The “immediate challenge confronting” the new Federal Reserve chairman, Janet Yellen, who is for the first time leading the meeting of the central bank’s policy-making committee, “is to overhaul the Fed’s forward guidance for short-term interest rates.” That’s the sentence that jumps out at us from the New York Times dispatch on the meeting of the Open Market Committee, which started today and runs through tomorrow. It was, after all, only a year or so ago that the idea of “forward guidance” came into widespread use in the first place. It strikes us that the guidance system is at awfully low mileage to come up for an “overhaul.” Unless, of course, it was a lemon to start with.

The idea of forward guidance seems to be part of what these columns have called the “verbal dollar.” We first used that phrase when news broke that the previous chairman, Ben Bernanke, was going to start holding press conferences to explain the Fed’s policies. It seems that there weren’t enough words in the minutes of the Fed or in the statements of the various Fed presidents or in the shadow open market committee or in the chairman’s testimony before the various committees of the Congress. Or his lectures to college students. On top of all that verbiage, the Fed chairman undertook meet with the press on a quarterly basis.

This was the price of quantitative easing and ultra low interest rates. How long would it last? What kind of expectations were reasonable? These kinds of questions sprang up as the Fed expanded its balance sheet by trillions and loaded up on debt issued by its owner. The value of the dollar itself had plunged, to a 1,900th of an ounce of gold at one point, before recovering to the range of a 1,300th of an ounce. At some point the Fed put up on its Web site a statement under this headline: “How does forward guidance about the Federal Reserve’s target for the federal funds rate support the economic recovery?”

“Clear communication is always important in central banking,” it said. It noted that since December 2008, its target for the federal funds rate has been between 0.0% and 0.25%. “Through ‘forward guidance,’” it said, “the Federal Open Market Committee provides an indication to households, businesses, and investors about the stance of monetary policy expected to prevail in the future. By providing information about how long the Committee expects to keep the target for the federal funds rate exceptionally low, the forward guidance language can put downward pressure on longer-term interest rates and thereby lower the cost of credit for households and businesses, and also help improve broader financial conditions.”

Then the Fed said the aforementioned target range “will be appropriate at least as long as the unemployment rate remains above 6-1/2 percent, inflation between one and two years ahead is projected to be no more than 1/2 percentage point above the Committee’s 2 percent longer-run goal, and longer-term inflation expectations continue to be well anchored.” Then it noted that in December the Open Market Committee “indicated that, in determining how long to maintain a highly accommodative stance of monetary policy, it will consider other information including additional measures of labor market conditions, indicators of inflation pressures and inflation expectations, and readings on financial developments.”

Then it said the committee “now anticipates, based on its assessment of these factors, that it likely will be appropriate to maintain the current target range for the federal funds rate well past the time that the unemployment rate declines below 6-1/2 percent, especially if projected inflation continues to run below the Committee’s 2 percent longer-run goal.” Then it insisted that the “formulation of the forward guidance based on thresholds helps to clarify policymakers’ intention to maintain accommodation for as long as needed to promote a stronger economic recovery in a context of price stability.”

“And,” the Fed added, just to be clear, “by more clearly describing the connection between future monetary policy and economic conditions, forward guidance helps to make monetary policy more transparent and predictable to the public.” To which one can but say, no wonder the Times’ reporter, Binyamin Appelbaum, is underlining the immediacy of overhauling forward guidance. Back in the old days, we were stuck with having to look what people were doing with gold, and the only way one could tell if money was too loose or too tight was whether they were buying or selling. Now forward guidance turns out to be just as rickety, another confounded barbarous relic.