As an example, he pointed to Thailand‘s 10-year treasury bond. That was yielding around 2.42 percent on Friday, compared with the arguably far less risky 10-year U.S. Treasury, which was yielding only a slightly lower 2.1886 percent.
Instead, Carnell said inflation should only be a secondary target, with more attention paid to the rate of credit growth.
Advocating eschewing an inflation target, or at least moving away from aiming for a 2 percent rate, isn’t an entirely new idea.
Robert Heller, a former Federal Reserve governor from 1986-1989, said that, in his opinion, the 2 percent inflation target wasn’t entirely in line with the central bank’s Congressionally mandated goal of price stability.
Instead, the goal should be zero percent inflation, he said, but acknowledged the difficulty of hitting that target exactly.
“If the Fed and other central banks say they want 2 percent or less, that’s fine with me. The closer to zero you get the better it is,” he said.
Others didn’t think getting rid of inflation targets would happen anytime soon.
“Almost all central banks have adopted it,” said Shirai Sayuri, a professor at Keio University whose five-year term at as a Bank of Japan governor ended in 2016. “They worry if they change the framework, it’ll have an impact on inflation expectations.”
In Japan’s case, “it’s very difficult to achieve 2 percent for a while, but that doesn’t mean they should abandon the 2 percent target,” she said. “As a central bank, it’s not a good idea to drop a target that they’ve already introduced,” although the bank can extend the time frame for when it can be achieved.
But she added that the massive monetary easing programs, particularly in Japan’s case, weren’t sustainable and she was very concerned about market distortion.
At least one analyst was sticking with the importance of keeping an eye on the inflation ball.
“What we know from experience, both theory and historical experience, when inflation moves to extremes, either very low or very high, generally that ends up having a bad outcome on economic growth, on employment, on other indicators we care about,” Manpreet Gill, head of fixed income, commodity and currency investment strategy at Standard Chartered Private Bank, told CNBC’s “Street Signs” on Wednesday.
“We do need to care about it,” he said.
—CNBC’s David Reid and Patti Domm contributed to this article.