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In this special Grumpy Economist Weekly Rant, John Cochrane highlights Finishing the Inflation Job and New Challenges for Monetary Policy, a new Hoover Institution Press volume drawn from Hoover’s annual monetary policy conference. The volume brings together leading voices from central banking, financial regulation, and economic policy, including Kevin Warsh, Chris Waller, Loretta Mester, Charles Plosser, Augustine Carstens, Isabel Schnabel, and others.
Cochrane previews the volume’s major themes, the unfinished fight against inflation, digital assets, private credit, international risks, fiscal pressures, and the increasingly difficult relationship between monetary policy and fiscal policy in a government facing rising debt burdens. With inflation still elevated and new risks emerging across the financial system, the central message is clear: finishing the inflation job will require confronting the next generation of monetary policy challenges.
To learn more or order the book, visit the Hoover Institution Press page:
Finishing the Inflation Job and New Challenges for Monetary Policy
Transcript
Hi, I’m John Cochrane, senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution, and welcome to my Grumpy Economist Weekly Rant.
This week, I’m going to be selling a book—or at least advertising a book—Finishing the Inflation Job and New Challenges for Monetary Policy, just released from the Hoover Institution Press.
The book is a compilation of essays resulting from a conference we ran last May. We run a monetary policy conference every May here at Hoover, and it has become more and more successful and more and more attended.
Though it was a conference from a year ago, as I look back on it, this one is still vital and relevant to the issues that we’re facing right now.
The first panel was an extension of some of the talks in praise of John Taylor’s contributions, but from some very weighty participants: Augustine Carstens of the BIS and formerly Bank of Mexico; Chris Waller, member of the Federal Open Market Committee; Loretta Mester, also of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland; Charles Plosser, vice president and a stalwart member of the John Taylor group of monetary policy critics; and Kevin Warsh, who gave a wonderful speech and set of remarks.
If you want to know what Kevin’s thinking, this is a good place to look.
It went on to think about digital assets, risks, an interesting talk about private credit—still in the news—from the presenter Torsten Sløk, international risks, fiscal risks, what goes on between monetary policy and fiscal policy in an increasingly bankrupt government, and the policy panel featuring Isabel Schnabel from the European Central Bank and several members of our own Federal Reserve.
All very important messages, especially as inflation continues to be elevated.
Finishing the Inflation Job, we said a year ago. We still need to finish that job. Risks ahead, we looked at a year ago. Many of those risks still face us.
I hope you find interesting things in the volume.
Thanks for listening, and don’t forget to click to subscribe.
John H. Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. An economist specializing in financial economics and macroeconomics, he is the author of The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level. He also authors a popular Substack called The Grumpy Economist.