Monetary Policy after the Global Crisis

Post-crisis spillovers and heightened capital flows have triggered a search for alternative monetary policy frameworks, especially for small open emerging economies. The Turkish experience since the end of 2010 is an interesting case in this respect. Faced with extreme volatility in cross-border capital flows, rapid credit growth, and a sharp deterioration in the current account deficit, the Central Bank of Turkey (CBT) has modified the conventional inflation targeting regime by adopting financial stability as a supplementary objective and enriching the set of policy instruments. This study explains the underlying motivation behind why the CBT adopted such a flexible policy, provides an overview of the new framework, and summarizes the initial results. The analysis conducted throughout the paper and the recent evidence suggests that the new policy framework has been quite effective in engineering a soft landing of the Turkish economy in the sense that it has successfully shifted the composition of aggregate demand towards a more balanced growth path (rebalancing) without prejudice to the price stability objective.