The Bundesbank and the Banque de France held their third joint conference on 19 and 20 May 2011 in Hamburg. The conference was devoted to the challenges that macroeconomic policy – in the form of monetary, fi scal and tax policy – must address in the short and long run.

Global imbalances are at the heart of the concerns of France’s presidency of the G20 and were the subject of the Banque de France’s sixth International symposium, which brought together a panel of high-level speakers. William R. White provided the concluding remarks.

This paper studies the potential gains of monetary and macro-prudential policies that lean against news-driven boom-bust cycles in housing prices and credit generated by expectations of future macroeconomic developments. First, we find no trade-off between the traditional goals of monetary...