Over time, as actual inflation tends toward the year-three forecasts, inflation expectations may well become even more firmly anchored than they are today. In another change, the Committee included total consumer inflation in its forecasts along with the core measure it had been using. We have always recognized that "price stability" was not intended to apply to a subset of prices that people paid.
However, we have also found that excluding volatile food and energy prices generally gives a better sense of underlying inflation pressures that are likely to persist and dominate total inflation over time. Hence, core inflation has been the most useful guide to the factors affecting policy when our forecast horizon was relatively short.