During the years prior to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), conventional monetary policy doctrine indicated clearly that the central bank's key policy rate is the sole monetary policy tool to achieve an objective defined on the inflation gap and the output gap with optimal exchange rate policy being a pure float. However, a number of countries, in particular open emerging market economies, did intervene extensively well before the GFC.  Since the GFC, many central banks, especially in both developed and emerging market small open economies, intervened actively in forex markets, (almost) always buying foreign currency. Ten years later, with renormalization of monetary policy beginning to become an area of active interest in central banks and academia, the question arises as to whether monetary policy should return to conventional pre-GFC doctrine or whether the experience since the GFC warrants thinking about forex intervention as one element of a new, conventional monetary policy toolbox. Among the many relevant considerations will be the distance between the natural rate of interest and the effective lower bound. 

The conference is sponsored by the CEPR, the Bank of Israel and the Swiss National Bank and will be held in Jerusalem, on Thursday 7 and Friday 8 December 2017.