Economic research as far back as the early 1980s showed that simple rules-based monetary policy would result in good economic performance in a globalized world economy. 2 According to this research, if each central bank in the world followed a steady monetary policy rule that was optimal for its own country's price and output stability, it would also contribute to a framework of stability for the other countries. In fact, quantitative research showed that there would be little additional gain from the central banks' jointly optimizing their policies. This finding was, and still is, the implication of empirically estimated multi-country monetary models with highly integrated international capital markets, no-arbitrage conditions in the term-structure of interest rates, forward-looking expectations, and price and wage rigidities.The historical experience of the Great Moderation period of the 1980s, 1990s, and until recently largely validated this result. As central banks moved toward more transparent rulesbased monetary policies-including through inflation-targeting-economic performance improved. The improvement was especially dramatic compared with the instability of the 1970s, when, following the demise of the Bretton Woods system, monetary policy was highly discretionary and unfocused. Mervyn King (2003) called it a NICE period for it was non-1 This paper was prepared for the Conference "The Federal Reserve's Role in the Global Economy: A Historical Perspective," hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The paper focuses on monetary policy rather than on the regulatory parts of Federal Reserve policy. Some of the results are based on research prepared for the BIS (Taylor (2013c). I thank Michael Bordo, Claudio Borio, Richard Fisher, Arminio Fraga, Lawrence Goodman, Simon Hilpert, Ronald McKinnon, David Papell, Kenneth Rogoff, George Shultz, Volker Wieland and the staff of the Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas for helpful comments and assistance. 2 See, for example, the studies by Carlozzi and Taylor (1985), Taylor (1985Taylor ( , 1993, Clarida, Gali and Gertler (2002), Obstfeld and Rogoff (2002).
inflationary and consistently expansionary. Toward the later part of this NICE GreatModeration, central banks in many emerging market countries also moved toward more rule-like policies with long-run price stability goals. Their performance and their contribution to global stability also improved, especially compared with the earlier periods of frequent emerging market financial crises.The situation had similarities to a game-theory equilibrium in which each country chose its own good monetary policy taking as given that other countries would do much the same under a basic understanding that the outcome would be nearly as good as if they coordinated their policy choices in a cooperative fashion. Attempts to coordinate policy choices across countries would likely have added little to the large improvement in macroeconomic stability during the Great Moderation, much...