Back in July, I shared here some thoughts concerning the Fed's conference in Chicago that month, which was dedicated to a review of its tools, strategies, and communications. Among other things, I said I was disappointed by the short-shrift given to NGDP targeting by Lars Svensson's paper…
In a previous post, I argued that Paul Volcker didn't put a stop to inflation by having the Fed systematically increase interest rates when commodity prices rose, and lower them when commodity prices fell. While commodity-price targeting, aka a "price rule" for monetary policy, had some prominent…
John Maynard Keynes once marveled at "how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam." (Bedlam was the nickname of a London madhouse.) Keynesian or New Keynesian macroeconomists who start with the mistaken premise that a central bank cannot fight recession except by lowering…
Last weekend the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City hosted its annual symposium in Jackson Hole. Despite being the Fed's largest annual event, the symposium has been "fairly boring" for years, in terms of what can be learned about the future of actual policy. This year's program,…
Recently David Beckworth and Martin Sandbu, among others, have drawn attention to an interesting paper by James Bullard and Riccardo DiCecio unveiled in Norway earlier this year. In it, Bullard and DiCecio investigate a model economy possessing both a large private credit market and "Non-state contingent nominal…