The Great Moderation and the subsequent Global Financial Crisis I joined the Faculty at a time when New Keynesian macroeconomics (NKM) and its approaches, immodestly referred to as "the science of monetary policy", had become the official mantra in the central banks of developed countries and had subsequently been translated into a monetary strategy referred to as inflation targeting (or inflation forecast targeting). It was an era characterised by optimistic expectations about longterm economic developments. Macroeconomists spoke of a "Great Moderation" and predicted that we would see decades of low and stable inflation amid brisk economic growth with no significant cyclical fluctuations. With the benefit of hindsight, these expectations were not fulfilled. The low inflation that took hold globally in the 1990s was largely a product of globalisation, not super-smart monetary policy. In the early 1990s, price stability began to gain ground as central banks' primary objective. However, in Ostrava – and the same was true of other Czech universities at the time – we took a more traditional approach and considered monetary stability, or currency stability, to be the main objective of monetary policy. By this we usually meant a more general state of affairs where inflation is low and stable, the banking sector is healthy and not a source of excessive money supply growth, the currency is reasonably strong and external imbalances are not building up. However, the world's macroeconomists longed for a simpler notion of a target that could be expressed in an exact, numerical, way, preferably with a single number.

Particularly in small open economies, where shocks to the exchange rate and other shocks from abroad have a significant impact on inflation, it is quite likely that the generation of inflationary potential may initially translate into asset price growth or, in some cases, current account deficits rather than into overt CPI inflation. The latter may then stay quite low for a long time even when the economy is overheating. As a result, rather than inflation-forecast targeting, central banks may slide towards a response-torecent-inflation-numbers regime. What is the solution to this situation? I offer no simple one. The above dilemmas need to be reflected in our thought processes. In monetary policy decision-making, in addition to model-based forecasts of highly variable CPI inflation, we need to give equal weight to the longer-term fundamental inflationary pressures generated by macroeconomic, monetary and financial developments. I understand the arguments that we have no reliable indicator of these pressures and that few people outside the central bank itself would pay heed to an index of fundamental inflationary pressures. But you can't escape reality. It doesn't pay to put everything on one card. It's better to have a broader set of models and, on top of that, a set of indicators to allow for cross-checking. From fears of low inflation to the current inflation shock For a quarter of a century, central banks in developed countries, along with legions of renowned macroeconomists, focused almost exclusively on how to prevent inflation from getting too low. At certain times, this undoubtedly made sense.