Not monetary policy, but in terms of public transport, life expectancy, restaurants, R&D (they’ve just invented a machine that can read your dreams) there’s a lot they can teach us. And in terms of how to avoid mass immiseration post a financial crisis there’s a lot they could teach the Spanish.

Among economists I believe that “inflation targeting” is dead in one sense – those who had pushed for strict inflation targeting have seen that this may not be quite appropriate!

However, the flexible inflation target that most mainstream economists were fans of seems to be kicking better than ever. The main area that has sprung up in debate is, as you say, level vs rate targeting for the “flexible price level” (in some sense read this as NGDP.

I was lucky to have recently come out of university when all this happened, so these movements didn’t seem all that suprising. Good old Victoria University, preparing me for what I needed to know 😉

Hopefully they stick at it so we can make a good comparison between the level and rate of inflation.

“We could learn a lot from the Japanese.”

They are implementing Aus-NZ style monetary policy, I’m not sure we have anything to learn from this 😉

Good on Kuroda … they may be kicking themselves they didn’t try this earlier. Exit from their fiscal situation will be a balancing act, but I think they will find their primary fiscal balance improving rapidly and this enable them to cover the increase in debt servicing costs. Inflating away a bit of the older debt won’t hurt either.

The inflation target is the inherent constraint on what happens with monetary policy – so it determines the BOJ’s choice of the level of quantitative easing.

For me, a credible inflation target is the underpinning of appropriate management with a fiat currency – so seeing them do that is good. We may question their credibility – but inflation expectations markets give us the clearest read on that. As a result, next week I should have a peak at those to see whether the responses line up!

Confused.