Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy

There is a conference on Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy "coordinated by Olivier Blanchard ...and Lawrence H. Summers..." taking place today and tomorrow (wanted to go, but couldn't).

"Academic experts and policymakers will address the challenges to macroeconomic thinking and policymaking that today’s economic environment presents–low inflation despite low unemployment, the apparent interactions of rising inequality and stagnating productivity, and the unresponsiveness of long-term interest rates to rising public debt, among others." [Conference program, papers, presentations, and conference webcast.]

Here are links to the first two papers presented at the conference. First, Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Summers:

Rethinking Stabilization Policy. Back to the Future (Preliminary): Nearly ten years after the onset of the Great Financial Crisis, both researchers and policy makers are still assessing the policy implications of the crisis and its aftermath. Previous major crises, from the Great Depression to the stagflation of the 1970s, profoundly changed both macroeconomics and macroeconomic policy. The question is whether this crisis should and will have similar effects.

We believe it should, although we are less sure it will. Rather obviously, the crisis has forced macroeconomists to (re)discover the role and the complexity of the financial sector, and the danger of financial crises. But the lessons should go largely beyond this, and force us to question a number of cherished beliefs. Among other things, the events of the last ten years have put into question the presumption that economies are self stabilizing, have raised again the issue of whether temporary shocks can have permanent effects, and have shown the importance of non linearities.

These call for a major reappraisal of macroeconomic thinking and macroeconomic policy. As the paper is a curtain raiser for a conference that will look in more detail at the implications for specific policies, we make no attempt at being encyclopedic and feel free to pick and choose the issues which we see as most salient. ...

Ben Bernanke posted a summary of his paper on his blog at Brookings:

Temporary price-level targeting: An alternative framework for monetary policy: Low nominal interest rates, low inflation, and slow economic growth pose challenges to central bankers. In particular, with estimates of the long-run equilibrium level of the real interest rate quite low, the next recession may occur at a time when the Fed has little room to cut short-term rates. As I have written previously and recent research has explored, problems associated with the zero-lower bound (ZLB) on interest rates could be severe and enduring. While the Fed has other useful policies in its toolkit such as quantitative easing and forward guidance, I am not confident that the current monetary toolbox would prove sufficient to address a sharp downturn. I am therefore sympathetic to the view of San Francisco Fed President John Williams and others that we should be thinking now about adjusting the framework in which monetary policy is conducted, to provide more policy “space” in the future. In a paper presented at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, I propose an option for an alternative monetary framework that I call a temporary price-level target—temporary, because it would apply only at times when short-term interest rates are at or very near zero.

To explain my proposal, I’ll begin by briefly discussing two other ideas for changing the monetary framework:  raising the Fed’s inflation target above the current 2 percent level, and instituting a price-level target that would operate at all times.  (See my paper for more details.) ...