Inflation,
“Looking ahead, we may face a period of structurally higher inflation compared to the past two decades. The deflationary impact of localization is dissipating, and there will be inflationary pressures from global trade, climate transition, demographics and politics,” said Claudio Borio, head of the monetary and economic department at the Bank for International Settlements, an umbrella group for central banks.
Yet Mr. Borio said he did not favor increasing central banks’ inflation targets, an opinion that has become widespread among top policy makers — from hawk to dove — despite similarly broad concerns that the recent outbreak of inflation may be even more persistent than expected and the return to 2% all the more difficult to engineer.
At least at this point, the greater worry among central bankers is lost credibility should they not toe the line they drew for themselves.
“Is 2% sort of a magical number?” US Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard said at a forum earlier this month. “Probably not. But it’s our number, and we are very committed to bringing inflation back to 2% ... Achieving that target is just core to our overall monetary policy,” Ms. Brainard said, a sentiment echoed in central bank headquarters from Frankfurt to London to Tokyo.
“Let me be quite clear, there are no ifs or buts in our commitment to the 2% inflation target,” Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said last year. “That’s our job, and that’s what we will do.”
NOT THE ‘MOST SCIENTIFIC PROCESS’
The Fed is expected at its two-day policy meeting this week, as it has each year since 2012, to recommit to 2% inflation as the rate “most consistent over the longer run with the Federal Reserve’s statutory mandate” from the US Congress to promote “stable prices” alongside maximum employment.
Though the US central bank has made major changes along the way to its “Statement on Long-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy,” it has never put the inflation target itself up for grabs on the grounds that a promise is a promise, and only renegotiated at great risk.
Yet the 2% number, as Ms. Brainard suggested, has no particular import in itself. Though now a global norm, it was less a product of deep analysis or statistical estimation than a best guess about an inflation rate that would capture the benefits central banks see in setting some sort of target, while remaining low enough that the public, in effect, wouldn’t notice.
Coming out of the high inflation environment of the 1970s and 1980s, policy makers recognized the need to cement their own inflation-fighting credibility, and saw commitment to an announced inflation target as an easy-to-communicate way to both steer public expectations and, assuming they stuck with it, build trust.