Jürgen Stark: The global financial crisis and the role of monetary policy

Looking back over time, we see that the role and conduct of monetary policy has often changed in response to economic and financial crises. In fact, the international central banking community has always been eager to learn from past developments and experiences, also with respect to different experiences across countries. Of course, this does not imply that monetary policy in the past has always been the same everywhere. Certainly, differences exist in the way monetary policy is conducted across countries. But it is precisely because of the open-mindedness in discussing and the willingness to learn from each others’ experiences during the past century that monetary policy making went through an evolutionary process: an evolutionary process that improved the conduct of monetary policy over time and led to a great deal of convergence across countries.