Must-Read: Antonio Fatas: The Missing Lowflation Revolution
: The Missing Lowflation Revolution: “It will soon be eight years since the US Federal Reserve decided to bring its interest rate down to 0%…
…In these eight years central banks have used all their available tools to increase inflation closer to their target and boost growth with limited success. GDP growth has been weak or anemic, and there is very little hope that economies will ever go back to their pre-crisis trends…. Very few would have anticipated… that central banks cannot lift inflation rates closer to their targets over such a long horizon… that a crisis can be so persistent and that cyclical conditions can have such large permanent effects on potential output… the slow (or inexistent) natural tendency of the economy to adjust by itself to a new equilibrium. To be fair… we had been warned about this by those who had studied the Japanese experience: both Krugman and Bernanke, among others…. But my guess is that even those who agreed with this reading of the Japanese economy would have never thought that we would see the same thing happening in other advanced economies….
It might be time to rethink our economic policy framework. Some obvious proposals include raising the inflation target and considering “helicopter money” as a tool for central banks. But neither of these proposals is getting a lot of traction. My own sense is that the view among academics and policy makers is not changing fast enough…. The comparison with the 70s when stagflation produced a large change in the way academic and policy makers thought about their models and about the framework for monetary policy is striking…. How many more years of zero interest rate will it take to witness a similar change in our economic analysis?