Scott Sumner on the Fed Transcripts

He writes,

Note that on the very day of the September 16 meeting, the meeting at which the Fed refused to cut rates due to fear of “high inflation,” the TIPS spreads were showing only 1.23% inflation over the next 5 years, well below target. The Fed should have ignored its own worries about inflation, and instead relied on the wisdom of the crowds. The crowd is not always right, but they are more reliable than the Fed, especially when conditions are changing rapidly. Market participants saw the bottom dropping out of the economy using millions of pieces of highly dispersed information, while the clumsy Fed waited for macro data that comes in with long lags.

The idea of relying on market forecasts is what puts the “market” in market monetarism. An interesting question is how much the Fed would have had to do to cause both actual and expected inflation (or nominal GDP) to change. My inclination is to believe that a lot more M would have merely resulted in a lot less V.