The writer is president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, and an adviser to Allianz and GramercyIt would not surprise me if future economic history books were to look back at the last week in central banking as marking a move away from strict inflation targeting by the world’s most influential central banks.
While far from being definite or risk-free, it is a shift that would be consistent with superior economic outcomes and stands a reasonable chance of working. And it is a policy approach that is to likely to be superior to others as central banks tackle an operating environment that is particularly fluid economically and politically at domestic and global levels.
It is not often that you see a reputable central bank revise up its inflation and growth projections and yet strengthen a dovish tilt to its policy stance. Yet that is what happened in Washington last week when the Federal Reserve raised those projections up a notch and yet delivered two consequential signals — a willingness to tolerate higher inflation for longer and an openness to slow the ongoing reduction in its balance sheet.