No one is suggesting a return to the micromanagement of the economy. Central Banks should remain focused on achieving their aim of price stability for the economy as a whole. With the advent of the financial crisis, however, we have realized that aggregate data are not enough and policy makers need more granular data.
This does not mean that there has been some sort of a change in the fundamentals of monetary policy objectives. Our focus continues to be macroeconomic variables and there is no going back to the detailed redistributive credit policies of the past. The use of micro data in today’s monetary policy making serves a rather different purpose.