As most people know, the Kansas City Fed has been holding its annual symposium in Jackson, WY, for a very long time. Supposedly a draw for Paul Volcker’s fly fishing hobby when he was Chairman, the conference came to include heavyweights on a regular basis. Most of them, especially those in the early years, however, were duds.

It wasn’t until 1985 that there was anything of real substance discussed, the topic finally the dollar six years after its great crisis had concluded. The most notable contribution to that one came from Paul Krugman who started his presentation noting that he was for five years by then confused and befuddled by its movements. Some things, it seems, never change (including those who refused to listen to Robert Solomon, also there in ’85).

One of the more interesting gatherings took place in 1999. The year and the reasons need no introduction. What most people remember about 1999 can be summed up by the acronym Nasdaq. Try as they might, even central bankers and economists were feeling some desire, maybe need, to address the situation.

The line up was a who’s who of top tier Economists: Alan Greenspan giving the introduction, Allan Meltzer talking zero inflation, Martin Feldstein fretting about currency, and Stanley Fischer actually recalling, “Well, everybody has his or her own view of what it is that Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. Mundell’s version is that the original sin was that Eve told Adam about central banking, about the notion that you can create value with a stroke of the pen.” On top of all that there was the obligatory paper from Ben Bernanke (co-author with Mark Gertler).

While not all talked about or focused on the dot-com bubble, the topic in general could not be avoided. Bernanke’s position was easily summed up:

The principal conclusion of this paper has been stated several times. In brief, it is that flexible inflation-targeting provides an effective, unified framework for achieving both general macroeconomic stability and financial stability. Given a strong commitment to stabilizing expected inflation, it is neither necessary nor desirable for monetary policy to respond to changes in asset prices, except to the extent that they help forecast inflationary or deflationary pressures.