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fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. President Lacker. | 7 |
fomc | 2,007 | I like the statement as is. I was one of those who, when we considered accelerating the release of the minutes, thought that it would take some weight off crafting the statement, which we could shorten. Alas, I was incorrect, and that was sort of hopeless. So I'm giving up. I sort of like the length the statement is no... | 516 |
fomc | 2,007 | President Moskow. | 4 |
fomc | 2,007 | Regarding the first question, the statement, I think the process is working well at this point, and so I don't see any need for major changes in it. Given the consensus on moving forward on these projections, I think that fits in quite well with the existing process we have for the statement. My feeling is to minimize ... | 339 |
fomc | 2,007 | Just to clarify your comment on forward-looking language, your examples were about policy, like "considerable period" or whatever, but not necessarily. Does your comment apply to statements like "output is going to grow at a moderate pace?" | 47 |
fomc | 2,007 | No, I should have clarified that. No, in terms of comments in the statement about the outlook for the economy, yes, I think that's fine. I was thinking of the outlook for policy. | 40 |
fomc | 2,007 | I also had a two-hander on that. So in terms of things like "predominant concern," which is kind of forward looking for what our concern is in the future, would you have that or would you cut out the whole fourth section? | 51 |
fomc | 2,007 | No, when appropriate, I would keep that. But I was thinking primarily of the last sentence that we had happen there. My recollection is that it evolved from "a considerable period" to "patience" and so forth, and then we got into "it will depend on the outlook for inflation and economic growth." | 65 |
fomc | 2,007 | President Lacker. | 4 |
fomc | 2,007 | I'm not sure I heard you clearly, Mike, but I want to clarify: I was advocating eliminating the risk assessment from the directive, but I would keep that section in the statement. | 37 |
fomc | 2,007 | President Yellen. | 4 |
fomc | 2,007 | Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think the statement is just about right. I like the current length and structure. I would not want to see a great deal more detail in it about our assessment of the economy. I think that should wait for the minutes, but I don't think there's anything that's in the statement now that we ... | 256 |
fomc | 2,007 | Well, considering the group. [Laughter] | 10 |
fomc | 2,007 | Initially when we started getting into circulating ideas about it before the meeting, I thought, "Oh, this is going to be chaotic and spin out of control." I've been amazed at how thoroughly constructive it has been--that by the time we walk in here and have the statement, it has actually evolved a fair amount. I think... | 140 |
fomc | 2,007 | President Minehan. | 4 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you very much. I'm relatively happy with the statement. Along the lines that Presidents Yellen and Moskow discussed, I would try to stay away as much as possible from forward-looking language or commitments. There's a time and a place--2003 going forward: Moving from 1 percent up was a unique occurrence, I think.... | 709 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. President Fisher. | 6 |
fomc | 2,007 | Mr. Chairman, I think the statement should be a statement of the Committee. I don't have any problem with the current governance structure, although I think it does make sense for everybody to vote on it since we hammer it out anyway. I wouldn't change the language. We do have one sentence that we always repeat, which ... | 150 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. Governor Kohn. | 7 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Like the others, I think the statement has basically evolved into a very good place. I sometimes worry that the process of putting a statement together by nineteen people will mean that there's too much inertia in the process. But so far, maybe because the economy hasn't jerked around very much... | 470 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. Governor Warsh. | 7 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I like the statement format and process and, like Governor Kohn, think that the governance, while it is not urgent to change, will catch up with the reality and with the expectation. Thank you. | 48 |
fomc | 2,007 | Governor Kroszner. | 6 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thanks. Much as Gary Stern has said, as an academic I was never particularly enamored of the statement. But actually having seen how it evolves, how it is built--usually when you see the way the sausage is made, that upsets your stomach, but it has actually been the opposite. [Laughter] Maybe I have been eating the sau... | 385 |
fomc | 2,007 | Governor Mishkin. | 4 |
fomc | 2,007 | In terms of this issue of forward-looking language, I'm quite comfortable with the statement and with forward-looking language so long as it's on the right-hand side of the Taylor rule in terms of what's going on with output and inflation. I'm actually not a fan of forward-looking language in terms of the federal funds... | 597 |
fomc | 2,007 | Not anymore. [Laughter] | 7 |
fomc | 2,007 | So I'm actually quite comfortable with moving in that direction. Thank you very much. | 16 |
fomc | 2,007 | We have to put those words in the minutes so that they get out there sooner than five years. [Laughter] | 24 |
fomc | 2,007 | I'll be an outlier in terms of the transcripts five years from now; they'll say, "Oh, God, Rick is here." | 27 |
fomc | 2,007 | President Lockhart. | 4 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It may horrify everyone at the table that before I joined the Committee, I didn't actually parse this statement every few weeks. [Laughter] I don't have a lot of historical perspective, but I'm basically okay with the way the process works now. I think that the inclusions in the statement all s... | 197 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. President Plosser. | 8 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I, too, am relatively new to this process of watching the sausage being made. I have to confess up front that I'm a bit schizophrenic about this because I'm really of two minds in terms of the direction I think about, and I'm persuadable either way. Part of me, as Jeff said, has argued that may... | 513 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. Vice Chairman. | 6 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think the statement has been evolving sensibly. The process is basically working. I don't think we need to lock ourselves into any fixed view of the optimal structure of the statement over time. We should be open to changing it if it suits our purposes in specific circumstances. Obviously, sh... | 603 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. Are there any other comments? Well, again, we'll review the transcript and see what steps we need to take. Once again, thank you for your very useful comments. The next meeting is Tuesday, August 7. If there is no other business, then we're adjourned. | 60 |
fomc | 2,007 | Good morning, everybody. We start off today with some welcomes and farewells. I would first like to welcome Eric Rosengren, the new President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. | 39 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. | 3 |
fomc | 2,007 | I have known Eric for about twenty years. We used to be squash partners. I won't say who won. We know who wins now. [Laughter] I admire Eric--he has been a multitasker: He has been very successful as a researcher and as a bank supervisor, and he is no slouch with respect to monetary policy. So we look forward to your c... | 80 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. | 3 |
fomc | 2,007 | Sadly, today we have to say farewell to President Michael Moskow of Chicago. Michael has sat at this table since 1994, which we have calculated is a total of 104 FOMC meetings. Mike has been involved in public policy off and on since 1969 in many capacities, and he has seen both the good times and the bad times. We wil... | 114 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will make some comments later on, but I just want to add that I counted 104 meetings, too. [Laughter] It has been a privilege and an honor to serve on this Committee, and I will miss the intellectual stimulation, the camaraderie, and the spirit of doing what is best for the American people. T... | 76 |
fomc | 2,007 | Today is also Vincent Reinhart's final FOMC meeting. Vince went to work at the New York Fed in 1983 and came to the Board--PARTICIPANT. Is he here? | 41 |
fomc | 2,007 | He's coming. | 3 |
fomc | 2,007 | He's coming. Well, he gets docked for... [Laughter] | 15 |
fomc | 2,007 | Make sure he submits a leave card. [Laughter] | 12 |
fomc | 2,007 | Well, let me make a couple of other announcements, and then we'll move on. First of all, in the days when Don Winn was the head of the Congressional Liaison Office, it was customary for him to present during the luncheon after the meeting an update on congressional matters. Laricke Blanchard, whom I think most of you k... | 665 |
fomc | 2,007 | I nominate Brian Madigan, with pleasure. | 9 |
fomc | 2,007 | Other nominations? [Laughter] If not, all in favor say "aye." Opposed? Carried unanimously. Congratulations, Brian. | 28 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you very much. | 5 |
fomc | 2,007 | Okay. I will wait until Vince appears. He may be looking at financial markets this morning, and so we will wait until he appears to bid him farewell. Let's go ahead, then, to the authorization for Desk operations and turn it over to Bill Dudley. Bill? | 55 |
fomc | 2,007 | 1 Thank you. As you all know, there has been considerable financial market turbulence since the last meeting: Problems in subprime mortgage credit have persisted and intensified; credit-rating agencies have begun to downgrade asset-backed securities and CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) that reference subprime deb... | 3,018 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you for a very good report, Bill. Are there questions? President Poole. | 18 |
fomc | 2,007 | I have two questions. First, does the New York Fed have what I might call material nonpublic information about firms that would suggest that there is more difficulty than we see in the newspapers? That is one question. The other question has to do with the distribution of views among dealers about probable Fed policy. ... | 249 |
fomc | 2,007 | Let me take the second question first. You know, it's certainly possible that, when people want to hedge their risk in areas where they can't easily sell the assets, they would buy something that will perform well if those assets continue to deteriorate. One thing to do would be to buy Eurodollar futures or Treasury se... | 460 |
fomc | 2,007 | President Fisher. | 3 |
fomc | 2,007 | Let's go back to your previous comment on the second question of President Poole. Another standard reaction is to sell things that are more liquid when you can't unload things that are less liquid. One thing I am curious about--and I don't know if we have the data, but this is the question--in terms of CDO/CLO issuance... | 297 |
fomc | 2,007 | President Fisher, I have a tiny bit of information in that regard. Once a year there are surveys taken of U.S. liabilities to foreign holders, and they are done security by security. We went looking for the securities that had been downgraded--by Moody's I guess it was, or maybe it was both Moody's and S&P--in CDO pack... | 301 |
fomc | 2,007 | It might be interesting to look at the issuance dates of those, if we were able somehow to analyze the issuance dates. | 24 |
fomc | 2,007 | This survey, which we basically have received just recently, is dated June 2006. So there is always a lag of several months to a year in the information that you can get out of this survey. But the survey itself is very comprehensive. | 50 |
fomc | 2,007 | Where the securities are held abroad is also very important. If they are held in a hedge fund that is highly leveraged, that is one thing. If they are held in a central bank reserve account, that is a small loss against all their other assets, so it wouldn't have any consequence. So if you talk to the dealers, they'll ... | 175 |
fomc | 2,007 | I have one other quick question, and that is that I want to make sure I understand what you're saying. It seems to me from this presentation that this is not just a matter of price; it is also a matter of structure and covenants. Is that correct? | 54 |
fomc | 2,007 | I guess I would characterize the situation as people having lost faith in the structured-finance product, especially the high-grade AA/AAA product that they thought was safe and therefore not subject to much market risk or liquidity risk. They found out otherwise, and so there is a total reevaluation of that market. As... | 167 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you for an excellent presentation. | 7 |
fomc | 2,007 | President Rosengren. | 5 |
fomc | 2,007 | The credit derivative swaps for Countrywide and some of the other mortgage providers spiked up very appreciably at the end of last week, and they were accompanied by announcements that the companies were having no trouble rolling over their financing. Some of the Boston hedge fund managers have observed that one depend... | 130 |
fomc | 2,007 | They certainly could. Their problem is that they have a very large mortgage finance subsidiary and a small thrift. If the mortgage finance subsidiary were in the thrift, then there would be other ways of financing all their assets. So far they are able to maintain their liquidity. But a lot of this is about perception,... | 148 |
fomc | 2,007 | President Moskow. | 4 |
fomc | 2,007 | An excellent presentation, Bill. One area that you talked a bit about was the commercial paper market. That made me uneasy because this segment is different from the other segments of the market that you were talking about, and obviously that short-term financing is crucial to companies. I wonder if you could expand on... | 64 |
fomc | 2,007 | Two areas of the asset-backed commercial paper market are being closely scrutinized, which means that a whole bunch of the asset-backed commercial paper market is fine, such as the asset-backed commercial paper with backstops--you know, credit card receivables. That area is fine; it is not a problem. One difficult area... | 557 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. | 3 |
fomc | 2,007 | Are there other questions for Bill? If not, we need a vote to ratify domestic market operations. | 21 |
fomc | 2,007 | I move we ratify those operations. PARTICIPANT. Second. | 14 |
fomc | 2,007 | Objections? Vincent has come in. Welcome. We just want to acknowledge you. | 17 |
fomc | 2,007 | Ever since you gave the guards guns, I didn't really have any choice. [Laughter] | 19 |
fomc | 2,007 | We want to acknowledge your final meeting, Vincent. It has been six years since Vincent was elected Secretary and Economist to the Committee. You took that role only three or four weeks before September 11, and your steady hand during that crisis was invaluable. Unfortunately, against all good advice and after only eig... | 305 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In putting together the Greenbook forecast for this meeting, we adjusted our outlook in five ways in response to the developments that Bill Dudley has just described. First and foremost in terms of its implications for real activity, we took on board the implications of the decline in the value... | 2,247 |
fomc | 2,007 | The financial market turmoil over the intermeeting period has not been confined to U.S. markets. In today's financially globalized world, events in one asset market frequently have consequences in other markets and other countries; both the level and the volatility of asset prices abroad have moved with U.S. asset mark... | 1,428 |
fomc | 2,007 | 2 I will be referring to the handout labeled "Material for FOMC Briefing on Trial-Run Projections." As in shown line 1 of the top panel of exhibit 1, the central tendency of your current forecasts for real GDP growth for the second half of 2007 is 2.0 to 2.7 percent. Combined with the BEA's estimate of 2.0 percent grow... | 1,242 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. We're now open for questions for the staff. President Fisher. | 15 |
fomc | 2,007 | I noted Karen's comments about the globalized interlinkages with financial markets, and I have a simple question for maybe Karen. In terms of the alternative scenario that was sketched for greater housing correction to spill over to confidence in financial markets, in that discussion and in that model or simulation, wh... | 88 |
fomc | 2,007 | Yes. | 2 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. | 3 |
fomc | 2,007 | Are there other questions? President Lacker. | 9 |
fomc | 2,007 | David, when you were describing the implications of the GDP revisions for your assessment of the output gap, you said that you essentially marked down potential by the same amount as realized growth recently based on your assessment of pressures in product markets. In case we wanted to try it at home, I was wondering i... | 79 |
fomc | 2,007 | It relies on a variety of considerations, but ultimately I would say it relies on inflation performance. One way that we have of assessing whether our gauges of resource utilization are moving off track is to look back and see whether our inflation models that incorporate those measures of resource utilization are over... | 237 |
fomc | 2,007 | I guess my question was motivated by my sense that estimates of the current output gap tend to play an important role in your outlook for near-term inflation trends. To the extent that the current estimate of the output gap is derived from current inflation, I am wondering if it provides less independent information th... | 70 |
fomc | 2,007 | I would make two remarks regarding that. First, quantitatively, in fact, the output gap doesn't play a very large role in shifting our projection of inflation. If one does a sort of retrospective decomposition of the factors that were generating inflation over the past ten, fifteen, or twenty years, during the period o... | 252 |
fomc | 2,007 | Other questions? We'll begin our economic go-round then. For President Rosengren's benefit--as you probably know, if we have a comment or a question for a speaker, we use a two-handed symbol for an intervention. I would like to begin the go-round today with President Moskow. | 60 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Conditions in the Seventh District have changed little since our last meeting. We continue to lag the nation largely because of difficulties in the auto industry. Our contacts thought that the U.S. economy had softened a little since June but that international sales continue to be strong. They... | 1,060 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. President Yellen. | 7 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Data on inflation during the intermeeting period have continued to be encouraging, but the prospects for economic activity have become dicier. The results for GDP in the second quarter as a whole actually took on a positive tone, with final sales mainly accounting for the healthy growth rate. B... | 1,276 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. President Fisher. | 6 |
fomc | 2,007 | Mr. Chairman, at the past few meetings I have spoken about my District as having strong growth. I have asked questions about the strength of the growth in the national economy, and I have described the global economy from the standpoint of the way the staff here writes about it and the way we do our own work as "hotter... | 1,270 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you, President Fisher. Just to respond very briefly, we do have a group here at the Board working with other economists and financial experts throughout the System that does scenario analysis and does monitor the markets, and we certainly are quite attuned to these issues. | 52 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | 7 |
fomc | 2,007 | President Pianalto. | 4 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The reports that I am hearing from business leaders in the Fourth District lead me to conclude that the pace of economic activity hasn't changed a great deal since our last meeting. However, the uncertainties surrounding the business climate seem to have risen measurably. The troubled housing s... | 587 |
fomc | 2,007 | Thank you. President Stern. | 6 |
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