The Wide and Foggy Road

Notes on the Week Ahead

Every three months, the 19 members of the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee, of FOMC for short, aided, no doubt, by an army of econometric minions, work up new forecasts for key economic variables and their assessment of appropriate monetary policy. In recent days, as they have huddled in their offices engaged on this task, they’ve had much to be thankful for. The economic roller coaster triggered by the pandemic and the policy response, which manifested itself in wild swings in output, unemployment and inflation, has subsided. Moreover, the very narrow road by which they thought inflation could be subdued without triggering a recession, turned out to be not so narrow after all. The U.S. economy has maintained solid economic growth and a very tight labor market even as inflation has fallen towards their 2% objective.