Knowing and Making

Paul Krugman (quoting Jan Hatzius) uncovers another scary article from another Fed president: Third, the statement seems to be at odds with a recent article by President Bullard of St. Louis suggesting that a continuation of the Fed’s current stance on short-term interest rates could result in deflation (see “Seven Faces of ‘The Peril’”, July 28, 2010). The first sentence of the abstract reads: “In this paper I discuss the possibility that the U.S. economy may become enmeshed in a Japanese-style, deflationary outcome within the next several years.” The original report from Bullard can be found here . Guess who is thanked in the footer of page 1? Narayana Kocherlakota (as well as David Andolfatto, regular blog commentator on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative and TheMoneyIllusion ). So what's going on? The paper is making the same argument for which Kocherlakota has been pilloried over the last two weeks. But the paradoxes in that paper are layered with yet more contradictions: H...

Nick Rowe has come up recently with a couple of nice analogies for monetary policy: the pole balancer and the farmboy . And for those of you not reading the other economics blogs, there's a bit of an uproar right now about Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Minnesota Federal Reserve, and his claim that long-term  low  interest rates will lead to deflation , when surely every schoolboy knows low rates lead to inflation . I've been trying to work out why Kocherlakota's argument is so intuitively wrong and yet theoretically consistent with standard monetary models. I think I've got it, with a bit of inspiration from Nick, Karl Smith , Andy Harless and Scott Sumner . So here's my contribution to the monetary analogy industry: You're driving a truck, one of those big articulated lorries with a trailer full of goods and services. There are three main variables which determine the truck's acceleration: how much you push the gas pedal (let's call...