Balancing Inflation and Growth Part 4 of 13

The Federal Reserve, unlike the Bank of England, has a dual mandate. We are charged with creating the monetary conditions to support sustainable noninflationary employment growth. We must keep our eyes on two things: economic growth and price pressures. Of course, this is easier said than done. It poses a conundrum of priority and balance. How should we weigh the risks of slow growth over the need to manage inflation? Reasonable men and women can agree that inflation is a sinister beast that, if untethered, will devour savings, erode the purchasing power of consumers, decimate returns on capital, undermine the reliability of financial accounting, distract the attention of corporate management and undercut employment growth and real wages. Thoughtful men and women can also agree that commodity trading courses at certain junctures, sluggish employment growth and financial instability present greater risks than inflation to the economic welfare of the nation. Both feverish price pressures and economic anemia matter, and both present great risk to our welfare. Both deserve our attention. But the question of the day is which deserves more of our attention right now.

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Balancing Inflation and Growth Part 10 of 13

There was a time, back when I was an outside observer of the Federal Reserve, when commodity future option trading the Fed practiced what some have dubbed opportunistic disinflation. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the FOMC recognized that while recessions sometimes occur, they could not be anticipated with any precision and that by the time the data revealed a recession, it was too late to do much about it, given the impact lags of monetary policy. The FOMC also recognized that the trend rate of inflation generally fell by about a percentage point or more following a recession. Put it all together and you get opportunistic disinflation, or the idea that if recession comes, make the best of it by bringing down the inflation rate.

This was a period of persistent disinflationand, I might add, a period during which the U.S. economy experienced only two short and mild recessions, a total of 16 months over almost 25 years. Over this same period, the inflation rate declined inexorably, reaching a point where the FOMC had to deal with the threat of deflation in 200304. It was also the period when the Fed made the largest gains in its policy credibility and commodity trading education.

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Balancing Inflation and Growth Part 1 of 13

It is an honor to speak here in London to the Society of Business Economists at the suggestion of my much-admired friend, Charlie Bean at the Bank of England. Charlie is on the advisory board of the Dallas Feds Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute, and we are most grateful for his platform trading insight and, not unimportantly, his wit.

I am on my way to a conference in Paris to learn commodity trading, where I have been invited by the Banque de France to comment on a paper by another of our institutes esteemed advisors, Harvard professor Ken Rogoff. I hope my French hosts will forgive me for bringing up my favorite of all of Shakespeares histories this evening, Henry V, as I recall one of the more pleasant moments during my tenure on the Federal Open Market Committee. During our last meeting with Alan Greenspan as chairman, some of us took advantage of the moment to ham it up and work a farewell salute into our otherwise somber interventions. I chose to adapt Henrys speech to the troops at Agincourt. Affecting my best Kenneth Branagh imitation, I mangled the words of the Bard: We few, we happy few, we band of bankers, and so on, concluding with the observation that other economists now abedit was morning when we metshall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their policy prescriptions cheap while any speaks that served in Alan Greenspans days.

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