Among other problems, significant pressures on bank balance sheets were beginning to emerge that would damp economic growth for the next several years. While dealing with the serious economic issues of the time, John and the other members of the Council simultaneously produced an impressive manifesto for policymaking.
They developed a rules-based approach to the conduct of monetary and fiscal policy and published it in 1990 in the Economic Report of the President. That essay laid the foundation for what is perhaps John's most well-known contribution to economics--the simple description of the determinants of monetary policy that eventually became known as the Taylor rule.