The Two Percent *Ceiling* for Inflation
The Fed has consistently missed its inflation target:
Monetary Policy And Secular Stagnation, by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi: ...The Fed’s goal is to achieve the target of 2% inflation in the long-term, and its preferred price index is the core personal consumption expenditure price index that excludes the volatile food and energy sectors (or core PCE for short). So how has the Fed performed in achieving its target of 2% inflation in the past 15 years?
The chart above plots the implied core PCE index if inflation had met its 2% target (red line), and the actual core PCE index (blue line) starting from 1999. ... The divergence between target and actual inflation is all the more striking given the elevated rate of unemployment during the sample period. ...
It is hard to fault the Fed for not trying... The Fed’s difficulty in maintaining a 2% target is not just about the Great Recession. The divergence started in the 2000′s... In fact the only period when the blue line runs parallel to the red (implying a 2% rate of inflation for a while) is the 2004-2006 period when the economy witnessed an unprecedented growth in credit. ...
What we are witnessing is the limit of what monetary policy alone can do. Sometimes there is a tendency to assume that the Fed can “target” any inflation rate it wishes, or that it can target the overall price level – the so-called nominal GDP targeting. The evidence suggests that the Fed may not be so omnipotent. ...
Another interpretation is that, at least during normal times, the Fed does have quite a bit of control over the inflation rate, but it treats 2% inflation as a ceiling (i.e. inflation must never rise above 2%) rather than a central tendency (i.e. inflation is allowed to fluctuate both above and below the 2% target so that, on average, inflation is 2%).
Posted by Mark Thoma on Sunday, March 30, 2014 at 11:10 AM in Economics, Inflation, Monetary Policy |
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