At the same time, I believe transparency and accountability are appropriate goals for monetary policymakers and that an explicit inflation target would contribute to each of these goals, even if it would not have had much effect on the actual course of policy in recent years. Should the full employment objective be explicit also?
A natural question in the case of a dual mandate is whether both objectives should be made explicit. Some members of the Congress, for example, might encourage the Fed to adopt an explicit objective for full employment to balance an explicit inflation objective.