By Sakari Suoninen
FRANKFURT, June 2 (Reuters) - European Central Bank policymakers are debating whether "to lean against the wind" -- using a controversial strategy to forestall the kind of asset bubbles which have landed the world economy in such a mess.
Any future attempt to deflate such price bubbles before they burst may mean raising interest rates, even when the ECB's consumer price inflation target is not under threat -- a tactic which would also slow down the entire euro zone economy.
Recent comments by ECB policymakers indicate they are actively considering whether to widen their anti-inflation strategy. This could include asset bubble evaluation in order to moderate future fluctuations in the business cycle.
Rapid inflation of property prices and a subsequent crash, notably in the United States, set off a chain of events which helped to provoke the current global recession. Other asset price bubbles, such as on stock markets at the end of the last decade, have also played havoc with the real economy.
But policymakers and academics disagree on whether central banks can effectively deflate such bubbles before they burst -- always assuming that they can spot them soon enough in advance.
Some policymakers believe they can clear up the mess only afterwards, an operation which worked quite well after the dot.com boom. However, this time the consequences have been far graver, with most leading economies including the euro zone's deep in recession and unemployment rising fast.
ECB heavyweights such as Vice-President Lucas Papademos and Governing Council members Axel Weber and Christian Noyer have all talked recently about taking asset prices more into the equation in setting monetary policy.
"The conclusion, that we have incorporated into our thinking, is that development in asset prices should be monitored very closely," Papademos said last week. "A policy of leaning against the wind of excesses deserves close thinking."
Under the Maastricht Treaty the ECB's task is to preserve price stability and it has set a target of keeping consumer price inflation below, but close to 2 percent in the medium term.
ADDING TO THE MIX
However, the ECB could add asset prices into the mix without having to change the Treaty. It could do this by laying more weight on monetary analysis, which it already uses to cross-check its economic analysis in policy decisions.
In recent years monetary analysis has largely taken a back seat to the economic analysis. Growth in M3 money supply has been above the ECB's reference rate every month since 2001, without necessarily prompting interest rate increases.
Papademos has said that the current ECB price stability objective would allow raising rates if an asset price bubble were forming, even if inflationary pressures were subdued.
Weber, who heads the German Bundesbank, has also said that leaning against the wind could help to avoid a boom-and-bust cycle. Such an approach could be used when money and credit growth is dynamic, asset prices go up and risk perceptions decline, he said.
"Central banks should take a longer-term perspective which takes due account of the future inflationary consequences of such unfavourable developments," he said, and added this could be achieved by monetary and credit analysis.
Thus the ECB seems to be diverging from the U.S. Federal Reserve, which argues it is hard to spot asset bubbles in advance and costly to deflate them, due to the risk of getting it wrong. Aggressive interest rate cuts to clean up after bubble bursts are the least-bad option, U.S. policymakers believe.
"The intellectual framework is starting to change at the ECB," said Bill White, an ex-Bank for International Settlements official and advocate of leaning against the wind. "The ECB ... is increasingly ready to take the Fed's doctrine on."
TIMING IS EVERYTHING
Critics say that trying to nip booms in the bud could do more harm than good. "Leaning against the wind can get really costly in terms of real economic activity," said Stefan Gerlach, professor at Frankfurt University's Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability.
"An asset price boom may lead to a crash, but it is not certain," Gerlach said. "But tightening monetary policy will for sure lead to lower economic activity ... The collateral damage of leaning against the wind is quite considerable," he added. "Raising interest rates is not a silver bullet."
Research suggests that about half of housing price run-ups lead to a crash but the rest do not, he said. Looking at asset prices would also distract central banks from their inflation target.
White dismissed this. "Undershooting the inflation target in the upswing is not dangerous," he said, adding that policymakers can overcome this by looking at inflation on a longer horizon.
Donald Kohn, who is now Fed Vice Chairman, has said that for leaning against the wind to work, it has to start well in advance. "The recent experience may have made us a bit more confident about detecting bubbles, but it has not resolved the problem of doing so in a timely manner," he said late last year.
"Nor has it shown that small-to-modest policy actions will reliably and materially damp speculation. For these reasons, the case for extra action still remains questionable, he said. "We cannot implement policy strategies that assume more information about the future than we can ever have."
ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet may also need winning over. "I would argue that, yes, bubbles do exist, but that it is very hard to identify them with certainty and almost impossible to reach a consensus about whether a particular asset price boom period should be considered a bubble or not," he said in 2005. (Reporting by Sakari Suoninen; editing by David Stamp))