Against this background, Taylor (2007) put forth the idea that the Federal Reserve helped inflateU.S. housing prices by keeping rates too low for too long after 2002. His main argument departedfrom the observation that the policy rate was well below what implied by a standard Taylor rule,a good approximation to the conduct of monetary policy in the previous several years (Figure 1).As a consequence, “those low interest rates were not only unusually low but they logically werea factor in the housing boom and therefore ultimately the bust.”16Therefore, according to thisview, higher interest rates would have reduced both the probability and the severity of the bustthat led to the Great Recession.In this section we evaluate this claim against the qualitative predictions of our model. In partic-ular, we will show that Taylor’s argument can be rationalized within the logic of our model onlyif we make the following auxiliary assumptions: the policy authority is responsible for financialstability —in addition to the traditional objective of price stability— and it has only one instru-ment at its disposal. However, Taylor’s argument is no longer valid within the logic of our modelif the policy authority has two instruments to address the macroeconomic and the financial fric-tion or, as we showed in the previous section, when there are two different policy authorities formacroeconomic and financial stability with one instrument each. In the latter case, which is theinstitutional set-up prevailing in the United States, in response to a negative aggregate demandshock, the “optimal” response of the central bank is to slash interest rates without concern forfinancial stability, which is addressed with the second instrument (or by the other authority).As we discuss below, the evidence suggests that the U.S. regulators were at best ineffective incurbing the continued expansion of subprime mortgage lending well past the point at which primelending had started to decline. We conclude from this analysis that Taylor’s claim that U.S. mon-etary policy is to blame for the Great Recession is not justified within the logic of our model,given the regulatory regime prevailing in the United States and the evidence we report on its in-ability to curb subprime lending while monetary policy was tightening its stance during the 2004-06 period.To assess Taylor’s contention through the lenses of the model, consider a negative shock hittingthe economy, such as the one that occurred in March 2000 when the dot-com bubble burst. Setthe beginning of period 0 as the year 2000 and assume that the economy comes back to its pre-shock level of activity after four years, namely at the beginning of 2004 —consistent with the factthat the policy rate was raised for the first time in July 2004. Therefore, each time period in ourmodel corresponds to about 4 years in the data.16John Taylor, interviewed by Bloomberg at the American Economic Association’s annual meeting, Atlanta,January 5, 2010, available at:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a44P5KTDjWWY