The Bank of England’s governor has defended central banks’ moves to spend trillions of dollars on monetary stimulus, saying the lack of accompanying structural fixes were to blame for the failure to revive global growth.
Governor Mark Carney told a gathering Group of 20 central bankers and finance ministers in Shanghai on Friday that global growth was a “serial disappointment” of sometimes spectacular proportion, which he attributed to “weaker potential supply growth in virtually all G20 economies.”
“This underperformance is a reminder that demand stimulus on its own can do little to counteract long-term forces of demographic change and productivity growth,” he said, according to a text of his speech released by the BOE.
Monetary stimulus did have value, he said, in that it supported economic activity while parts of the economy de-levered, and it bought time for structural changes, such as shifting activity from declining to growing sectors. It also bought time to fix the “fault lines” in financial markets that helped cause the financial crisis, as well as to build a more robust banking system.
