彼得森经济研究所-联邦公开市场委员会是否存在结构性问题？（英）

1750 Massachusetts Avenue, NW | Washington, DC 20036-1903 USA | +1.202.328.9000 | www.piie.comPOLICY BRIEFAlan S. Blinder was a distinguished visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics from September 2023 to January 2024. He has been on the Princeton faculty since 1971, taking time off from January 1993 through January 1996 for service in the US government, first as a member of President Bill Clinton’s original Council of Economic Advisers and then as vice chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He is grateful for helpful comments from Karen Dynan, Peter Fisher, Heidi Shierholz, and David Wilcox and for fine research assistance from Daniel Sozanski.24-11 Was Something Structurally Wrong at the FOMC?Alan S. BlinderOctober 2024Note: This Policy Brief is part of a series titled Understanding COVID Era Inflation. PIIE gratefully acknowledges the financial support from a donor who wishes to remain anonymous for the research presented in this Policy Brief. The research was conducted independently; funders are never given the right to review a publication before its release.INTRODUCTION There is little doubt that the Federal Reserve was late to start raising interest rates as inflation rose in 2021–22. Even Chair Jerome Powell admitted that not starting until March 2022 was too late.1 Some critics have even accused the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of being as much as a full year late in pulling the rate trigger,2 though that seems exaggerated to me. In fact, as late as January 2022, private forecasters were more or less where the Fed was: forecasting that core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation, then over 5 percent, would decline to about 2¼ percent in 2023.3 In that case, why raise rates? All the inflation optimists were wrong, of course. But if misery loves company, the Fed had plenty of both.THE FORECASTING ERRORI begin this Policy Brief with the forecasting error because mistakes in monetary policy often emanate from poor forecasts rather than from any structural problem at the central bank. This one surely did. But why was the inflation forecast so important? And why was it so wrong?1 Rachel Siegel, “Fed Chair says Interest Rates Should Have Gone Up Sooner,” Washington Post, May 12, 2022.2 John B. Taylor, “The Fed’s State of Exception,” Project Syndicate, August 13, August 2021.3 David Wilcox, “If the Fed Is Wrong on Inflation, It’s Not Alone,” Bloomberg Terminal, January 23, 2022 (subscription required).2 PB 24-11 | OCTOBER 2024Regarding the first question, it is well known that the effects of monetary policy on inflation arrive only after “long and variable lags.” As a hypothetical example, but one that is highly relevant to the present context, imagine that inflation is running at 3 percent, and the central bank’s forecast under current policy is that it will either (1) recede to 2 percent in one or two years; or (2) rise to 4 percent in one or two years. The moneta