Samim Ghamami

Samim Ghamami is chief economist at the New York State Insurance Fund, where he leads economics, investment, and markets research. He is an economist, strategist, and researcher whose work focuses on macro-finance, financial stability, financial regulation, Treasury-market reform, banking, digital assets, private credit, and central clearing, with prior roles at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Goldman Sachs, Millennium Management, the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board, and Barclays.

Fiscal Stress Is Narrowing the Room for Independent Central Banks

At a Hoover Institution conference on central-bank independence, Michael Bordo, Barry Eichengreen and Hanno Lustig argued that fiscal policy is increasingly constraining what monetary policy can credibly do. Bordo used Britain’s Great Inflation to show how a fiscal regime shift can turn shocks into inflation; Eichengreen said U.S. fiscal politics now pose risks to the dollar and the Federal Reserve; and Lustig argued that markets are starting to price Treasurys less as safe assets than as risky debt. Their shared point was that legal independence offers central banks only limited protection when debt dynamics, fiscal politics and bond-market stress move against them.

Hoover InstitutionJun 1, 202621 min read