Monday, March 30, 2015

Janet Yellen worried about Stagnation

Some recent studies have raised the prospect that the economies of the United States and other countries will grow more slowly in the future as a result of both demographic factors and a slower pace of productivity gains from technological advances.

At an extreme, such developments could even amount to a type of "secular stagnation," in which monetary policy would need to keep real interest rates persistently quite low relative to historical norms to promote full employment and price stability, absent a highly expansive fiscal policy.