COLOMBO – Parliament is set to take up for debate a bill for a controversial new central bank law on May 11, a parliamentary statement said on Thursday (4).
The controversial law is expected to legalize output gap targeting (printing money for growth) as a sub objective and give banks a legal mandate to simultaneously operate money and exchange polices, (so-called dual anchor or impossible trinity regime), in the course of operating flexible inflation targeting regime.
Provisional advances – another form of delivering liquidity shocks – will be done for interest instead of free as of now.
Sri Lanka has had monetary instability from shortly after the central bank was created in 1950 with simultaneous money and exchange policies but the country had managed to avoid external sovereign default until 2022.
Flexible inflation targeting with output gaps and aggressive open market operations started around seven years ago after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gave technical assistance to calculate a so-called potential output.
The new monetary law is a structural benchmark in the IMF program.
Parliament is also scheduled to a welfare benefit law for debate on May 12.
-economynext.com
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.