Central banks must not let market volatility halt their plans to retreat from crisis-fighting monetary policies, the Bank for International Settlements has warned ahead of the expected first rate rise by the US Federal Reserve in nine years.
While the current “uneasy calm” in financial markets threatened to blow up into bouts of financial turmoil, with clear tensions between markets’ behaviour and underlying economic conditions, such a threat should not dissuade monetary policymakers from taking the first steps towards tighter monetary policy, the BIS argued in its latest quarterly review.
“At some point, [the tension] will have to be resolved,” said Claudio Borio, head of the BIS’s monetary and economic department. “Markets can remain calm for much longer than we think. Until they no longer can.”
