I do not intend this brief and necessarily incomplete review of events to illustrate how far we have come or to despair of how far we have to go. Rather, I believe it demonstrates the inevitable and ongoing uncertainty faced by policymakers.
Despite extensive efforts to capture and quantify what we perceive as the key macroeconomic relationships, our knowledge about many critical linkages is far from complete and, in all likelihood, will remain so. Every model, no matter how detailed or how well conceived, designed, and implemented, is a vastly simplified representation of the world, with all of the intricacies we experience on a day-to-day basis.