In light of the slowness of the economic recovery, some have questioned the effectiveness of asset purchases and extended forward rate guidance. But this criticism fails to consider the unusual headwinds the economy faced after the crisis. Those headwinds included substantial household and business deleveraging, unfavorable demand shocks from abroad, a period of contractionary fiscal policy, and unusually tight credit, especially for housing.
3  While there are various methods for analyzing consumer prices, I think it is helpful to focus on the frequency of price changes in each item by separating the two categories of "sticky" and "flexible" consumer prices. Sticky consumer prices are those for items whose prices change relatively infrequently, and in Japan's CPI these are mainly services prices.