The financial crisis and subsequent economic recession led to a rapid increase in the issuance of public debt. But large-scale purchases of bonds by the Federal Reserve, and other major central banks, have significantly reduced the scale and maturity of public debt that would otherwise have been...

This paper discusses the role of forecasts in the control of inflation. Much has been made of variations on the so-called Taylor rule for inflation control. Forward-looking Taylor rules are reconciled with optimal control using a class of rules described as error-correcting Taylor rules.

In this article we propose a policy framework for inflation targeting that contains elements of both optimal and simple rules. We use a simple feedback rule for the interest rate to look after monetary policy in the long run whilst using optimal control in the short run to determine appropriate...