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1. Introduction

The financial crisis has left deep scars in many economies. An important issue is whether these scars are so deep that economies will be heading into a ‘new normal’ after the crisis. The post-crisis new normal was the theme of a conference held in Hong Kong on 21 and 22 May 2015, organized by the City University of Hong Kong, De Nederlandsche Bank, and the Journal of International Money and Finance. 1 The conference papers focused on the question of whether after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), economies have fundamentally changed relative to the years preceding the crisis. This special issue contains selected papers of the conference. In this introduction, we briefly summarize these papers and put them in perspective.

5. Policies under the new normal

What are the implications of the new normal for policymakers? Is it possible and desirable to go back to pre-crisis practice? This special issue opens with the keynote speech of Stephen Cecchetti who addresses the important issue of how monetary and macro-prudential policies relate to each other. Macro-prudential policies are increasingly being used (Cerutti et al., 2015). Before the GFC, it was widely believed that these policies could be separated as the objectives and instruments could be assigned to different policymakers, while the differences in time horizon reduced the need for any one authority to worry about the objectives of the other. In answering the question of whether after the GFC this is still a proper view, Cecchetti analyzes whether the monetary policy stance creates financial stability risks. He argues that in the short-term there is no apparent conflict between macroeconomic stability and financial stability. However, if interest rates remain low for several years, leverage will increase and that, in turn, will almost surely reduce the resilience of the financial system. In that case, financial stability risks become a concern for monetary policymakers. Cecchetti also argues that higher risk-weighted capital requirements are unlikely to be effective in stemming booms in credit, but they can improve the resilience of the financial system. In his view, Basle III’s countercyclical capital buffer is not the proper instrument though. He favors stress tests as perhaps the most powerful prudential tool for safeguarding the resilience of the financial system, because it is more flexible, faster, and less politically contentious than Basel III’s countercyclical capital buffer.