Namely, monetary policy is conducted flexibly. Moreover, the global financial crisis has woken central banks to the fact that adhering to inflation targets was unable to avoid the financial crisis triggered by the Lehman shock. Thus, there is an increasingly shared view among central banks that attending to financial imbalances is an important element in conducting monetary policy.
For these reasons, flexibility in monetary policy is stressed under the current flexible inflation-targeting framework, in which a number of central banks permit deviation of actual inflation from inflation targets. Sometimes, such deviations can last quite a long time.