In any action -- including leaving policy unchanged -- we seek to assure ourselves that the expected benefits are large enough to risk the cost of a mistake. In closing, I would like to note that the current economic expansion is now entering its seventh year. That makes it already a long upswing by historical standards.
Macro-economic performance in the 1950s and 1960s It is not necessary to spend much time demonstrating how successful this period was in terms of macro-economic performance because no-one disputes it. Table 1 shows that the real growth rate for the world economy was more than twice as high in the 1950-1973 period than in the previous 80 years.