Thankfully, within the last decade there have been signs of intelligent life in the economics profession, with the emergence of the online journal Real World Economics, the burgeoning of research on happiness, and the hypothesis that the economy evolves according to universal laws of evolution – laws which are also seen in operation in biology.
But in a context of increasing downside risks to the inflation outlook, especially driven by continued declines in oil prices and a large output gap, and downside risks to the global economy and a still fragile domestic recovery, the Governing Council decided that the calibration of those measures needed to be adjusted.