RBC at the Fed

RBC theory says that monetary policy only affects inflation and has no effect on unemployment and growth.  This matters because if monetary policy only affects inflation, then there is no special role for monetary policy during a recession except that people generally like inflation to be low and stable. That is probably why Richmond Federal Reserve President Jeffrey Lacker doesn't seem to understand that his job at the Fed is to fight unemployment during recessions by boosting growth.  Yglesias quotes Lacker:

“The Fed doesn't control growth. We can interfere with it. We can impede it,’’ Lacker said. “But in general the growth rate the economy can crank out is determined by technology, people's preferences, resource endowments, other policies and the like. Our job is to keep inflation low and stable.”

"Lacker ought to check the Fed's own FAQ page:"

The Congress established two key objectives for monetary policy--maximum employment and stable prices--in the Federal Reserve Act. These objectives are sometimes referred to as the Federal Reserve's dual mandate. The dual mandate is the long-run goal for monetary policy, and the Congress also established the Federal Reserve as an independent agency to help ensure that this monetary policy goal can be achieved.

Not low and stable, but stable and consistent with maxmimum employment. Different! ...If you have unemployed workers and idle capital goods then you're cranking out less than you could because monetary policy is too tight. Conversely, if you try to push total economy-wide spending above the economy's capacity to produce goods and services then money is too loose and you'll get inflation. The way Lacker describes it, there's no state of the world that would constitute money being excessively tight.

If the Fed truly didn't have any impact on growth and unemployment (which are tightly linked by Okun's law), then what have they been doing at all of those meetings??  It would be extremely easy to do monetary policy if inflation really were the only concern.  Inflation is almost never troublesome during a recession.  And RBC theory also says that inflation does not have any impact on growth and unemployment, so the real question is why does Lacker even care about inflation???