In a recent Financial Times comment, Michael Woodford of Columbia University discussed how greater clarity in policy communications would help.9 As I see it, current financial conditions are more restrictive than I favor, because households, businesses, and markets place too much weight on the possibility that Fed policy will turn restrictive in the near to medium term. The FOMC’s announcement in August that it anticipates short-term rates remaining low through mid-2013 was certainly a step in the right direction, because it significantly raised the hurdle for early policy tightening. However, I think our dual mandate responsibilities and the strong impediments of the financial crisis argue for a more aggressive approach. One way to provide more accommodation would be to make a simple conditional statement of policy accommodation relative to our dual mandate responsibilities. The goal would be to enhance economic growth and employment while maintaining disciplined inflation performance. This conditionality could be conveyed by stating that we would hold the federal funds rate at extraordinarily low levels until the unemployment rate falls substantially, say from its current level of 9.1% to 7.5% or even 7%, as long as medium-term inflation stayed below 3%. With regard to the inflation marker, we have already experienced unduly low inflation of 1%; so against an objective of 2 percent, 3 percent inflation would be an equivalent policy loss to what we have already experienced. On the unemployment marker, a decline to 7.5% would be quite helpful.
In this scenario, either much of the past decade of prosperity was an illusion or, alternatively within the space of only a few years, the productive potential of the U.S. collapsed for some unexplained reason. I suppose it is natural to believe that some elements of the story are true. But for me, the evidence for this is minimal, and the implications for productive capacity are exceedingly pessimistic. And even if it is true, the market mechanism should cause wages and prices to adjust in order to reemploy unused resources. For example, there should be some lower real wage that would make it profitable for firms to fund the necessary on-the-job training for workers who need some modest acquisition of skills. According to this pessimistic hypothesis, something is preventing the market’s pricing mechanism from achieving such results within a satisfactory time frame. My own view is more optimistic and, I believe, more consistent with the idea that our best days are ahead. Without a compelling explanation for the hypothesis that the productive capability of the U.S. has been diminished, I think the evidence favors the belief that aggregate demand is simply much too low today. After all, today there are roughly 14 million unemployed Americans. Only a few years ago, there were only about half that many. It is hard to believe that an additional 7 million Americans have suddenly lost the necessary skills to work in today’s economy, and I have not seen any evidence supporting such a dramatic and rapid loss of skills.