How does monetary policy affect inflation?
Wages and prices will begin to rise at faster rates if monetary policy stimulates aggregate demand enough to push labor and capital markets beyond their long-run capacities. In fact, a monetary policy that persistently attempts to keep short-term real rates low will lead eventually to higher inflation and higher nominal interest rates, with no permanent increases in the growth of output or decreases in unemployment. As noted earlier, in the long run, output and employment cannot be set by monetary policy. In other words, while there is a trade-off between higher inflation and lower unemployment in the short run, the trade-off disappears in the long run.
Policy also affects inflation directly through people’s expectations about future inflation. For example, suppose the Fed eases monetary policy. If consumers and businesspeople figure that will mean higher inflation in the future, they’ll ask for bigger increases in wages and prices. That in itself will raise inflation without big changes in employment and output.
Doesn’t U.S. inflation depend on worldwide capacity, not just U.S. capacity?
In this era of intense global competition, it might seem parochial to focus on U.S. capacity as a determinant of U.S. inflation, rather than on world capacity. For example, some argue that even if unemployment in the U.S. drops to very low levels, U.S. workers wouldn’t be able to push for higher wages because they’re competing for jobs with workers abroad, who are willing to accept much lower wages. The implication is that inflation is unlikely to rise even if the Fed adopts an easier monetary policy.
This reasoning doesn’t hold up too well, however, for a couple of reasons. First, a large proportion of what we consume in the U.S. isn’t affected very much by foreign trade. One example is health care, which isn’t traded internationally and which amounts to nearly 15% of U.S. GDP.
More important, perhaps, is the fact that such arguments ignore the role of flexible exchange rates. If the Fed were to adopt an easier policy, it would tend to increase the supply of U.S. dollars in the market. Ultimately, this would tend to drive down the value of the dollar relative to other countries, as U.S. consumers and firms used some of this increased money supply to buy foreign goods and foreigners got rid of the additional U.S. currency they did not want. Thus, the price of foreign goods in terms of U.S. dollars would go up—even though they would not in terms of the foreign currency. The higher prices of imported goods would, in turn, tend to raise the prices of U.S. goods.
How long does it take a policy action to affect the economy and inflation?
It can take a fairly long time for a monetary policy action to affect the economy and inflation. And the lags can vary a lot, too. For example, the major effects on output can take anywhere from three months to two years. And the effects on inflation tend to involve even longer lags, perhaps one to three years, or more.
Why are the lags so hard to predict?
So far, we’ve described a complex chain of events that links a change in the funds rate with subsequent changes in output and inflation. Developments anywhere along this chain can alter how much a policy action will affect the economy and when.
For example, one link in the chain is long-term interest rates, and they can respond differently to a policy action, depending on the market’s expectations about future Fed policy. If markets expect a change in the funds rate to be the beginning of a series of moves in the same direction, they’ll factor in those future changes right away, and long-term rates will react by more than if markets had expected the Fed to take no further action. In contrast, if markets had anticipated the policy action, long-term rates may not move much at all because they would have factored it into the rates already. As a result, the same policy move can appear to have different effects on financial markets and, through them, on output and inflation.
Similarly, the effect of a policy action on the economy also depends on what people and firms outside the financial sector think the Fed action means for inflation in the future. If people believe that a tightening of policy means the Fed is determined to keep inflation under control, they’ll immediately expect low inflation in the future, so they’re likely to ask for smaller wage and price increases, and this will help achieve low inflation. But if people aren’t convinced that the Fed is going to contain inflation, they’re likely to ask for bigger wage and price increases, and that means that inflation is likely to rise. In this case, the only way to bring inflation down is to tighten so much and for so long that there are significant losses in employment and output.
What problems do lags cause?
The Fed’s job would be much easier if monetary policy had swift and sure effects. Policymakers could set policy, see its effects, and then adjust the settings until they eliminated any discrepancy between economic developments and the goals.
But with the long lags associated with monetary policy actions, the Fed must try to anticipate the effects of its policy actions into the distant future. To see why, suppose the Fed waits to shift its policy stance until it actually sees an increase in inflation. That would mean that inflationary momentum already had developed, so the task of reducing inflation would be that much harder and more costly in terms of job losses. Not surprisingly, anticipating policy effects in the future is a difficult task.
How does the Fed decide the appropriate setting for the policy instrument?
The Fed’s job of stabilizing output in the short run and promoting price stability in the long run involves several steps. First, the Fed tries to estimate how the economy is doing now and how it’s likely to do in the near term—say, over the next couple of years or so. Then it compares these estimates to its goals for the economy and inflation. If there’s a gap between the estimates and the goals, the Fed then has to decide how forcefully and how swiftly to act to close that gap. Of course, the lags in policy complicate this process. But so do a host of other things.
What things complicate the process of determining how the economy is doing?
Even the most up-to-date data on key variables like employment, growth, productivity, and so on, reflect conditions in the past, not conditions today; that’s why the process of monetary policymaking has been compared to driving while looking only in the rearview mirror. So, to get a reasonable estimate of current and near-term economic conditions, the Fed first tries to figure out what the most relevant economic developments are; these might be things like the government’s taxing and spending policies, economic developments abroad, financial conditions at home and abroad, and the use of new technologies that boost productivity. These developments can then be incorporated into an economic model to see how the economy is likely to evolve over time.
Sounds easy—plug the numbers into the model and get an answer. So what’s the problem?
There are lots of problems. One problem is that models are only approximations—they can’t capture the full complexity of the economy. Another problem is that, so far, no single model adequately explains the entire economy—at least, you can’t get economists to agree on a single model; and no single model outperforms others in predicting future developments in every situation. Another problem is that the forecast can be off base because of unexpected, even unprecedented, developments—the September 11 attacks are a case in point. So in practice, the Fed tries to deal with this uncertainty by using a variety of models and indicators, as well as informal methods, to construct a picture of the economy. These informal methods can include anecdotes and other information collected from all kinds of sources, such as the Directors of the Federal Reserve Banks, the Fed’s various advisory bodies, and the press.