16 Of course, it is not entirely clear how to move underlying trend inflation smoothly to our target on a sustained basis in the presence of a very flat Phillips curve.
One possibility we might refer to as “opportunistic reflation” would be to take advantage of a modest increase in actual inflation to demonstrate to the public our commitment to our inflation goal on a symmetric basis. 17 For example, suppose that an unexpected increase in core import price inflation drove overall inflation modestly above 2 percent for a couple of years.