The West’s financial crisis has shaken public confidence in its leading central banks. Yet it has also led to an expansion of their duties and powers

IN TWO days, two prominent central bankers, one on each side of the Atlantic, headed for the exit. Few people were surprised when Kevin Warsh tendered his resignation from the Federal Reserve on February 10th. Rather more people were taken aback when rumours started to fly that Axel Weber would stand down as president of Germany's Bundesbank and thus rule himself out as the next president of the European Central Bank (ECB), a job for which he had been the front-runner. The rumours were confirmed on February 11th.

The timing was coincidental. Yet the two men have something in common. Both were uneasy about changes in the way that central banks conduct themselves—specifically, about the unprecedented forays into financial markets by the Fed and the ECB. Mr Weber publicly opposed the ECB's decision last May to start buying the bonds of member countries' governments. His colleagues, he believed, were intruding dangerously into fiscal policy. Mr Warsh, similarly though more quietly, fretted that the Fed's policy of quantitative easing (QE)—the purchase of government bonds with newly printed money—was fomenting new imbalances in the global economy and steering the Fed into treacherous political waters.

Since the financial crisis in 2007 central banks have expanded their remits, either at their own initiative or at governments' behest, well beyond conventional monetary policy. They have not only extended the usual limits of monetary policy by buying government bonds and other assets (see chart). They are also taking on more responsibility for the supervision of banks and the stability of financial systems. Their new duties require new “macroprudential” policies: in essence, this means regulating banks with an eye on any dangers for the whole economy. And their old monetary-policy tasks are not getting any easier to perform. Central banking is becoming a more complicated game.

The new duties also bring new risks. Before the crisis, a political consensus had emerged: central banks should be run by technocrats, free of interference by government, pursuing one goal, price stability, with one tool, short-term interest rates. Many gave up the supervision of banks to other regulators. The connection between interest rates and inflation may not have been exact, but at least central banks had plenty of theory and evidence to guide them. In contrast, the effects of unconventional monetary policy, such as bond purchases, are largely unknown. Proponents argue that with interest rates at or near zero, it is a sensible way of keeping credit flowing and preventing deflation. Opponents say that it bails out profligate treasuries and risks recreating the speculative bubbles that led to the financial crisis in the first place.

Financial stability is politically a more treacherous mission than price stability, notes David Archer of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), a co-ordinating body for central banks. During booms, macroprudential measures, such as restraints on lending, will tend to arouse anger, and if they avert a crisis, the public will never know. Yet if a crisis strikes, the public, with perfect hindsight, will blame the central bank for not acting sooner. “The relationship between the central bank and government is likely to become more difficult and more political,” he adds.

The way we were

In a sense, central banks have returned to their roots. The first central banks were created to handle the sovereign's financial affairs and issue a national currency. That endowed them with competitive advantages that led naturally to becoming lenders of last resort to commercial banks. Because such lending created moral hazard and the risk of loss, they also became those banks' supervisors. Only later did monetary policy—managing economic growth and inflation—become a primary duty. Charles Goodhart, a monetary historian and a former member of the Bank of England's monetary-policy committee, has noted, “The monetary (macro) functions of central banks were largely grafted onto the supervisory functions.”

In the decades before the crisis, the intellectual consensus changed. Monetary policy took on more of the trappings of a quasi-scientific discipline: the judicious adjustment of the short-term interest rate could keep inflation low and thus iron out the bumps of the business cycle. In this central banks were aided by increasingly sophisticated markets which, by diffusing risk, had apparently made the financial system more resilient. Central bankers and regulators were “lulled into complacency by a combination of a Panglossian worldview and benign experience,” Janet Yellen, the Fed's vice-chairman, said last year.

Many central banks did have responsibility for financial stability, but they carried it out poorly. In 1996 the Bank of England pioneered financial-stability reports (FSRs); over the next decade around 50 central banks and the IMF followed suit. But according to research cited by Howard Davies and David Green in “Banking on the Future: The Fall and Rise of Central Banking”, published last year, in 2006 virtually all the reports, including Britain's, assessed financial systems as healthy. In the basic function of identifying emerging threats, “many central banks have been performing poorly,” they wrote. The authors, who both worked at the Bank of England, attribute the FSRs' failure either to simple lack of competence or to reluctance to publicise weaknesses.

The failure to spot trouble in the system as a whole was replicated in the supervision of individual banks. The Fed is the most powerful of America's four national bank regulators because it oversees bank holding companies such as Citigroup and Bank of America, which needed federal support, and Wachovia, which was saved from collapse by merging with Wells Fargo. Yet its supervisors were often understaffed, too deferential to the banks, demoralised by lack of support from their bosses, ignorant of what regulators at other agencies were doing and reluctant to punish banks formally for fear of unsettling markets, according to testimony and documents collected by Congress's Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Not surprisingly, public confidence in central banks has plummeted (see chart). That makes it all the more remarkable that they are being given more responsibility, not less. Governments have instructed them to oversee financial stability; or the central banks have reaffirmed this duty for themselves. Institutional barriers between bank supervision and monetary policy have been removed in the hope that central banks will have a fuller picture of financial and macroeconomic risks.

With more jobs, central banks need more tools. Short-term rates are too blunt an instrument to deal with the many threats that a financial system may face. Hence the interest in macroprudential policy. If a bubble in share prices or property threatens the whole economy, better to prick it surgically rather than bludgeon everyone with higher interest rates.

Central banks in emerging markets have long used tools of this kind to control credit growth and capital flows. For instance, they vary reserve requirements (cash that commercial banks must keep on deposit at the central bank) or impose quantitative limits on bank lending. Central banks in richer countries have not used them for many years, considering them ineffective, distorting or both. The Fed, for example, ruled out margin requirements to tame the stockmarket in the 1990s. Many have dispensed with reserve requirements altogether. Spain was a notable exception: haunted by the memory of a banking crisis in the 1970s, in 2000 the Bank of Spain began requiring leading banks to set aside a portion of profits against future losses. This did not save Spain's banking system from trouble this time, but it almost certainly made it less severe.

Macroprudential policy typically requires some authority over firms and markets. In Britain the Financial Services Authority, which took over bank supervision from the Bank of England in 1998, is due to be folded back into the central bank. The central bank is to have a financial-policy committee, charged with identifying threats to the financial system, as well as a monetary one. Both will be chaired by the governor. Like the monetary-policy committee, the financial version will contain external experts as well as central bankers.

The ECB, which previously had no role in supervision, will become a partner with the European Systemic Risk Board, made up of national regulators and central bankers, and provide most of its staff and technical support. In member countries, the French and German central banks have had their supervisory responsibilities increased. Elsewhere in Europe, the Swiss National Bank is agitating to share oversight of Credit Suisse and UBS, Switzerland's two biggest banks, with the country's banking supervisor.

In America the Dodd-Frank act, which became law last July, created a 15-member Financial Stability Oversight Committee (FSOC), chaired by the treasury secretary. Although the Fed occupies only one seat, it is the most influential participant. The central bank will regulate any firm the FSOC deems “systemically important” and can compel it to raise capital or even break itself up. The Fed has created its own Office of Financial Stability Policy and Research, with 20 staff, which will be a principal source of expertise for the FSOC.

However, creating institutions is not the same as making them effective. The ECB will still rely on national regulators for information about specific firms, and those regulators are free to ignore its advice. American bank supervisors will have to overcome their habitual reluctance to challenge authority and share information. It “will require a degree of sophistication, contrarian thinking and imagination beyond anything thought needed in the past,” a chastened Federal Reserve Bank of New York concluded in an internal review of its supervisory record.

Even if regulators share what they have, there are wide gaps in the information needed to make the new policies work well. The IMF and the Financial Stability Board, a global club of regulators, want to know more about the mismatch of the maturities of banks' assets and liabilities, the connections between banks and the rest of the financial system, and non-bank financial firms, just for starters.

Testing times ahead

The first test of central banks' macroprudential prowess may already be upon them. Some worry that the low policy rates and bond purchases of rich countries' central banks are planting the seeds of the next crisis as money scurries into emerging-market property, commodities and elsewhere in search of better returns.

Central banks and regulators in emerging economies have already imposed a host of measures to cool property prices and capital inflows. Their counterparts in richer places may not be far behind. Israel may be a bellwether. Stanley Fischer, the head of the Bank of Israel, is the epitome of orthodox central banking. Yet in January he reluctantly imposed reserve requirements on foreign-currency derivatives to cool speculative buying of the shekel.

Experience so far argues against expecting too much of macroprudential policy. Since 2009, for example, Singapore has announced four rounds of measures to cool property markets, including higher loan-to-value ratios, a ban on interest-only mortgages and a stamp tax on relatively quick resales. Speculative buying has eased slightly but prices and sales have reached new highs. A review by the BIS last year found that as long as interest rates remained low, credit growth tended to resume soon after restraints were imposed.

Central banks in rich countries have a more immediate problem: that higher food and energy prices will build inflationary pressure. Last month British inflation (measured by the consumer-price index) reached 4%, two percentage points above the Bank of England's target: many economists expect interest rates to rise within a few months. In the euro area, inflation is 2.4%; the ECB aims for a rate close to but below 2%. In America, though, price pressures are still subdued.

Dealing with this old foe has been complicated by the still fragile state of rich economies and by the unconventional measures in place. In America Ben Bernanke, the Fed's chairman, has spent much of the past two weeks fending off accusations, in particular from Republicans in Congress, that QE has fuelled the global surge in commodity prices (and even revolution in Egypt). Internally, too, dissent over QE is brewing. Mr Warsh never voted against QE and is departing out of a long-standing intention to return to the private sector. However, other QE sceptics on the Fed's policy committee are turning more vocal. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans, worried that QE has turned the Fed into the handmaiden of profligate fiscal policy, have called for the central bank to be stripped of its responsibility for maintaining employment, the better to focus its attention on prices. For now, Mr Bernanke seems willing to continue QE until June as planned, but may have some agonising to do thereafter.

The pressures on the ECB are even more intense. From its inception it avoided buying government bonds because it smacked of fiscal support. Yet it started doing so last May because collapsing market confidence in the debt of some member countries could have led to the euro's break-up.

Officials at the ECB rationalise the central bank's bond-buying as essential to the conduct of monetary policy. Without it, dysfunctional bond markets would not be able to transmit the central bank's interest-rate stance to the euro zone's economy. Officials have been deeply frustrated by the failure of the European Union's politicians to resolve the zone's debt crisis. The longer the crisis drags on, the more the ECB must put its reputation at risk, by buying (or ceasing to buy) government bonds. It has already acquired, in effect, the power of veto over some countries' fiscal affairs: it prodded Ireland, whose banks were completely dependent on ECB funding, to accept a bail-out from the EU and the IMF.

Mr Weber came to believe that his views were no longer compatible with the ECB's presidency. Someone else will succeed Jean-Claude Trichet (see article). But Mr Weber and the similarly orthodox Mr Warsh have departed. The leadership of central banks is committed to the institutions' expanded role; so, for the most part, are governments. The crisis exposed central bankers as misguided in their theories and deficient in their practices, but also as indispensable. “Only they are able to provide almost unlimited system-wide liquidity at very short notice,” says Jaime Caruana, the BIS's general manager. For better or for worse, the world is relying more than ever on its central banks.