On November 21, 2002, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, then a member of the Board of Governors, gave a speech titled Deflation: Making Sure “It” Doesn’t Happen Here. This speech provides a nice window into how the current Fed might react in a deflationary environment. In the speech Bernanke outlines why deflation is so damaging to an economy and some of the strategies that the Federal Reserve could use in order to avoid deflation. Some of these policies ended up being implemented from 2007 to 2009. In the speech Bernanke goes on to outline additional ways that the Fed might try to avoid deflation.

In order to prop up aggregate demand and avoid deflation extraordinary monetary and fiscal policies were undertaken by the Federal Reserve and the federal government over the past two and a half years. On the monetary front the Fed first used traditional measures by dropping the Federal Funds rate (the rate at which large institutions loan to each other on a short term basis) to a range of 0.00% to 0.25%. This had the effect of lowering interest rates for both consumers and business borrowers. The Fed then turned to less ordinary measures such as purchasing U.S. Treasuries, U.S. federal agency debt and mortgage backed securities. The extraordinary fiscal policies included the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) which recapitalized banks and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The primary reason why the Fed and the federal government undertook these actions was to avoid deflation. Widespread deflation can be very damaging to a nation’s economy. In order to understand why deflation is so destructive ABC News had a short segment on the economic consequences of this phenomenon.