Yellen at Jackson Hole and transparecy

The buzzword from central banks for years has been transparency, yet here we are post-Jackson Hole waiting for Chairman Yellen to again say something important about policy. We don't know what the rules will be for changes in rates. Policy should not work this way. It should not be a balance of pros and cons based on a speech. It should be translated to action through clear rules. The verbal should be employed to explain why the rules are not being followed. It should be the exception not the norm. 

In the 60's and 70's pre-rational expectations, there was the belief that economists could engineer changes in the economy and that we could employ optimal control to solve monetary problems. The Lucas critique and the rational expectations revolution changed that thinking. It was argued that transparency was needed to reduce uncertainty but policy models for engineering an economy would not work. 

Still, we are now at an extreme that there is no model for how transparency will work. Fed officials tells us about their transparency, but then cannot articulate a clear policy. Talking without clarity is not transparency. The discussion for the 80's and 90's was about Fed creditability but what is the level of creditability when you do not know what are the decision rules.