When Yellen left the Fed in 2018, several of her closest allies said her biggest (and most underappreciated) success was delaying liftoff and making it as slow as it was in 2015-16.
And yet here, in 2020, with the benefit of hindsight (and facing a recession that was not caused by monetary policy), the conventional wisdom is that liftoff was premature.
Yellen today: "If our goal had been to overshoot 2% inflation, perhaps we would have waited a little longer to start the process of raising interest rates. I don't think it would have made an extreme difference."
