The Start of Monetary Normalization
With an increase of 75 basis points in the SELIC rate and the indication it will (very likely) be followed by another hike of the same magnitude, the Central Bank has started to reduce the excessive monetary stimuli in the economy. We do not disagree with the direction of the movement, but beg to differ with its intensity. A central bank’s “loss function” is a weighted average of two increasing marginal costs: the deviation of inflation from the target and the gap between actual and potential GDP. If the unanchoring of expectations were severe and the negative GDP gap were small, the loss would be minimized with a front-loaded increase of the SELIC rate. But the situation at present is one of expectations with low and non-persistent deviations from the target, alongside a large negative output gap, with a risk of opening even more. The best response in this case would be a more gradual increase, thus taking more time. Since the largest inflationary impetus comes from the exchange rate, if this were sensitive to the interest rate, a front-loaded hike might be justifiable, but this is not a good hypothesis, as we have shown in several previous reports. Finally, as it was predictable, the entire yield curve has recently been shifting upward, but with a greater increase of the short end. If the economy were overheated, this would reduce inflation, but the economy is not even warm. The only unquestionable results is that the gains from the steeper slope of the short end of the yield curve will be internalized by the financial market, increasing the payoff of holding public bonds with any maturity. The loser is the Treasury (and society), which now has less room to reduce the cost of the debt by placing bonds with shorter maturities.
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