The United States President: Donald Trump, has appointed Jerome Powell as the next head of the United States Federal Reserve. Born on February 4, 1953, Jerome Powell has served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors since 2012 before he was being appointed as the next Chairman of the Fed on November 2, 2017.
In accordance to this, U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Jerome Powell as the next head of the Federal Reserve was taken by analysts as a choice that is reassuring to the markets. In addition, analysts are also saying that President Donald Trump’s choice is set to pursue its gentle and careful approach that is very supportive of the United States Economy and is possible to be welcomed by policy makers elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Lars Svensson of the Stockholm School of Economics supports with the proposal that the Federal Reserve should have a systematic method of setting interest rates.
However, along with other economists, Svensson claims that it is also important for the Federal Reserve to use judgement and take advantage of all the information that is available, instead of going by the Taylor rule, a rule named after John Taylor which is an interest rate model, invented and perfected in 1992 and defined in his 1993 study: Discretion vs. Policy Rules in Practice.
In October, Svensson presented a paper promoting an idea of what he calls: Forecast targeting, which was a simple suggestion but not easy to execute. Svensson’s presentation suggests the Federal Reserve to agree on a future path for the federal funds rate making its forecasts for inflation and unemployment look good. This means that inflation is at or near the Federal Reserve’s objective of 2% and that there is full employment.
In addition, Svensson added that if the Federal Reserve took his suggestion and gets it wrong on its first try, the Fed should try again, that is if the Fed’s interest rate-path is predicted to leave inflation and unemployment at undesirable levels.
Svensson claims that the Fed should map out other interest-rate trajectories until it the Fed comes up with one in which forecasted inflation and unemployment are where the Federal Reserve anticipated. If that happens, the Fed should publish that forecast in order for the world to see and tweak it as new information’s comes in.