The paper describes key aspects of actual Federal Reserve interest rate targeting procedures and addresses a number of issues in light of these stylized facts. It reviews the connection between rate smoothing and price level trend-stationarity. It critiques interest rate targeting as inflation...

Institutional knowledge of Federal Reserve policy procedures, simple economic theory, and the inflation scare concept explain interest rate policy as practiced by the Fed since 1979. The focus is the primary policy problem during the period: the acquisition and maintenance of credibility for the...