Monetary Policy and Economic Activity: Benefits and Costs of Monetarism
回顾了美联储1979-1982年货币主义实验，分析了其抑制通胀的收益与导致经济停滞和失业上升的成本，并评估了未来回归货币主义的可能经济后果。
On October 6, 1979, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) adopted an essentially monetarist operating approach to monetary policy. The key element was the decision to put more emphasis on influencing bank reserves and the monetary aggregates (which were already being targeted) and less on interest rates. Three years later, on October 5, 1982, the monetarist approach was laid aside-at least temporarily. During that three-year experiment with monetarism, the Federal Reserve's policy achieved a substantial benefit, but it also imposed considerable costs: it helped to check inflation while causing a long period of economic stagnation and a sharp rise in unemployment. In this lecture, the evolution of monetarism in the Federal Reserve is traced briefly. It is shown that the resort to closer monetary targeting reflected a pragmatic move by the Federal Reserve to moderate actual inflation and to erase deeply embedded inflationary expectations. The impact of monetarism on the economy as a whole and on several of its major sectors is evaluated. The effects are visible in the financial markets (particularly on nominal and real interest rates) and on the real economy (especially on housing, capital formation, and unemployment). The benefits of moderating inflation (and the dampening of inflation expectations) are shown. Finally, since the Federal Reserve may well return to a monetarist approach in the coming year, an effort is made to assess the economic consequences of such a move. 1. Monetarism in the Federal Reserve: Triumph and Retreat