We carefully monitor a wide range of indicators of longer-term inflation expectations. These measures today are at levels broadly consistent with our 2 percent objective (figure 4). Because measures of inflation expectations are individually noisy, we also focus on common patterns across the measures.
The global commodities boom, which has been stimulated by the emergence of the Chinese and Indian economies on the international scene, has been an important offset to the deflationary effects from their low-priced goods and services.