The “Blade Runner” comes from his talk in the IMF´s “Monetary Policy in the Future” panel.
Scott Sumner wrote that
“this is the post we’ve all been waiting for, isn’t it? Ben Bernanke has a post discussing options for monetary reform. As you’d expect, it’s a really well thought out post—first rate. And as you’d expect, I am still able to find a few points where I disagree. “
That was certainly not the post I was waiting for. I think Patrick Sullivan is more on “target” when he writes in Bernanke? … Bernanke?:
So, finally, the most authoritative scholar/policy expert on monetary policy–in a blogpost titled Monetary Policy for the Future–is going to get around to answering the Market Monetarists? No, that was just a feint;
Some of these approaches have the advantage of helping deal with the zero-lower-bound problem, at least in principle. My colleagues at the Fed and I spent a good deal of time during the period after the financial crisis considering these and other alternatives, and I think I am familiar with the relevant theoretical arguments.
Yes…yes…
Although we did not adopt one of these alternatives, I will say that I don’t see anything magical about targeting two percent inflation.
What he thinks was (and is) magical is Inflation Targeting (2% is just the conventional point number or, in some cases the mid-point of a narrow band). A little over 15 years ago, long before becoming a Fed Governor and after editing the “Inflation Target Bible”, Bernanke (with Mishkin and Posen, his co-editors in the “Bible”) wrote an op-ed called “What Happens when Greenspan is Gone?”:
U .S. monetary policy has been remarkably successful during Alan Greenspan’s 121/2 years as Federal Reserve chairman. But although President Clinton yesterday reappointed the 73-year-old Mr. Greenspan to a new term ending in 2004, the chairman will not be around forever. To ensure that monetary policy stays on track after Mr. Greenspan, the Fed should be thinking through its approach to monetary policy now. The Fed needs an approach that consolidates the gains of the Greenspan years and ensures that those successful policies will continue; even if future Fed chairmen are less skillful or less committed to price stability than Mr. Greenspan has been.
We think the best bet lies in a framework known as inflation targeting, which has been employed with great success in recent years by most of the world’s biggest economies, except for Japan. Inflation targeting is a monetary-policy framework that commits the central bank to a forward-looking pursuit of low inflation; the source of the Fed’s current great performance; but also promotes a more open and accountable policy-making process. More transparency and accountability would help keep the Fed on track, and a more open Fed would be good for financial markets and more consistent with our democratic political system.
As our research on the use of this approach around the world documents, successful inflation targeting requires that the central bank and elected officials make a public commitment to an explicit numerical target level for inflation (usually around 2%), to be achieved over a specified horizon (usually two years). Equally important, the central bank must agree to provide the markets and the public with enough information to evaluate its performance, and to understand its reasoning when policy and inflation deviate from the long-run goal–as they inevitably will at times.
What I really want is for him to explain the reasoning behind, not the deviation of policy and inflation from the long-run goal, but the complete failure of policy in keeping inflation anywhere near close to the long-run goal, and the utter loss of the nominal stability that had characterized the previous 20 years!
Update: After accepting a position as adviser to Hedge Fund Citadel, it´s unlikely Bernanke will “explain” anything:
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a key architect of the federal government’s rescue of the financial system, is joining Chicago hedge fund Citadel LLC as a senior adviser.
Mr. Bernanke will consult on developments in monetary policy, financial markets and the global economy, Citadel said in a release. “His insights on monetary policy and the capital markets will be extremely valuable to our team and to our investors,” said Citadel founder and chief executive Ken Griffin in the statement.
Historinhas 