Before the crisis, most economists thought the amount of output of goods and services was primarily driven by supply, Yellen said. “This conclusion deserves to be reconsidered in light of the failures of the level of economic activity to return to its prerecession trend in most advanced economies.”
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Her remarks suggest that Yellen agrees, at least in some part, with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who said that secular stagnation, or a lack of demand, is pushing down global growth.
If one assumes that demand is holding back outlook, “the natural next question is to ask whether it might be possible to reverse these adverse supply-side effects by temporarily running a ‘high-pressure economy,’ with robust aggregate demand and a tight labor market,” Yellen said.
Policy makers want to keep policy more easy during recoveries than would be called for under the traditional view that supply is largely independent of demand, she said.
At the same time, Yellen noted an easy interest rate stance “could have costs that exceed the benefits by increasing the risk of financial instability or undermining price stability.”
The strategy remains hard to quantify, and other policies might be better suited to address damage to the supply side of the economy, the Fed chairwoman added.
Yellen said the idea of a high–pressure economy is one question for economists to answer.
She laid out a few other questions, such as whether the persistent rise in the personal savings rate since the crisis might be “transitory.”
And getting at the root of the financial crisis, Yellen asked the economic profession to study what can Fed interest-rate policy and financial oversight do to reduce the frequency and severity of future crises.
She also asked economist to try to puzzle out why the influence of labor market conditions on inflation seems to be weaker that had been thought before the financial crisis.
And the Fed chairwoman asked how a central bank might influence the public’s expectation of future inflation.
Yellen said more study was needed on how to the Fed can influence expectations of future interest rates and inflation.
She said the Fed guidance that it would hold rates low, which lasted from 2011 through 2014, might be needed again, given that it remains unlikely that reductions in short-term interest rates alone will be an adequate response to a future recession.