In recent years, members of Congress and academia have repeatedly urged the U.S. Treasury to issue some portion of its debt in the form of inflation indexed bonds. With an indexed bond, the interest and maturity value are adjusted by the rate of inflation over the life of the bond. Because the cash flow of an indexed bond is adjusted for inflation, the bond’s real value does not vary with infla...

The longtime perplexing purchasing power parity (PPP) puzzle has been recently resolved empirically by using the pure price inflation rates extracted and estimated by a pioneering financial-asset pricing approach. Applying the same extracted inflation rates, we estimate a vector error-correction (VEC) model of prices and the Japanese yen per U.S. dollar exchange rate, and find strong evidence s...

I report some personal views and reflections on transparency experiences and transparency challenges following my first year and a half as Deputy Governor at Sveriges Riksbank regarding (1) flexible inflation targeting, (2) the role of transparency in inflation targeting and committee decisions on instrument-rate paths, (3) the management of interest-rate expectations, and (4) the publishing of...

Inflation depends generically on current and expected monetary and fiscal policies. There are three ways to carry $1 today into the future: money, bonds, and real assets. That dollar’s purchasing power varies inversely with the price level. The real return on money depends on the flow of transactions services it supports and the expected inflation rate; the analogous return on bonds is the nomi...

In this paper the long-run trend in CPI inflation (core inflation) for the US over the 1960– 2000 period is estimated using a common trends model. In this framework, core inflation is interpreted and constructed as the long-run forecast of inflation conditional on the information contained in nominal money growth, output fluctuations and movements in the oil price. Unlike other commonly used me...

The representatives at this conference from inflation targeting central banks—including Brazil, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, New Zealand, Korea, Thailand, and the United Kingdom—have provided us with a useful overview of how inflation targeting works in practice. These experiences will be very important as other countries, including Indonesia, consider inflation targeting. We have also had so...

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