Sebastian Becker

Some years prior to the crisis, abundant global liquidity and investors’ strong risk appetite boosted asset prices to very high levels. The state of the global economy and financial markets deteriorated dramatically when the subprime crisis turned into a full-blown global banking and economic crisis. Central banks around the world were forced to inject extra liquidity to support the banking sector, the credit channel and the overall economy. Despite the presence of global excess liquidity short and medium-term risks to CPI inflation appear to be limited because of low capacity utilisation and rising unemployment. However, excess liquidity could still potentially stoke new asset price bubbles. Central banks are aware of this risk and are at the moment preparing post-crisis exit strategies from their current accommodative monetary policy stance. [more]

Global liquidity has become abundant over the past few years mainly owing to extremely accommodative monetary policies in the US, Euroland and Japan. Since this liquidity "glut" has barely shown up in consumer price inflation, it has likely contributed to asset price inflation. There are basically two scenarios for how global "excess" liquidity could be cut back over the medium to long term: (1) continued global monetary tightening or at least no monetary easing soon and (2) global nominal GDP expanding faster than the money stock over time. [more]