Mysteries of Monetary Policy
Does the credible threat of extreme responses from the Fed mean that it does not actually have to repeat the Volcker-era policy, should inflation rates rise? A column by Robert J. Barro.
«It is like saying that the inflation rate is subdued because it just is.»
One of the remarkable features of post-war economic history has been the taming of inflation in the United States and many other countries since the mid-1980s. Before then, the US inflation rate (based on the deflator for personal consumption expenditures) averaged 6.6% per year during the 1970s, and exceeded 10% in 1979-1980.
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Volcker, backed by President Ronald Reagan after January 1981, stuck with this approach, despite intense political opposition, and that July the federal funds rate peaked at 22%. The policy worked: annual inflation fell sharply to an average of just 3.4% from 1983 to 1989. The Fed had satisfied in extreme form what later became known as the Taylor Principle (or, more appropriately, the Volcker Principle), whereby the federal funds rate increases by more than the rise in the inflation rate.
Federal funds rate as the main instrument
Since then, the Fed has guided monetary policy primarily through control over short-term nominal interest rates, especially the federal funds rate. When its power over short-term borrowing costs was compromised following the 2008 financial crisis – because the federal funds rate approached its (roughly) zero lower bound – the Fed supplemented its main policy instrument with forward guidance and quantitative easing (QE).
Judging by the US inflation rate over past decades, the Fed’s monetary policy has worked brilliantly. Annual inflation has averaged only 1.5% per year since 2010, slightly below the Fed’s oft-expressed target of 2%, and has been strikingly stable. And yet, the question is how this was achieved. Did inflation remain subdued because everyone believed that anything significantly above the 1.5-2% range would trigger a sharp hike in the federal funds rate?
There is a large body of research into how changes in the federal funds rate influence the economy. A 2018 paper by Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, for example, finds that a contractionary monetary shock – an unanticipated rise in the federal funds rate – raises yields on Treasury securities over a 3-5-year horizon, with a peak effect at two years. (Results for expansionary shocks are symmetric.) Most of these effects apply to real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates, and show up in indexed bonds as well as conventional Treasuries. The effect of a contractionary shock on the prospective inflation rate is negative but moderate in size, and sets in significantly only after 3-5 years.
Only weak and delayed effects
Although unexpected increases in the federal funds rate are conventionally labeled as contractionary, Nakamura and Steinsson find that «forecasts about output growth» actually rise for the year following an unexpected rate hike. That is, a rate increase predicts higher growth, and a decrease predicts lower growth. This pattern likely occurs because the Fed typically raises interest rates when it gets information that the economy is stronger than expected, and it cuts rates when it suspects that the economy is weaker than it previously thought.
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https://www.fuw.ch/article/mysteries-of-monetary-policy/
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