Fed policy fine-tuning: Is there a case in the US for a lone rate? Recall what the Fed did in 1997

In 1997 too, the rate-setting committee openly debated the implications of a surreptitiously rising neutral rate: “If monetary policy failed to recognize the changes in the equilibrium situation and did not adjust nominal interest rates higher, then effectively, to use the language we normally employ, we would have eased monetary policy even if we maintained the same level of nominal interest rates,” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond president J. Alfred Broaddus told Greenspan at the time, according to a transcript of the meeting—a sentence that could just as well have been written in September 2026.