity, urged central bankers to worry about asset bubbles even when consumer-price inflation was low, encouraged policymakers in a global economy to pay more attention to global measures of economic slack, and argued that banking supervisors... [read full story]