Jai Kedia
Jai Kedia and Norbert Michel
The Federal Reserve is scheduled to conduct its five-year monetary policy framework review in 2025, barely two years after one of the nation’s worst bouts of inflation. The review is the perfect opportunity for the Fed to take a bold step toward objective policymaking that could protect Americans from future policy mistakes, such as those that led to the post-COVID pandemic inflation spike. To take this step, the Fed’s review should include an examination of monetary policy rules that would commit it to certain courses of action regarding its future monetary policy stance.
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As long as the monetary system is based on government-issued paper (fiat) base money, some group of government officials must manage that issuance. Because there is no pure market-based mechanism to guide how much of that base money the government should issue, a monetary policy rule might provide the next best alternative. As Jason Furman, chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, recently explained: “Placing more weight on rules at the Fed could solve several problems. It would make monetary policy more predictable and understandable, reducing market volatility and enabling better investment decisions. It could also avoid the biases that have crept into the Fed’s decision-making in recent years.”
Debates over which specific rule the Fed should adopt are useful but ultimately should not stand in the way of committing to a rule in the first place. Most monetary policy rules take the form of an interest rate feedback system where the Fed sets the target for the federal funds rate (“FFR”) in response to current values of key macroeconomic indicators. Since the economy is interlinked and most macroeconomic indicators mirror each other, the general recommendations the various rules offer should (theoretically) be similar. Indeed, this is borne out by the data. » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/fed-must-adopt-monetary-policy-rule