mholyland

> It's never been clear to me why it's a good idea to continually adjust the rate, as opposed to picking an ideal target rate and trying to keep it relatively stable permanently.

That target rate depends on many things in the economy that the FED has no control over, so they adjust the knob as best they can predict, to stear the economy to their dual mandate.

They need to keep inflation low (around 2%) and employment high, but they don't control what the government does in terms of raising/cutting taxes, what world events do to supply, and production.

But you're right, it's a blunt knob to adjust when there are so many variables at play.

True. My use of the word "speed" is incorrect, or at least imprecise.

The parent comment claimed that immutable data structures are slow, because you would have to copy them around, an O(N) operation.

I wanted to know if they considered that operations on immutable structures can be done without copying, and have the same algorithmic complexity as the mutable data structures, if they used persistent data structures.