Changing central bank pressures and inflation

Globalization, market liberalization, and other factors that helped reduce inflation in the four decades before the COVID-19 pandemic may be reversing, complicating central banks' efforts to tame the post-pandemic inflation surge, suggests a paper to be discussed at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) conference on March 29. "We argue that several global economic trends will, more likely than not, increase pressures on central banks to inflate," write the authors--Pierre Yared and Hassan Afrouzi of Columbia University, Marina Halac of Yale University, and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University.