Under the leadership of Volcker and, subsequently, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Open Market Committee took the actions necessary to bring the nation to price stability. In my view, the conquest of inflation has been a major source of the more-rapid economic growth and the greater stability of output and employment that the United States has enjoyed since the mid-1980s (Bernanke, 2004).
Impressive as the Fed's inflation-fighting accomplishments may be, however, inflation developments to our south, in Latin America, may prove to be more impressive yet. For much of the latter half of the twentieth century, Latin America experienced recurrent bouts of high inflation together with erratic growth and periods of economic and financial crisis.