This talk emphasizes the connection between inflation targeting and monetary policy rules. Inflation targeting is not enough. You need to have a policy procedure - a policy rule - to achieve the target. And one cannot design or evaluate a monetary policy rule without a target inflation rate....

We study the possibility of (almost) self-fulfilling waves of pessimism and selfreinforcing liquidity traps in a New Keynesian model with heterogeneous expectations. We explicitly focus on the "anchoring" of expectations that is modeled as the range of deviations from the central bank targets...