Conference Paper
America's historical experience with low inflation
Abstract: The inflation of the 1970s was a marked deviation from America's typical peacetime historical pattern as a hard-money country. We should expect America to continue to be a hard-money--low inflation--country in the future, at least in peacetime. The low rate of future inflation that we thus forecast changes the balance of macroeconomic risks and opportunities. The risk of debt-deflation-mediated recessions is somewhat higher because a low trend rate of goods-and-services price index inflation somewhat increases the changes of deflation. But it does not raise such risks as much as one might think. The failure of the Fisher effect to hold empirically means that a low-inflation era will in all likelihood be a high real interest rate era. But such high real interest rates do not appear to significantly discourage investment or growth.
Keywords: Monetary policy; Inflation (Finance); Interest rates;
Status: Published in Journal of money, credit and banking, v. 32, no. 4, pt. 2 (November 2000) ; Monetary policy in a low-inflation environment
Authors
Bibliographic Information
Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Part of Series: Conference Series ; [Proceedings]
Publication Date: 2000
Pages: 979-1006