Perhaps because the world was fixated elsewhere, a lesser known, hugely unappreciated piece of the 2008 global panic was the gross misbehavior of this presumed core competency. It didn’t get any coverage, but this was a symptom of the primary monetary problem not just of the panic but everything that has followed. Moneyless monetary policy performed just as you would have expected during the first worldwide monetary panic in four generations.
As I’ve written consistently, federal funds do not matter. There’s nobody there. The only reason the Federal Reserve continues to rely on the rate is that monetary policy is moneyless. The modern central bank regime is one exclusively of expectations, therefore the means for conveying those policy expectations becomes all-important.
