Yellen’s “suffering economy” vs Feldstein’s concern about future inflation

Yellen:

Underscored how the jobs lost in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis have yet to come back, and have left millions suffering in the aftermath.

Feldstein:

Janet Yellen, like Ben Bernanke before her, believes that the Federal Reserve should communicate the reasons for its current policies and the strategy of its future policy actions. And so we have been told the basic plans are for gradually reducing the volume of large-scale asset purchases, and for keeping short-term interest rates low—”for some time,” as she said in her speech on Monday—in order to stimulate employment and raise the inflation rate toward 2%.

But the Fed’s leaders should also be telling the public and financial markets what they think about the risk that future inflation could rise substantially above the Fed’s 2% target—and what the Fed would do to prevent such inflation or reverse it if that occurs.

Experience shows that inflation can rise very rapidly. The current consumer-price-index inflation rate of 1.1% is similar to the 1.2% average inflation rate in the first half of the 1960s. Inflation then rose quickly to 5.5% at the end of that decade and to 9% five years later. That surge was not due to oil prices, which remained under $3 per barrel until 1973.

Yes, it can.

Read the whole article here.