Still flying blind after all these years: The Federal Reserve's continuing experiments with unobservables

Abstract

In 1994, we examined the Fed's abandonment of monetary targets in favor of “omens of impending inflation” (Papadimitriou – Wray 1994). Here we are, three decades later, and the Fed is still fumbling around with unobservable indicators of inflation in its quest to target stable prices. In what follows, we examine the evolution of the Fed's thought and practice over the past three decades, a period in which the Fed has increasingly turned to unobservable indicators that are supposed to predict inflation and unobservable tools that are supposed to fight inflation. We will show that our criticisms have also been raised by the Fed's own members and research staff. Moreover, we suggest that the Fed has far less control over inflation than is presumed, and, at worst, might have the whole inflation-fighting strategy backwards. We conclude with an assessment of the latest round of rate hikes.