What Is the Monetary Standard? The Fed Should Tell Us

The Federal Reserve System (Fed) is a regular feature in the media. When the Fed communicates with the public, its focus is on forward guidance related to monetary policy—specifically, for achieving low unemployment and low inflation. Fed participants on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) convey what they see as the likely path of policy, including changes in the federal funds rate, a standard monetary policy tool. Because financial markets find this information useful, news stories thoroughly cover Fed communication. However, such communication fails to explain the structure of the economy that disciplines how the FOMC achieves its objectives for employment and inflation. The FOMC necessarily conducts monetary policy based on assumptions about this structure. What is now implicit should be made explicit. Such explicitness by the FOMC is necessary for the public to understand the monetary standard that it has created. That is, the Fed needs to explain the framework it assumes to then explain how its actions translate into achievement of its objectives. Such transparency will be challenging. The standard Fed narrative implicitly assumes that a free-market economy and financial markets are inherently unstable. Economic instability originates in the private sector, and an independent Fed is required to mitigate this instability. Again, implicitly, the assumption is that the Fed understands the structure of the economy so that it knows the origin of instability and how its actions will offset that instability. Despite the Fed narrative, there is a need for a debate over the optimal monetary standard. In the 1960s, the monetarist-Keynesian debate raised the key issues relevant to the design of the optimal monetary standard. Is inflation a monetary or a nonmonetary phenomenon? What accounts for the simultaneous occurrence of monetary instability and real instability. Does the direction of causation go from monetary to real instability or vice versa? The intent of this article is to revive the earlier debate. To do so, it will be necessary to re-exposit monetarism in a way relevant to current central bank practice. To do so, I re-exposit monetarism in a way that is relevant to current central bank practice, using the term "Wicksellian monetarism" as the descriptive label. Such a debate is especially urgent at present given the FOMC's current policy of disinflation. The FOMC needs to articulate a monetary policy in terms of a long-term strategy (rule) that will restore price stability and then maintain that stability. How does current policy ensure that a declining rate of inflation will stop at 2 percent and then remain there? That is, for the long run, the policy needs to provide a stable nominal anchor. Such a policy should allow the FOMC to lower the federal funds rate to prevent a serious recession while maintaining credibility for a long-run policy to restore price stability.