Inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, seems to have settled at an annual rate of about 2 percent. Is that rate too low? In this article, William Poole, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, states his belief that the Federal Reserve's target should be zero...

“Expectations” is the Twenty-Second Henry Thornton Lecture, given by the author at the Department of Banking and Finance, City University Business School, London, England, on November 28, 2000.

An earlier version of this article was delivered as a speech to the Money Marketeers of New York University, New York, New York, May 18, 2011.

Despite the fact that the U.S. economy has been performing very well recently, monetary policymakers have been the targets of some criticism. In the speech reprinted here, which was delivered to a group of bankers in June 1997, St. Louis Federal Reserve President Thomas C. Melzer responds to the...

The U.S. economy performed well across the board in 1997, with low unemployment, robust economic growth, and the lowest sustained inflation in decades. Nevertheless, the current framework for monetary policymaking does not ensure that inflation is down for the count, says Federal Reserve Bank of...

In light of recent research findings, Michael J. Dueker and Andreas M. Fischer review the 1996 policy posture of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the monetary policymaking body of the Federal Reserve System. They find several areas in which the FOMC's policy positions were consistent...

In 1913, Congress purposefully created the Federal Reserve as an independent central bank, which created a fundamental tension: how to ensure the Fed remains accountable to the electorate without losing its independence. Over the years, there have been changes in the Fed’s structure to improve...

The Federal Reserve is not formally inflation targeting. Nevertheless, it is commonly believed to be an implicit inflation targeter. The evolution to inflation targeting occurred because central banks, most importantly the Federal Reserve, demonstrated that monetary policy could control...