When you have steady inflows and global central banks hell-bent on stoking credit activity and inflation, money will flow into the most attractive areas.
The role of monetary policy is to smooth out business cycles by promoting steady inflation and healthy labor markets, but modern central bankers have taken an activist turn.
It's a challenge for monetary policy to communicate that our inflation objective is 2 percent.
If we were to underrun our inflation objective over a period of time that we tried to increase interest rates, I think that would be worrisome.
When inflation begins to rise, that's a situation we know how to deal with. When the economy is not doing well, and we're stuck at zero, that's one we don't know so much about - or we know about it that it's bad.
For risk management reasons, we need to make sure we hit our inflation objective at the same time we're at full employment.
At the end of the day, inflation has been below 2% for quite a long time, and to me, symmetry means getting somewhere above 2% inflation at some point in my Fed career.
If you look around the world and see all the different countries struggling to get away from very low inflation rates with economies not nearly as strong as ours, you want to make sure we avoid those circumstances.
I oppose indexing gas tax hikes to inflation.
Production is the only answer to inflation.
