Must-Read: Menzie Chinn: “Inflation Expectations Can Change Quickly…”

Must-Read: It is not clear to me that inflation expectations would undergo a “rapid and dramatic shift” even if we had a “drastic regime change”. Or rather, as Stan Fischer told me when we were discussing Tom Sargent’s “Stopping Moderate Inflation” and “End of Four Big Inflations” papers, we say after the fact that we had a drastic regime change if and only if inflation expectations underwent a rapid and dramatic shift. It’s not something that one can do–especially living, as we do, not in Plato’s Republic but in Romulus’s Sewer…

Menzie Chinn: “Inflation Expectations Can Change Quickly…”: “One of the arguments for acting sooner rather than later on monetary policy…

…is that if the slack disappears, inflationary expectations will surge… [aA] in this quote from reader Peak Trader’s comment…. I am sure if there is a drastic regime change, one could see a rapid and dramatic shift in measured expectations; the question is whether that scenario is relevant and/or plausible…. I will let readers decide whether expectations turned on a dime. They seem pretty adaptive to me.