The ultimate person of the hour would be the Fed official who advocates NGDPLT. But, for today, I’ll bestow a more generalized version of the honor upon John Williams, President of the San Francisco Fed, for his latest remarks about the future monetary tools as reported by Reuters:

The Federal Reserve and other global central banks need to consider new stimulus tools to deal with what may be permanently lower interest rates worldwide, a top Fed official said on Saturday.

With the so-called natural interest rate in the United States now near zero, and equilibrium rates in other countries around the world also lower than in the past, central banks have less room to stimulate their economies in the face of shocks, San Francisco Fed President John Williams said at a conference at University of California Berkeley’s Clausen Center.

Central banks should consider possibly keeping larger balance sheets, or using negative interest rates, to provide stimulus when needed, Williams said.

This is a positive sign of educational progress in a complex and often incoherent public debate about interest rates and the meaning thereof.

Even though I truly wish we could cut through the complexity by changing the focus of monetary discussions away from interest rates, any movement toward rationality within that context by any member of the Fed is worthy of recognition. I therefore deem that Williams is the almost the man of the hour.

However, it is a little sad that Reuters provided this background information with the quotes from Williams:

The natural interest rate is the rate at which an economy can maintain full employment and stable inflation; central banks traditionally lower rates to stimulate their economies, but have less room to do so when the natural rate is low.

This explanation is the epitome of a missed opportunity to enhance public debate with enlightenment.

PS: Here is an interesting article fact-checking statements made by Ann Corcoran of refugee watch who suggests in a short video that the UN is working with an Islamic supremacy group to select migrants for the Hijra, the religious obligation to migrate and proselytize to gain domination, among other unoriginal forms of fear mongering.

These people are from war-torn countries or counties with totalitarian regimes. The are traumatized and homeless with many having lost everything to violence or threat of violence that nobody here in the states has any experience with or can fathom. But I think Ms. Corcoran says everything about what her real complaint about refugee settlement is during the first 30 seconds of the video. They are being brought to her area, a rural area where there aren’t much in the way of jobs (she doesn’t want them there). The rest of it is just plain, unadulterated demagoguery.