This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Michael Ehrmann and Panagiota Tzamourani (European Central Bank): Memories of high inflation, September 2009. Inflation has been well contained over the last decades in most industrialized countries. This implies, however, that memories of high inflation are likely to fade, because over time larger parts of the population have never experienced high inflation, whereas those who have might forget. This paper tests whether memories of high inflation affect agents’ preferences about the importance attached to price stability, using a large database covering over 52,000 survey responses from 23 countries over the years 1981-2000. It finds that memories of hyperinflation are there to last, whereas those of less drastic inflation experiences tend to erode after around 10 to 15 years. The recent decline in

I don't know whether anyone ever had the temerity to argue that central banking is boring. Of course, one could always argue that central banking and monetary policy are supposed to be boring in the sense that the central bank should be blindly following some version of a Taylor rule and/or a specific nominal target for the inflation rate as well as the growth rate in the monetary base. Kind of like a good referee in soccer; if you don't notice him (or her), we should consider it a job well done.

Ultimately of course life is never that easy. I only need to invoke the M3 measure in the Eurozone to show this. For those of my readers who don't get the wonky joke here, the ECB is formally targeting a growth rate in the M3 somewhere between 3-4%. As far as I know, it has been way above this