The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) hosted a Seminar titled Monetary Policy Responses to Post-Pandemic Inflation. The seminar featured William B. English, Professor, Department of Economics, Yale University and Yale School of Management in conversation with Janak Raj, Senior Fellow, CSEP. Renu Kohli, Senior Fellow, CSEP provided the closing remarks.

The seminar was held on Tuesday, March 19, 2024 from 11 am to 12.30 pm. The event was live streamed on Zoom and on the CSEP YouTube channel.

Register here to attend

About the event

Central banks worldwide responded swiftly to the economic challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic through massive policy interventions aimed at averting prolonged economic weakness and deflationary risks. However, a more rapid than expected recovery in demand, coupled with supply-side shocks and geopolitical events, led inflation to soar to levels unseen in decades. Emerging market central banks responded swiftly by adjusting their monetary policy stances, while many advanced economy central banks delayed due to greater confidence in inflation expectations, idiosyncratic concerns, and uncertainty regarding the global economic recovery. Eventually, most central banks embarked on an aggressive cycle of monetary policy tightening, raising interest rates rapidly and in large increments. Despite initial uncertainties, economies performed well, with inflation declining and unemployment rates remaining low, suggesting that the aggressive policy response may have helped contain inflationary pressures over the medium term with much less pain for the real economy than expected. Despite this fairly smooth adjustment, similar shocks could present greater challenges to financial stability and aggregate activity in the future. Drawing lessons from the experience of the past few years, it needs to be emphasised that central banks cannot ignore inflation risks, especially in an environment where inflationary pressures can rapidly fluctuate due to unforeseeable global shocks.

Speakers

• William B. English joined the faculty at Yale University in 2017, after 25 years at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Bill teaches and conducts research on monetary policy and central banking issues, with students in both the School of Management and the Economics Department. His work has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Economic Journal, and the IMF Economic Review, among other journals. Before coming to Yale, Bill was the Senior Special Advisor to the Board for monetary policy and, prior to that, held a range of positions on the Board of Governors, including, from 2010 to 2015, Director of the Division of Monetary Affairs and Secretary to the Federal Open Market Committee. While at the Federal Reserve, Bill visited the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the Bank for International Settlements. Prior to joining the Federal Reserve, Bill taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago. He received a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986 and a BA in Economics and Mathematics from Yale University in 1982.
• Janak Raj is a Senior Fellow and leads the macroeconomic segment in the Growth, Finance and Development vertical at CSEP. He also works specifically on fiscal federalism in the health sector, climate finance and multilateral development banks (MDBs) reforms. He is currently also a member of the JM Financial Centre for Financial Research of IIM Udaipur. He has nearly four decades of experience working in the Reserve Bank of India, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Ministry of Finance (Department of Financial Services). Janak Raj served as an Executive Director in the Reserve Bank of India and as a member of its statutory Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). He also served as Principal Adviser of Monetary Policy Department and International Department of the RBI and headed its Department of Economic Policy and Research. At the IMF Washington DC, he was Senior Advisor to the Executive Director for Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Sri Lanka. He served as an RBI nominee director on the Governing Board of the BSE (formerly Bombay Stock Exchange) and as a Senior Consultant in the Department of Financial Services, Ministry of Finance. He has a PhD in Economics from IIT Bombay.

Closing Remarks

• Renu Kohli is an economist with research and practitioner experience on macroeconomic policies and issues. She has previously worked with the RBI, the IMF and thinktanks including ICRIER and the Institute of Economic Growth. Her work has focused on financial sector liberalization, capital flows and exchange rate management in emerging markets with special India focus, international macroeconomic coordination, and recently, the macroeconomic impact of decarbonisation in India. She has been published in refereed journals such as the Review of  Development Economics, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Asian Economics, Oxford University Press, IMF Working Papers, RBI Staff papers, and contributed to edited volumes. She has exposure to multilateral surveillance including Article IV missions; as short-term expert with IMF Institute, her training missions include courses on financial programming & policies and macroeconomic diagnostics. Renu Kohli has wider engagement with the private financial sector and investors through talks, presentations and consultation on Indian macroeconomic policies. She also serves as an independent director on the board of NCML Ltd and NFIN. 

For media enquiries please contact Ayesha Manocha (AManocha@csep.org). For event enquiries please contact Gurmeet Kaur (gkaur@csep.org) or Manmeet Ahuja (mahuja@csep.org).

All content reflects the individual views of the speakers. The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) does not hold an institutional view on any subject.