On Saturday a Yellen ally and former adviser at the Fed delivered a provocative retort: the economic models underpinning those simple rules don’t work that well, and the best policy decisions come when central bankers look beyond those models to the unexpected forces shaping the economy.
Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan famously did it in the 1990's when he argued against a rate hike at a time when rising productivity was holding down inflation, and arguably failed to do it when he ignored the impact of the tech and housing bubbles, Johns Hopkins University economics professor Jon Faust said in a paper presented at an annual Fed conference here.
In each case the point is the same: it was the extraordinary events outside of the basic inflation and output models used by central bankers that ultimately mattered most, argued Faust, who served as a special adviser to the Fed’s board of governors until September 2014.
