Search Results for: inflation target

A quick Bank of England Inflation Report Press Conference Post Mortem. The headline seems to be that MPC is forecasting a larger, protracted deviation of CPI inflation below the 2 per cent target.  That is despite some softening in the … Continue reading →

John Kay reminds us in his latest FT column that inflation is a statistical chimera. From time to time, new things are invented or desired, and old things no longer bought, and all the time what we buy gets improved. … Continue reading →

Ken Rogoff wrote recently extolling the virtues of abolishing cash in favour of electronic money in order to escape the zero lower bound, which he prefers to the alternative of raising the inflation target.  Targeting higher inflation would ‘baffle’ the … Continue reading →

Noah Smith and Ryan Avent got his debate going again, a conversation whose last incarnation was an exchange between Steve Williamson and Paul Krugman, essentially, sparked by Steve asserting that inflation was too low because Fed rates were too low.  … Continue reading →

This is prompted by the latest post by Steve Williamson, where he reiterates a view he’s expressed a few times, that the Fed’s [and other central banks’] efforts to keep interest rates pinned at the zero bound, in an effort … Continue reading →

As the ECB slides inexorably towards a liquidity trap, debate focuses on whether it might be prepared to engage in a forward guidance policy that implied a Woodford-style inflation target overshoot.  Simon Wren Lewis suggests that a more palatable way … Continue reading →

In a nice post on the New York Fed’s blog, Liberty Street Economics, Marc Giannoni and Hannah Herman write on price level targeting.  In a nutshell, they observe that, whatever the FRB said it was doing ex ante, ex post … Continue reading →

Larry Summers wrote this piece recently, marking the 20 year celebrations of independence for the UK’s Bank of England, explaining why he thought the case for central bank independence was now weaker than in the past.  I am going to … Continue reading →

One kind of forward guidance – consciously eschewed by central banks during the crisis – was dubbed ‘Odyssian’. The idea was that, deprived of being able to move the short interest rate by the zero bound, central banks would attempt … Continue reading →

Charles Goodhart, speaking at the Bank of England’s recent conference celebrating 20 years of central bank independence, was reported to have said ‘it was nice while it lasted’.  Andrew Benito of Goldman Sachs, speaking on a panel at a Money … Continue reading →