The August 2011 meeting of the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee produced new language describing the expected path of interest rates over a two-year horizon. That language spurred a variety of interpretations, as some saw it as describing what was already expected and others interpreted it as a significant policy shift. This column examines the expected path of future interest rates and says that the new language was wholly consistent with past Fed practice.

Recent history of long-run inflation expectations suggests reasonably well-anchored expectations in both regions, however no studies to date have compared the recent evolution and dispersion across forecasters' long-horizon projections in the United States to those in the EU. The authors of CEPR DP6536 use daily evidence from financial markets and surveys, which reveal a substantially greater degree of forecaster disagreement about long-run inflation outcomes in the United States than in the euro area.