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Modern Macroeconomics: Theory, Policy, and Events

Macroeconomics today is in a peculiar state. Internally, the profession seems to have lost interest. Macroeconomics is neglected as a research topic. Outside of handy data to which to apply the latest statistical technique, graduate students seem to frown upon it as a dissertation topic. No longer are the heady debates, claims, and counter-claims of the theoretical battles between the post-war Keynesians versus the New Classicals of the 1970s and 1980s making headlines in the journals. Yet simultaneously, externally, out in the real economy, something of a revolution (to use a phrase popular in macro-talk) does seems to be taking place in macroeconomic performance, and possibly also in policy. This is especially so in the case of the United States economy. U.S. output growth has exceeded all consensus forecasts for the last three years (final figures for 1998 and 1999 came in at 4.3 percent and 4.2 percent). The duration of the expansion has pushed into record territory. Unemployment has been falling for years and has now stood below 5 percent since 1996. And, most macroeconomically amazing of all, these good times have been accompanied by falling rates of inflation (below 3 percent for all but two quarters since 1995, below 2 percent since 1997:4). On the policy side, meanwhile, there is a degree of unreality. Fiscal policy, long ignored in the shadow of deficit politics, has seemingly dropped from the U.S. policy debate (although not so in Japan). Monetary policy in the era of Greenspan is widely given credit for engineering the U.S. miracle. But if you look a bit closer, both Greenspan and his cheering section seem a bit puzzled, even nervous about all the good fortune. M2 growth has fluctuated widely in the nineties, with little apparent correlation with inflation. Moreover, as inflation has declined, M2 money supply growth has been consistently above the upper bound of its target range for most of the period since 1995. Consequently, both publicly and privately the Fed has abandoned money as an intermediate