미국 연준의 향후 통화정책 경로에 대한 중대한 실마리가 조만간 나올 예정이다. 이달 19일은 연준의장이 다시 의회에 나서 통화정책 전망에 대해 증언하는 날이다.이미 중립금리 수준에 도달한 연방금리와 향후 경기둔화 및 인플레 압력 상승 우려 속데 금융시장은 연준의 향후 행보에 대해 갈피를 잡지 못하고 있다.이 가운데 지난 4월 의회증언 이후 지금까지 몇 차례 신뢰성 실추 사태를 경험한 벤 버냉키(Ben S. Bernanke) 연준의장은 이번 증언대를 새로운 신뢰성을 획득할 기회로 삼아야 할 것이라는 '충고'가 나와 눈길을 끈다.미국 대형투자은행 모건스탠리(Morgan Stanley)의 수석 이코노미스트 스티븐 로치(Stephen Roach)는 화요일 버냉키 의장에게 보내는 공개편지를 제출했다.로치는 이 편지에서 "신뢰성이 없으면 중앙은행은 아무 것도 아닌 존재가 된다"며, 글로벌 금융 경제의 전체적인 매락 속에서 주도력을 행사하고 있는 버냉키가 아마도 "거의 마지막 기회가 될 이번 의회 증언에서" 좀 더 알아듣기 쉬운 말로 자신의 "정책 성향(bias)"을 올바로 드러냄으로써 실추한 신뢰를 다시 되찾으면 좋겠다고 충고했다.여기서 로치는 그린스펀 시대의 한 페이지를 장식했던 틀로 간단하게 "긴축 성향" 혹은 "완화 성향"을 드러내는 것이 좋을 것이라며, 이처럼 정책 성향을 드러내는 것은 정책금리가 이른바 중립수준을 넘어서고 있을 때 최선의 결과를 나타낼 수 있을 것이라고 주장했다.한편 로치는 "중앙은행의 정책운용은 과학적인만큼 동시에 기예(art)에 가까운 것"이라며, 연준이 소비자물가 목표치와 같은 제한적인 물가안정 목표에 국한되지 않고 유럽과 일본 그리고 중국 등 주요국 중앙은행들과 함께 글로벌 불균형과 그 배경인 과잉 유동성을 제거하기 위해 노력해야 할 것이라고 지적했다.그는 이런 목적 때문이라면 원칙적으로 좀 더 강한 긴축 성향을 유지해야 할 것이라며, 이른바 "그린스펀 풋(Greenspan Put)"이라고 지칭되는 도덕적해이를 억제할 수만 있다면 이 같은 정책리스크는 충분히 감내할만한 가치가 있을 것이라고 강조했다.아래는 로치가 버냉키에게 쓴 공개편지 원문이다.An Open Letter to Ben Bernanke Stephen Roach Dear Ben,It’s time to take a deep breath. You are off to a rocky start as Chairman of the world’s most powerful central bank. Your policies are not the problem. Given the über accommodative legacy you inherited from your legendary predecessor, the three 25 bp rate hikes in each of the three policy meetings you have chaired have made good sense. The issue is more subtle —- your ability to send a consistent message to financial markets. This is a critical element of your job description. It defines your credibility as a policy maker as well as the credibility of the great institution you now lead. In the end, without credibility, a central bank is nothing.You know this, of course. As one of the world’s leading academic apostles of inflation targeting, you have long stressed the merits of anchoring financial market expectations of monetary policy with a simple price rule. With price stability now widely accepted as the sine qua non of central banking and with core inflation rates in the US and around the world not all that far away from the hallowed ground of price stability, there is considerable merit in underscoring a determination to preserve the hard-won gains of the past 25 years. This could well be your golden opportunity.With all due respect, Ben, you are close to squandering that opportunity. A transparent policy rule has real merit in minimizing unexpected and undesired swings in financial markets. But any such rule is as good as its disciplinarians — the central bankers who are charged with delivering the message to the public at large. It pains me to say this, but your message has been all over the place. What I am alluding to are several reversals in your official pronouncements in the past couple of months. It all started with your 27 April testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress, where you openly entertained the possibility of an “unjustified pause” in the Fed’s monetary tightening campaign. That was followed by your 5 June speech at an International Monetary Conference in Washington DC that sent a clear warning about your concerns over “unwelcome developments” on the inflation front. Then there was the policy statement immediately after the 28-29 June FOMC meeting, underscoring the Fed’s forecast that a “…moderation in the growth of aggregate demand should help to limit inflation pressures over time.” Nuanced or not, in this brief two-month time span, your official statements have gone from dovish to hawkish and back to dovish again. Such inconsistencies raise serious questions about your credibility as the world’s leading monetary policy maker.Speaking of that, you and your colleagues at the Fed must be mindful of the international context and consequences of your posture. Your back-and-forth waffling comes at a critical juncture in the global monetary tightening cycle. Jean-Claude Trichet of the ECB surprised the markets with his own tough talk last week — in effect, pre-announcing another rate hike for August, a month when Europe is normally at the beach. At the same time, the Bank of Japan’s Governor Toshihiko Fukui has also been talking tough for several months, signaling the end of a seven-year zero-interest rate regime and the onset of a long-awaited normalization of Japanese monetary policy. His first step could well be imminent — most likely at the BOJ’s upcoming 14 July policy meeting. Ben, that puts the consequences of your recent reversals in a very different context. Global investors are perfectly comfortable with the notion that the Fed, which began its tightening campaign long before other major central banks, would be the first to attain its objectives. The idea of the “policy catch-up” by foreign central banks has long been embedded in the consensus view of a cyclical dollar weakening. However, to the extent that the European and Japanese central banks stay on message while you do not, the monetary policy credibility factor could well shift away from the United States. Given America’s outsize current account deficit, a relative credibility erosion could spell sharp downward risks to the dollar — and equally sharp upside risks to real long-term US interest rates. That’s the last thing an asset-dependent, overly-indebted US consumer needs. A resumption of the greenback’s weakness in recent days suggests that you can’t take this possibility lightly.It was always going to be difficult to wean the markets from the measured Fed tightening campaign that has unfolded without interruption over the past 24 months. When the federal funds rate was 1% in June 2004, the next move was a no-brainer. But now at 5.25%, it is obviously much trickier. The key for you is not to let your understandable sense of uncertainty over the economic and inflation outlook morph into an on-again, off-again assessment of policy risks. This was supposed to be the sweet spot in the policy cycle for inflation targeters like yourself. Lay out the metric you are targeting, provide a clear assessment of the risks, and then let the policy rule generate the unambiguous answer. Easier said than done, I guess. I think the best thing you can do at this point is to borrow a page from the Greenspan era and make a simple statement of your policy bias. For example, as long as you perceive inflation risks to be on the upside of your tolerance zone, you and your colleagues can endorse a tightening bias. Conversely, if inflation risks tip to the downside, it may be appropriate at some point to announce an easing bias. The bias statement works best when the policy rate is near the so-called neutrality threshold. It is less appropriate when the overnight lending rate is far away from such an equilibrium. In the current context, the verdict would be clear — a tightening bias is in order until inflation risks recede. There’s nothing automatically actionable about such a bias that locks you into a move at each and every policy meeting. There is ample leeway to pass on a policy move and still maintain your concerns. There may well be a silver lining in your unfortunate experience of the past couple of months. Central banking is as much art as it is science. In that vein, it is equally important to be mindful of one of the major pitfalls of the current financial market climate — seven years of one asset bubble after another, driven by the mother of all liquidity cycles. It is high time to bring this dangerous state of affairs to an end. These are the same bubbles that spawn wealth-dependent distortions to saving and massive global imbalances. Not only must you commit to price stability in the narrow sense of your CPI target, but you and your central banking colleagues in Europe, Japan, and China must be equally willing to commit to an orderly withdrawal of excess liquidity in order to put a seriously unbalanced world on safer footing. That underscores my recommendation to maintain a tighter policy bias at low rates of inflation than a strict price rule might otherwise imply. If that’s what it takes to break the moral hazard of the “Greenspan put,” it is a risk well worth taking.I guess in retrospect we should have seen this coming. After all, history tells us that transitions to a new Fed Chairman invariably don’t go well. The “transition curse” saw the equity market quickly challenging Alan Greenspan with the Crash of 1987, the bond market promptly testing Paul Volcker, and a dollar crisis immediately confronting G. William Miller. The so-called risk reduction trade, which commenced in early May, could well go down in history as the Bernanke test. There’s nothing like unforgiving financial markets to find the Achilles’ heel of a new central banker. The good news is that you have another important chance to recover your credibility — your midyear appearance in front of the US Congress slated for 19 July. The bad news is that this may be your last chance for a while. A third reversal could well spell a serious and damaging setback to Fed credibility. A serial bubble blower was bad enough — the last thing world financial markets need is a serial flip-flopper.Sincerely,Stephen S. RoachChief EconomistMorgan Stanley