The Great Deception : The ‘Science’ of Monetary Policy and the Great Moderation Revisited

Conventional wisdom suggests that the Great Moderation was caused by either good policy, good luck (favourable shocks), more efficient private sector behaviour (such as better inventory management), or more effective financial innovations. We show that it may, instead, have originated from the complementarity of an erroneous reading of the economy by central bankers and evolutionarily time-varying heterogeneity in inflation expectations formation within the private sector. One general finding of our analysis is that seemingly inadequate stabilization policies may, in fact, work. We comment on the broader ramifications for stabilization policy of this finding