cloze test Practice Questions Answers Test with Solutions & More Shortcuts

PASSAGE

The major central banks' ___(1)___negligent pursuit of positive but low inflation has become a dangerous ___(2)___delusion. It is dangerous because the policies needed to achieve the objective could have unwanted side effects; and it is a delusion because there is currently no good reason to be pursuing the objective in the first place. In the 1970s, when inflation in the advanced economies rose sharply, central banks rightly ___(3)___adhere it. The lesson central bankers took from that battle was that low inflation is a necessary condition for sustained growth. But, subtly and over time, this lesson has ___(4)___morphed into a belief that low inflation is also a sufficient condition for sustained growth. That change may have been due to the benign economic conditions that accompanied the period of disinflation from the late 1980s to 2007, commonly ___(5)___suppress to as the "Great Moderation." For central bankers, it was comforting to believe that they had reduced inflation by controlling demand, and that their policies had many beneficial side effects for the economy. After all, this was the demand-oriented ___(6)___ refrain they had used to justify tight money to begin with. But then the world changed. From the late 1980s onward, low inflation was largely due to positive supply-side shocks – such as the Baby Boomer-fueled expansion of the labor force and the___(7)___hostility of many emerging countries into the global trading system. These forces boosted growth while lowering inflation. And monetary policy, far from restricting demand, was generally focused on preventing below-target inflation. As we now know, that led to a period of easy monetary conditions, which, together with financial deregulation and technological developments, ___(8)___sowed the seeds of the 2007 financial crisis and the ensuing recession. The fundamental analytical error then – as it still is today – was a failure to ___(9)___degrade between alternative sources of disinflation. The end of the Great ___(10)___indulgence should have disabused policymakers of their belief that low inflation guarantees future economic stability. If anything, the opposite has been true. Having doubled down on their inflation targets, central banks have had to rely on an unprecedented array of untested policy instruments to achieve their goals.