Asymmetric Misinformation

Paul Krugman, NYT
May 13, 2014, 7:22 am

A followup to my post about Jaime Caruana at the BIS. One other thing that struck me was his claim that

policymakers respond asymmetrically over successive business and financial cycles, hardly tightening or even easing during booms and easing aggressively and persistently during busts

Is this true? Anyway, is symmetry in policy responses inherently desirable?

The claim that policymakers have an easy-money bias is one of those things usually said with an air of worldly wisdom; of course people don’t want to take away the punchbowl when everyone is having fun. But the reality doesn’t look at all like that. After all, if policy were consistently doing too much to fight slumps and not enough to curb booms, what you would expect is a steady ratcheting up of inflation — which isn’t at all what has happened over the past 35 years. This supposed piece of wisdom is actually a cliche from the 1970s, which hasn’t been remotely true for a generation.

(More here.)