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Last week the International Monetary Fund knocked down its world growth forecasts, blaming Brexit risks and “protracted financial market turbulence and rising global risk aversion (that) could have severe macroeconomic repercussions.”

In Frankfurt Wednesday, the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, was less than enthusiastic about Europe, despite the fact that the ECB maintains a stimulative refinancing rate of zero per cent, the deposit rate at minus 0.4 per cent and quantitative easing at around US$88 billion a month. Draghi said the ECB has the “readiness, willingness, and ability” to add more, likely in September, and most likely by extending quantitative easing.

Policy-makers at the U.S. Federal Reserve meeting next week are not expected to make an immediate change in ultra-low interest rates. U.S. growth is a little better, but eight years of massive monetary and fiscal stimulus has generally failed to stimulate as expected. Maybe the Fed will raise rates later in the year, or maybe not.

Unacknowledged by any of these oracles of growth is the possibility that the main pillars of economic stimulation — monetary policy and expansions in government spending — may be ineffective and even counterproductive. At some point this long stretch of policy experimentation will have to end and an alternative new framework developed.

One such alternative is offered by John Taylor, the Stanford University economist who long ago proposed rules to govern central bank strategies. In a chapter in a new Hoover Institution book, Blueprint for America, Taylor takes many swipes at recent monetary-policy actions by the Fed and central bankers elsewhere. On quantitative easing (QE), the discretionary Fed buying of securities, Taylor says “it did not deliver the economic growth that the Fed forecast and it did not lead to a good recovery. The continuation of the near-zero rate was another deviation from rules-based policy.”