Last month, in what will presumably be one of his last public speeches before he retires this June, New York Fed President William Dudley defended the Fed's current "floor" system of monetary control against the alternative of a corridor arrangement. Because Dudley's is one of the more…
Forty years ago, in the spring of 1978, I had no intention of becoming an economist. Instead, I was studying marine biology at Duke University's Marine Lab at Pivers Island, on the beautiful North Carolina Coast. There, when the wind was up, my classmate Alan Kahana and…
In the book I advertised in my last post, I argue that the Fed's decision to switch to a "floor"-type operating system "deepened and prolonged the Great Recession." Yet the Fed is only one of several central banks that have adopted floor systems for monetary control during…
The Fed’s persistent failure to reach its 2 percent inflation target ever since that target was first made explicit in 2012 has elicited a great deal of commentary in the last couple months, from economists, journalists, and some Fed officials themselves. And well it ought to, for…