The Evolution of Technological Disruption

Tom Barkin

Speech from Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

Abstract: The economy has seen a number of disinflationary innovations in recent years. These innovations put “the wind at our back” when it came to containing inflation. But we've been through quite a storm over the last two years, and it is appropriate to ask whether anything has changed and if the wind has shifted in a more inflationary direction. We’ve seen vulnerabilities associated with a globally complex supply chain, investments in renewable energy, and changing demographics that may shift labor from being abundant to being scarce, all of which could result in rising cost pressures. It’s possible that we could return to pre-pandemic wind conditions, but what if we are in a new era – one in which we face inflationary headwinds? Our goal, 2 percent target inflation, wouldn’t change, nor would our longer-run ability to meet that goal, but the appropriate path to achieve it could.

Keywords: inflation; production and investment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-10-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.richmondfed.org/press_room/speeches/th ... rkin_speech_20221003 Speech (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:r00034:101262

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Speech from Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Matt Myers ().