September 20, 2012
The Washington Post ran a piece that highlighted the concerns of Richard Fisher, the President of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, that the Federal Reserve Board’s latest round of quantitative easing may lead to higher inflation. Fisher notes that financial markets indicate that investors are now anticipating higher rates of inflation than was the case before the Fed’s latest move.
It would have been worth noting that this is arguably the intention of the policy. This certainly is the goal of Paul Krugman and others who had advocated more aggressive action from the Fed. (Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke had advocated that Japan’s central bank deliberately target a higher inflation rate when he was still a professor at Princeton.)
Clearly Fisher views a higher rate of inflation as being a bad thing, but it would have been worth noting that more rapid inflation is considered to be desirable by many advocates of QE3.
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