What does the Bundesbank target?

Although its primary ultimate objective is price stability, the Bundesbank has drawn a distinction between its money-focused strategy and the inflation targeting approach recently adopted by a number of central banks. We show that, holding constant the current forecast of inflation, German monetary policy responds very little to changes in forecasted money growth; we conclude that the Bundesbank is much better described as an inflation targeter than as a money targeter. An additional contribution of the paper is to apply the structural VAR methods of B. Bernanke and I, Mihov (Measuring monetary policy, working paper no. 5145, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, June 1995) to determine the optimal indicator of German monetary policy: We find that the Lombard rate has historically been a good policy indicator, although the use of the call rate as an indicator cannot be statistically rejected. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.