Global liquidity expansion has been very dynamic since 2001. Contrary to conventional wisdom, high money growth rates have not coincided with a concurrent rise in goods prices. At the same time, however, asset prices have increased sharply, significantly outpacing the subdued development in consumer prices. We investigate the interactions between money and goods and asset prices at the global level. Using aggregated data for major OECD countries, our VAR results support the view that different price elasticities on asset and goods markets explain the observed relative price change between asset classes and consumer goods.

This study applies the Cointegrated Vector-Autoregressive (CVAR) model to analyze the long-run relationships and short-run dynamics between stock markets and monetary policy across five developed and three emerging economies. Our main aim is to check whether monetary policy plays an important role for stock market developments. As an innovation, monetary policy enters the analysis from three angles: in the form of a broad monetary aggregate, short-term interest rates and net capital flows. Based on this framework, we analyze whether central banks are able to influence stock market developments. Our findings suggest different patterns and causalities for emerging and industrial economies with the stock markets of the former economies more frequently related to monetary aggregates and capital flows. A direct long-run impact from short-term interest rates on stock prices is only observed for 3 out of 8 economies.

This paper tackles the question of whether a cross-sectional perspective on monetary policy is capable of explaining movements in global commodity prices. In this vein, we contribute to the rich literature on global liquidity in two different ways: on the one hand, to achieve a global series in terms of common monetary policy shocks, we propose a distinction between common and idiosyncratic factors across economies, as proposed by Bai and Ng (2004). Our second innovation stems from the consideration of a Markov-switching vector error correction model when analyzing time-varying short-run dynamics. Having identified the long-run structure which includes a proportional relationship between commodity prices and global liquidity in the first step, our results indeed show that the impact of a global liquidity measure on different commodity prices is significant and varies over time. One regime approximately accounts for times where commodity prices significantly adjust to disequilibria, while the second regime is characterized by either a weak or no commodity price adjustment. The fact that global liquidity also reacts to disequilibria in a specific regime demonstrates the two-way causality between monetary policy and commodity prices.