I ended my previous post by pointing to a striking correlation:
It’s interesting to consider the small group of economists who have suggested that monetary policy can and should have done more, and/or the payment of positive interest on reserves was a mistake: Thompson, Hall, myself, Woolsey, Glasner, Svensson, Jackson, etc. Every one of them was in the even smaller group of economists that focused on forward-looking monetary regimes of one form or another. Once you start looking at monetary policy in a forward-looking fashion, everything seems different.
To give you an idea just how striking this pattern is, consider the following two facts:
1. In addition to this short list, I know of only two other economists who wrote papers advocating that monetary policy “target the forecast,” Robert Hetzel and Kevin Dowd. That’s just nine people.
2. The ideas that I have promoted on this blog are widely viewed as quite heterodox, departing from the prevailing views of economists on both the right and the left. Indeed, very few economists have publicly argued that Fed errors in late 2008 made monetary policy much more contractionary that it appeared, and that these errors (perhaps just errors of omission), contributed to a severe intensification of the recession.
Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…