So even if the central bank is reluctant to provide a time frame for meeting its objective, the structure of the price-level objective provides a means for the bank to commit to increasing its anti-deflationary efforts when its earlier efforts prove unsuccessful.
Three- to five-year earnings forecasts for each of the S&P 500 corporations, compiled from projections of securities analysts by I/B/E/S, averaged almost 12 percent per year between 1985 and 2001. Actual earnings growth over that period averaged about 7 percent. Perhaps the last sixteen years, for which systematic data have been available, are an historical aberration.