From her Jackson Hole speech US Fed Chair Janet Yellen used the Taylor Rule to suggest that the Fed Funds rate today should already be around 1.33% – currently at 0.50%. She also used the Taylor rule to explain how US interest rates should have been negative after the Global Financial Crisis. This same rule suggests that the rate should already have been 1.25% in June – see Chart below.
Source: National Australia Bank: Australian Markets Weekly – 5th September
What is the The Taylor Rule?
This is a specific policy rule for fixing interest rates proposed by the Stanford University economist John Taylor. Taylor argued that when:
Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) = Potential Gross Domestic Product and
Inflation = its target rate of 2%, then the Federal Funds Rate (FFR) should be 4% (that is a 2% real interest rate).
If the real GDP rises 1% above potential GDP, then the FFR should be raised by 0.5%.
If inflation rises 1% above its target rate of 2%, then the FFR should be raised by 0.5%.
This rule has been suggested as one that could be adopted by other central banks – ECB, Bank of England, etc for setting official cash rates. However, the rule does embody an arbitrary 2% inflation target rather than, say 3% or 4%, and it may need to be amended to embody alternative inflation targets at different times or by different central banks. The advantages of having such as explicit interest rate rule is that its very transparency can create better conditions for business decisions and can help shape business people’s and consumers’ expectations. Central banks prefer to maintain an air of intelligent discretion over the conduct of their policies than to follow rules, but to some extent they do unwittingly follow a Taylor rule. This makes the rule a useful benchmark against which actual policies can be judged.
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