Firms that were once under the sway of other ministries had to consider hiring retirees from MITI as well, if they wanted to gauge future policy changes and cash in.
The chart above, supplied by Julian Callow of Barclays Capital, shows the gap between nominal GDP growth and official interest rates, a common gauge of policy, for a group of big economies: America, Britain, Canada, China, the euro area, India and Japan.
Although the broader measures of money have become an unfashionable way to gauge monetary policy, their behavior during the period of low interest rates should still make us skeptical of the idea that Greenspan had opened the floodgates.
For players, tournament director Craig Tiley said a new traffic light-themed "heat policy gauge" would help players understand whether their matches could be affected.
The Fed has departed from the rule at other times in the past couple of decades, said Mr Taylor, notably in the autumn of 1998, "but this was the biggest deviation, comparable to the turbulent 1970s".The Taylor rule is not the only gauge of monetary policy.
Alas, Bernanke has been taught to ignore the best gauge of monetary policy: the price of gold.
Greenspan & Co. should continue to sell these bonds until gold, the best gauge of monetary policy, dips below $400 an ounce.
No. 3 became the first new locomotive to travel on the railway for over 80 years in 1951, but it frequently derailed, and on inspection it turned out that the Talyllyn track was laid approximately half an inch (13 mm) wider than the official gauge, a deliberate policy by the old company to accommodate the long wheelbase of Talyllyn.
The reading, which reflects broad growth trends in Japan and is one of the major policy gauges for the central bank, the Bank of Japan, was worse than the median market forecast of minus 1.
The personal consumption expenditures price index, a gauge watched by Federal Reserve policy makers, rose at a 1.9percentt pace after a 1.8percentt increase in the third quarter.
