The primary objective of monetary policy is to keep inflation and unemployment low and stable. To be effective, central bankers must address shocks to inflation and unemployment, while ensuring that what they say and do is not a source of volatility. One way to make a commitment to stability credible is for policymakers to broadcast their likely responses to shocks—their reaction function. Such transparency escalates the cost of reneging, helping to anchor expectations about the future that influence current behavior (see our primer on time consistency). And, because they can anticipate how policy will respond to changes in economic and financial conditions, it improves everyone’s economic and financial decisions.

With such a stability-oriented policy strategy, the policy path will depend on what happens in a changing world. Only under specific circumstances―such as when the short-term interest rate is at or near its effective lower bound―will policymakers be inclined to commit to a specific future policy path.

Recently, we wrote about the remarkable evolution of Federal Reserve monetary policy communication over the past quarter century. Today, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) publishes statements, minutes, and quarterly forecasts for growth, inflation, unemployment, and interest rates. In this post we take up a narrow question: What can we learn from the information published in the FOMC’s quarterly Summary of Economic Projections (SEP)?

Our answer is: quite a bit. The data allow us to estimate not only an FOMC reaction function, but also a short-run projection of the equilibrium real rate of interest (r*)―one that is consistent with projected economic conditions over a two- to three-year horizon—in addition to the long-run r* that is implicit in each SEP. While there is almost surely room to improve on the SEP, we conclude, as a friend and expert Fed watcher once suggested, “Don’t ditch the dots” ….