Monetary Policy and the Saving Glut Both Mattered for the Boom

That is what Filipa Sá, Pascal Towbin, and Tomasz Wieladek find in their new paper. Moreover, they find that the effects of monetary policy and the saving glut were more pronounced in those economies with more developed and securitized mortgage markets.  On this latter point, Roger Ahrend similarly finds that easy monetary policy had its biggest effect on housing in periods of financial deregulation and innovation.  The Sá et al. paper also is consistent with the findings of Thierry Bracke and Michael Fidora who show that monetary policy shocks and global saving glut shocks contributed to the buildup of global economic imbalances.  These nuanced studies that take a global perspective and find both monetary policy and global savings to have mattered are far more satisfying than the "Not us!" research being pushed by former and current Fed officials lately.  

It would be nice, however, if these nuanced studies did more to tease out (1) how much of the saving glut was due to truly exogenous developments in the emerging economies versus (2) how much was due to endogenous responses by these economies to the Fed's loose monetary policy.  In other words, how much of the saving glut was simply recycled U.S. monetary policy?