ECON 2020 Extra Credit

For February 19 This will be the last post from which short answer extra credit questions for Test 2 will be drawn. There's an interesting tidbit of data out this week. The FOMC makes monetary policy on behalf of the Federal Reserve (the U.S. central bank).  The FOMC walks a fine line, since they make decisions about setting interest rates. On one hand, they want to be open about their decisions. On the other hand, a lot of money is invested to figure out what they're going to do before they do it.  One way they balance these is that they do release the minutes of their 1.5 day meetings, but not until about a month after the meeting. Today we got the minutes from the January meeting covered earlier this semester. Armchair-macroeconomists and politicians will tell you that inflation is down. End of story.  Then the politicians say "Yeah us!" But there's more to it, since inflation tends to be persistent. And it can ignite again, sort of like the embers of a dying f