This development, in turn, makes it more likely that recessions will impart elevated risks of more persistent downward pressure on inflation and upward pressure on unemployment that the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy should, in design and implementation, seek to offset throughout the business cycle and not just in downturns themselves.
Two other, related developments that have also become more evident than they appeared in 2012 are that price inflation seems less responsive to resource slack, and also, that estimates of resource slack based on historically estimated price Phillips curve relationships are less reliable and subject to more material revision than was once commonly believed.