'Profiles in Coreage'

Paul Krugman follows up on one of Tim Duy's posts:

Profiles in Coreage: Tim Duy, in the course of a discussion of the outlook for Fed policy, reminds us of the spring of 2011, when headline inflation had risen a lot mainly due to oil prices. He portrays Ben Bernanke as being all alone in insisting that the inflation bump was a blip, and would soon fade away. Actually, that’s not quite right; as far as I recall, most saltwater economists agreed. I was writing about it often. And the Fed, after all, routinely focuses on core inflation rather than headline numbers. Still, Bernanke was definitely under pressure.

What Duy doesn’t say is that the inflation fight of 2011 was about more than inflation; it was another aspect of the fight over how the economy works – and another big victory for the Keynesian view. The concept of core inflation arises out of the notion that most prices are “sticky” ... Standard measures of core inflation are imperfect ways of getting at this distinction, but they ... have been hugely vindicated by the experience of recent years. So I’m glad to see all the people who issued dire warnings about inflation in 2011 acknowledging that they had the wrong model. Hahahahaha.

And yes, this means that you should discount the effects of falling oil prices in the same way you discount the effects of rising oil prices. I would nonetheless urge the Fed to hold off on rate hikes, but for different reasons – the asymmetry in risks between raising rates early and raising them late. And I worry that the Fed may be losing the thread here (hi Stan!). But that’s another topic.