US & European central banks’ chiefs address Jackson Hole symposium

Global Business

US & European central banks' chiefs address Jackson Hole symposium

The head of the U.S. Central Bank has been defending financial regulation. Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, rejects President Donald Trump’s view, that they’ve hurt the economy.
Yellen was speaking at Jackson Hole in Wyoming, where financial leaders from more than forty countries are meeting at the 2017 Economic Policy Symposium.

Karina Huber reports.

The most anticipated speech at this year’s symposium was Mario Draghi’s, the President of the European Central Bank. Market watchers were looking for clues on when the ECB plans on pulling back on its 60 billion Euro a month bond-buying program.

But there were no revelations from Draghi, though, he did say the global recovery is firming up. Markets have taken that to mean quantitative easing will end relatively soon.

That gave a boost to the Euro, which rose to its highest level against the U.S. dollar since 2015.

Draghi’s speech was mainly in defense of globalization. He said the recent trend among some countries in the developed world was to pull away from it, something Draghi said was a worrying trend for the global economy.

Yellen’s speech was also short on monetary policy and interest rate guidance. It focused instead on the past and on the importance of regulation in making the banking system safer.

Her remarks reminded everyone of the dire state of the global economy in 2008 and strongly defended the Dodd-Frank Act-a series of banking regulations enacted shortly afterwards to prevent a similar crisis from ever happening again.

Yellen did call for modest adjustments to the Volker Rule, which limits proprietary trading by banks. The Trump administration, on the other hand, has called for “significant changes” to the Volker Rule.

For more on the Economic Policy Symposium meetings, Rachelle Akuffo spoke to CGTN’s global economics analyst, Saruhan Hatipoglu.