Marcus Nunes on what the late central banker got right and his successor(s) didn’t:

Tell [Greenspan] he ran a flexible nominal-GDP level target and he’d have reached for some cryptic deflection about money-supply mechanics. He didn’t have the theory, didn’t want it, and in 1992 treated the nominal-GDP goal as something the Committee was doing almost despite itself. The market monetarists who later gave the policy its name were arguing for on purpose what he did by ear. . . .

The Fed has run nominal stability before. It did not require a model or a manifesto. It required a willingness to keep total nominal income on its path and to make up the ground when it slipped — which a man who distrusted theory managed for nineteen years, and which the theorist who succeeded him, for all his erudition, did not.