The U.S. central bank would be courting disaster if it pursued a so-called nominal growth target that did not take into account the economic damage done by the housing crisis, a senior Federal Reserve official warned on Thursday. James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, also argued that the only variable in the economy the Fed could control over the longer term was inflation, saying it did best when focusing solely on that goal. Bullard, in a lecture at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, said the pre-crisis housing bubble had driven U.S. growth to levels that were not realistic to try to ... (full story)