What are those fundamentals? Mr. Greenspan, in his opening remarks to this conference, talked about the importance of the fundamentals, going all the way back to Adam Smith. What's interesting is that things have not changed that much. But we don't have to reach that far in history for guiding principles.
We can look at the four key principles that emerged as part of the OECD consensus during the 1980s. The first principle relates to monetary policy. It basically recognized price stability as the appropriate goal for monetary policy over the medium term.