Central bankers unable to cut interest rates are failing to turbocharge the effect of declining oil prices. Economists at Oxford Economics Ltd., a U.K.-based research group, say policy makers may be damping hopes that last year’s near-halving of crude prices would spark worldwide demand. “With rates this low, even good news has a sting in the tail,” John Bulford and Gabriel Sterne, economists at Oxford, said in a report to clients last week. “The expansionary impact of the oil-price shock is dampened to some extent because of the limited capacity of central banks to loosen monetary policy.” Oxford’s economic modelling shows the lower crude prices would historically be enough for 26 of the 29 major central banks it monitors to have cut rates by the end of this year. Instead, just half have done so, including the Bank of Canada, which reduced its key rate to 0.75 percent in […]