Must-Read: Josh Bivens: Is 2 percent too low?: Rethinking the Fed’s arbitrary inflation target to avoid another Great Recession

Must-Read: The answer to the question is Josh Bivens’s title is: YES!!

Josh Bivens: Is 2 percent too low?: Rethinking the Fed’s arbitrary inflation target to avoid another Great Recession: “The end of 2017 will mark 10 years since the beginning of the Great Recession… http://www.epi.org/publication/is-2-percent-too-low/

…The terrible damage it inflicted… should inspire deep thinking…. All major tenets of macroeconomic stabilization policy… should be subject to this rigorous evaluation…. The very low inflation rate currently targeted by the Federal Reserve as a long-term macroeconomic policy goal (2 percent annual inflation) should be reassessed…. A higher inflation target… will make conventional monetary policy more effective in fighting recessions and spurring recoveries during periods when nominal interest rates are near-zero… greatly increas[ing] the probability that the next recession will be shorter and the recovery faster, not just because it will allow inflation-adjusted interest rates to be lowered further, but because it will be easier for households to climb out from under overhanging debt…