Interest rate rules and price determinacy: The role of transactions services of bonds$

Interest rate rules have been associated with price indeterminacy when they do not respond aggressively enoughto inflation. Price indeterminacy is typically associated with indeterminacy of real bond balances, suggesting that the missing element is a meaningful role for government bonds. We assume that government bonds provide arbitrarily small transactions services and show that this can dramatically change the local and global determinacy conditions. In particular, the specification of fiscal policy affects the aggressiveness with which monetary policy must respond to inflation to deliver local determinacy—a range of passive monetary policies, even an interest rate peg, may yield determinacy. r 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V