The Federal Reserve is probably not ready to take the aggressive plunge into Nominal GDP Targeting, but it likely will.
Such a policy, which received wider attention during Ben Bernanke's Congressional questioning last year and was also highlighted this year in a paper delivered at the Jackson Hole conference (Woodford, opens to PDF [26]), has not caught any visible traction with Washington policy makers possibly because it’s seen as either too radical, or simply too new.
However, after four years of broad reflationary policy (and another year to come) failing to meaningfully spur U.S. employment growth, the Fed may be willing to try such measures by late next year, 2013.
Indeed, given the Fed’s recent announcement of open-ended quantitative easing (QE), one can already anticipate the incremental move towards Nominal Gross Domestic Product (NGDP) Targeting, which has as its central belief that an aggressive and open-ended promise to pursue growth at the expense of inflation is the booster required to push a structurally broken economy back to normal trend. Moreover, in contrast to Bernanke’s swift rejection last year of NGDP on a conceptual basis, Bernanke discussed the idea in friendlier terms during his post-Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) news conference.
What’s 'exciting' about the emergence of NGDP Targeting into mainstream economic thinking is that, once implemented, it will provide a real-world test of reflationary policy’s final effort to combat the forces that have led to the end of strong, economic growth. The appearance of the Woodford paper (link above) further highlights the reality that endless amounts of cheap capital will be provided to restart economies, now that we are in energy transition, with the world having lost its cheap oil. The battle between credit and natural resources will be renewed.
What will be the effect on global natural resource extraction in an era of NGDP Targeting?
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