The wording was symmetric but the intent seemed asymmetric as Fed officials began talking about when they'd taper purchases, not ramp them up.
Nonetheless, the mere assertion that QE is symmetric is, in effect, asymmetric.
So to be specific, business cycles display real-output asymmetry but may be nominal-output symmetric.
In short, America exchanged a world in which individual cycles were demand-symmetric for one in which cycles are symmetric on average across generations, because policymakers swung from never allowing demand growth to dip too low to never allowing demand growth to rise too high.On the whole, I think most people would prefer the cycles of the first era.
These boo-boos are common in the first two paragraphs, while some confusion seems to dangle into the third paragraph (which apparently mixes up groups with symmetric spaces).
Scraps of matter pop up in strangely symmetric pairs, as if they were tiny Tweedledums and Tweedledees.
The wholesale endorsement of Linux, the open-source operating system for Pentium-style processors, by the world's leading hardware and software firms (with the exception of Microsoft) has turned it into a formidable platform for enterprise servers capable of ganging dozens, even hundreds, of internal processors together into a giant "symmetric multiprocessing" unit that behaves as a single entity.
If we go on to define demand as all the money spent each year nominal output then we find ourselves in a world in which business cycles can and historically have been fairly symmetric.
A symmetric inflation target demands that a central bank fights deflation as aggressively as inflation.
In 1985 Richard Smalley, Robert Curl and Harold Kroto discovered that, when carbon is vaporised in an inert gas such as helium and allowed to cool slowly, it spontaneously forms a buckyball, the celebrated soccerball-shaped carbon molecule consisting of 60 carbon atoms arranged in a symmetric pattern.
That is partly because the ECB's mandate is to maintain price inflation just below 2%, while the Fed's is symmetric ("2% over time").
