Beliefs are to be held forever

And Chairwoman Yellen has forever held the belief that Phillips Curve/NAIRU is the “best inflation indicator”.

In his Final Thoughts on September, Tim Duy writes:

I expect the Fed will ultimately pledge allegiance to the Phillips curve. I think they believe that stable inflation is incompatible with sub-5% unemployment if short term interest rates remain at zero. Hence, they will signal that the first rate hike is imminent.

While a BoG member in 1996, she teamed up with PC/NAIRU other big fan Laurence Meyer:

Dec/96 FOMC Transcript:

L Meyer:

A second justification for policy change would be the conviction that we are already below NAIRU and not likely to move back to it quickly enough to prevent an uptick in inflation. This is basically the staff forecast, and my view has been and continues to be that this is the most serious risk factor in the outlook. Yet, we get stuck in place because we continue to be confronted by the reality of stable to declining core inflation in the face of this prevailing low unemployment rate. So, we wait for additional data to resolve our doubts. The risk of waiting, judging from the modest rise in inflation in the staff forecast, is not very great. Still, it is probably worthwhile noting that in all of the five private-sector forecasts that I looked at, there are increases in core inflation over the next year or two. That is a pervasive tendency that just about everybody is worried about. I think we need to keep that in mind.

J Yellen

To my mind, labor markets are undeniably tight. You remarked last time, Mr. Chairman, that we should be careful not to lull ourselves into a false sense of security about incipient wage pressures by reading too much into that suspiciously low third-quarter ECI, and I agree with that. So, I still feel that we need to avoid complacency about the potential for inflationary pressures to emerge from the labor market down the road.

Sometime later, now as head of President Clinton´s CEA we read:

Yellen CEA  Report 1998

This chapter’s analysis of macroeconomic policy and performance concludes that the economy should continue to grow with low inflation in 1998. The chapter begins with a review of macroeconomic performance and policy in 1997, to show in some detail where the year’s growth came from and how inflation remained so tame. The second section examines the important question of whether our understanding of inflation and our ability to predict it have changed in significant ways. This question is part of a broader inquiry into whether the economy has changed in such fundamental ways that standard analyses of how fast it can grow without inflation need to be replaced with a new view. The conclusion reached here is that no sea change has occurred that would justify ignoring the threat of inflation when the labor market is as tight as it is now;

In a few hours we´ll know if beliefs changed!