Per Jansson: Monetary policy when inflation is too high – prerequisites and challenges

Speech by Mr Per Jansson, Deputy Governor of the Sveriges Riksbank, at a breakfast meeting arranged by Swedbank, Stockholm, 9 December 2022.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

"There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen."

The words are said to be Vladimir Lenin's, but it is disputed whether that really is the case. Nevertheless, the quotation is very well suited to what I intend to talk about today.

Once a year, I usually make a longer speech, which is also published on the Riksbank's website. The most recent was in December 2021. My speech then was about the division of roles in macroeconomic policy, and my main message was that in the future fiscal policy needs to be more active than has been the case in recent decades.

I emphasised in my speech that the inflation target needs to be symmetrical, that is, it is as important to counteract too low inflation as it is to counteract too high inflation. But at that time, too high inflation was not regarded as a particularly pressing threat, nor was it something I specifically mentioned in the speech.