Yet that zero interest rate policy was evidence of an extremely tight monetary policy.
Free-market economists from Milton Friedman to Bill Niskanen believed that excessively-tight monetary policy caused recessions.
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Tight monetary policy has turned investors off to its equity market since last November.
We ran a very tight monetary policy during the first month and 20 days.
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Democrats blamed Mr Volcker for losing them the 1980 election because of his tight monetary policy.
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The benefits of tight monetary policy are more doubtful, and the damaging side-effects of depreciation less severe.
Meanwhile the European Central Bank will be determined to establish its credibility with a tight monetary policy.
But these flaws do not excuse the BOJ's unnecessary, destructively tight monetary policy.
The biggest problem at the moment for the sector is inflation and a tight monetary policy that is restricting lending.
Tight monetary policy, which fuelled a strong pound , acted like a dose of salts on a swathe of industrial Britain.
The villains of the Depression were the trade-killing, international-capital-flow-strangling Smoot-Hawley Tariff, an overly tight monetary policy and a catastrophic tax increase.
But most of this drop reflects cheaper imports from Asia and lower commodity prices, rather than an overly tight monetary policy.
The problem, however, is that in 1982 most interest rates were in double digit, due to tight monetary policy in the preceding years.
"The danger now is that rising food world prices and energy prices will lead to excessively tight monetary policy", it says, as the government seeks to counter the rise by "squeezing domestic costs".
Recent declines in output in both Japan and Germany are largely due to inadequate demand caused by overly tight monetary policy, and not to supply-side constraints imposed by the failings of their models.
It is now generally accepted that the blame for the Great Depression in 1930s America does not lie with the Wall Street crash of 1929 but the unreasonably tight monetary policy which followed it.
Mr Lopes insists that tight monetary policy will slow the capital outflow, because it is no longer profitable to borrow reais to buy dollar-denominated Brazilian bonds, as it was when bond yields soared last month.
Indeed, as both America and, ironically, Germany found in the 1980s and 1990s, big budget deficits, if allied to tight monetary policy, often strengthen rather than weaken a currency by increasing foreign demand for it.
This required excruciatingly tight fiscal and monetary policy.
While a Keynesian focus only on interest rates caused most observers to think of monetary policy as very easy, a Milton Friedman type monetarist might have argued that monetary policy was too tight for the circumstances.
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The first is that the Bank of Japan has kept monetary policy too tight.
One could easily argue that the Fed overdid its sterilization for most of the period, which made monetary policy too tight.
They explain that monetary policy has actually been far too tight in the last four years, and they make the case for shifting monetary policy to focus on achieving a steady growth in nominal (that is, non-inflation-adjusted) incomes.
Sumner was one of the few observers who understood in 2009 that monetary policy was too tight.
Right now, the Fed is projecting below-target inflation and above-target unemployment, suggesting that monetary policy is too tight.
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This severely undermines the claim that monetary policy is too tight.
But philosophical arguments about the merits of central banking have nothing to do with the practical question facing Ben Bernanke right now: is monetary policy currently too tight or too loose?
At the other extreme, Ireland, which ran a large budget surplus last year, might be forced to run an even bigger one if the single monetary policy is not tight enough to suit its needs.
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