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In emerging markets, slow growth in the advanced economies has shut down a traditional development path: export-led growth. As a result, emerging markets have had to rely once again on domestic demand. This is always a difficult task, given the temptation to over-stimulate.

Monetary policy causes booms and busts.

But clearly an economy that's growing and expanding like this one - and it certainly is doing that with high GDP output, employment numbers strong, capacity utilization strong - that's an environment in which the Fed needs to continually be alert to early signs of inflation.

Monetary policy has less room to maneuver when interest rates are close to zero, while expansionary fiscal policy is likely both more effective and less costly in terms of increased debt burden when interest rates are pinned at low levels.

The supply-side effect of a restrictive monetary policy is likely to be perverse, in that high interest rates enter into costs and thus exert inflationary pressure.

Inflation is not always the main problem, or indeed a problem at all. Sometimes, though rarely, deflation is a more serious threat, and we need to shelve many of the orthodoxies we have held so dear.

I have never believed that central banks should have rigid inflation targeting. That is not a good thing to stabilize. There is nothing in economic theory to back this.

Businesses that have gone through an episode of hyperinflation become understandably alert to the threat of it: at the first hint of inflation, they're likely to increase prices, since they've learned that if they don't, and inflation hits, their businesses will be wrecked.

So much of what happened to India late last year and early into 2011 is the same story we've seen with other big emerging markets, and that is that investors started to realize that the growth trajectory in India would have to get moderated by tightening policy.