Allan Meltzer and the Search for a Nominal Anchor: a speech at the \"Meltzer's Contributions to Monetary Economics and Public Policy, Philadelphia, Pa

In a speech in Philadelphia, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard paid tribute to the late Allan Meltzer, a monetary economist, economic historian and ?a great friend of the St. Louis Fed.? Bullard cited Meltzer?s research on the run-up to the Great Inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s and contrasted that period with the inflation targeting era of the past two decades, when inflation was brought under control. ?Inflation targeting has worked well because it deals more directly with the coordination of macroeconomic expectations than other approaches. By committing to an inflation target, inflation has generally been kept lower and less variable, and inflation expectations have also been less variable,? Bullard said. ?This has been a major achievement of U.S. monetary policy, and one to which Allan Meltzer made an outsized contribution.?