The Reader's Guide to Optimal Monetary Policy is a snazzy new website created by Anthony Diercks and Cole Langlois at the Federal Reserve Board. Screenshot:
Who said 2% inflation is a good idea? The graph shows publication date on the horizontal axis, the optimal inflation rate on the y axis, and the size of the circle is the number of citations.
The sizeable number of dots around -4% reflect the "Friedman rule" idea. (Sadly, the graph doesn't include Friedman. It only goes back to 1990.) The idea here is that the nominal interest rate should be zero, so you earn the same on money as on bonds. Then there is no reason to economize on holding cash. Most of these were written when real rates were thought to be around 4%, so you need 4% deflation to get a nominal interest rate of zero. Ah, the good old days.
More dots show up around zero. These are mostly "sticky price" models. Now there are costs to changing prices. So the economy works best when people don't have to change prices at all, 0% inflation.
Note the paucity of papers at 2%, the Fed's inflation target. This is a nice testament to the honesty of the Fed and its researchers.
The website allows you to graph many other issues, search for papers and so on. If you hover over a paper you get a great little two-sentence summary of the paper's main idea. If you click, you get the abstract and link to the paper. Have fun. Trigger warning: you may end up wasting a good deal of time.
from The Grumpy Economist https://ift.tt/2Pcflk7
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