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fomc | 2,008 | There have been more borrowers than just them. Some have done it because they wanted to test the facility. Some have done it because they viewed it as a fairly advantageous cost of funding. You know, there have been quite a few different borrowers, but those two borrowers mentioned are the ones that I would view as mor... | 67 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you for discreetly answering the question. | 9 |
fomc | 2,008 | Other questions? President Plosser. | 8 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just to follow up on that question, I was at a meeting in New York not too long ago and was talking with some people on Wall Street. They suggested that for the primary dealers there was stigma attached to borrowing from the PDCF. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that, and I just wondered if... | 97 |
fomc | 2,008 | I think there is some stigma attached to the Primary Dealer Credit Facility. It is hard to know exactly how much. One thing I thought was interesting: The first week the facility was outstanding, a number of institutions went to the Primary Dealer Credit Facility and then announced that they were doing it as a test. No... | 163 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. | 3 |
fomc | 2,008 | President Stern. | 3 |
fomc | 2,008 | Yes. Bill, on chart 6, just a quick question on the leverage ratio: Do we know how good those data are? I mean, to the best of our knowledge, is that reliable stuff? | 42 |
fomc | 2,008 | This is just assets divided by equity, so I think it is pretty good. When the investment banks start proposing their adjusted leverage ratios, then I think you have a problem--you know, apples and oranges--because the different investment banks calculate those kinds of adjusted leverage ratios a bit differently. Usuall... | 92 |
fomc | 2,008 | Mr. Chairman? President Stern, I have just one thing to add. For the first time with the three investment banks that reported for the quarter that ended in May, the SEC allowed them to disclose their risk-weighted ratio on the SEC's version of Basel II. That's the ratio for which your question is more germane in some s... | 227 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thanks. | 2 |
fomc | 2,008 | Other questions? If not, would someone move the ratification. | 13 |
fomc | 2,008 | So move. | 3 |
fomc | 2,008 | Without objection. Thank you. Okay. Let's turn now to the economic situation. Nathan, I'll start with you. | 23 |
fomc | 2,008 | 2 Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Given that developments in global commodities markets have continued to have influential effects on our forecast for domestic activity and prices, we felt that it would be useful for me to lead off with the international portion of the chart show, which will include a discussion of these mark... | 2,357 |
fomc | 2,008 | Last week, the Washington Post ran a front page story with the headline, "Why We're Gloomier than the Economy." Like the author of the Post article, we too have noticed the difference between what people are saying about the economy in surveys and what they apparently are producing and spending. Starting first with the... | 2,300 |
fomc | 2,008 | Exhibit 10 reviews our assumptions about aggregate supply. As you can see from the first two rows of the table at the top, we now assume that potential output growth will hold steady at about 21/2 percent per year over the forecast period, about 1/4 percentage point per year higher from 2007 to 2009 than we had assumed... | 2,155 |
fomc | 2,008 | 3 I will be referring to the separate package labeled "Material for Briefing on FOMC Participants' Economic Projections." The top two sections of table 1 show the central tendencies and ranges of your current forecasts for the first and second halves of 2008; central tendencies and ranges of the projections published b... | 1,932 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Brian. Are there questions for our colleagues? President Fisher. | 15 |
fomc | 2,008 | If I may, I would like to ask Nathan, Mr. Chairman, about exhibit 4 and exhibit 5. Particularly noteworthy is that exhibit 4 is the forecast period showing a significant decline in inflation in the emerging market economies. I am wondering what that is based on. Do we have a sense of capacity utilization or slack, if i... | 93 |
fomc | 2,008 | You are asking particularly with respect to the emerging market economies? | 12 |
fomc | 2,008 | Yes, sir. In the top left-hand panel. | 11 |
fomc | 2,008 | In the process of preparing our forecast, we do come up with estimates of slack for the emerging market economies, but we are not inclined to put a whole lot of weight on them. The concept of an output gap is not really a well-defined construct for, say, China. Nevertheless, these economies will be growing a little mor... | 221 |
fomc | 2,008 | You don't know how happy I am to see global things come first. But are you saying that a great deal of uncertainty is attached to that forecast? | 30 |
fomc | 2,008 | Oh, absolutely. | 4 |
fomc | 2,008 | Then, in exhibit 5 on core import prices, I guess it is pretty much the same answer. One would expect that these would fall of their own weight after a while. | 36 |
fomc | 2,008 | Yes. The spike that we have seen is driven particularly by commodity prices. The depreciation of the dollar has played a secondary role, so the decline in core import price inflation to below 2 percent next year is conditioned crucially on commodity prices flattening out and the dollar not depreciating as rapidly as it... | 68 |
fomc | 2,008 | Mr. Chairman, if I could ask just one other question--of Larry, I think it was--on the housing exhibits. I am wondering if we are not in the eye of the storm here. We have had the first wave of buckling at the knees--or worse, cascading. If you talk to the homebuilders, they are, of course, the most depressed group ima... | 141 |
fomc | 2,008 | We expect foreclosures to rise--and to rise appreciably. One thing we have done in thinking about house prices is, in effect, to build in some extra house-price depreciation, above and beyond what our price-rent model would want to say, to reflect the kinds of factors that you are talking about--the foreclosures, what ... | 119 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. | 3 |
fomc | 2,008 | President Evans. | 3 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'd like to ask a question about inflation and labor compensation. At the last meeting, many of us, myself included, mentioned that labor compensation had not been growing very strongly, and we took that as a possible comforting comment about inflationary pressures not being too strong. That co... | 122 |
fomc | 2,008 | No, I agree with you. I think our models have been surprised by the low rates of compensation growth. One way to think about it is that in the past we might have seen higher headline inflation passed through more quickly to compensation growth--as in the '70s, when those wage-price spirals were really led by prices, bu... | 272 |
fomc | 2,008 | From a forecasting perspective, President Evans, I think you're right. I don't think models that rely simply on labor costs to predict prices are very sound in terms of their forecasting ability versus just a plain old price-price type of Phillips curve or a price type of Phillips curve augmented with price expectation... | 265 |
fomc | 2,008 | President Fisher. | 3 |
fomc | 2,008 | Just a quick follow-up, Mr. Chairman. To what extent do you impute the kind of insecurity that comes from competition and broader outsourcing? If you impute anything there in terms of wage behavior here, to what extent are you assuming going forward that the increase in wages being paid elsewhere might bleed into our w... | 66 |
fomc | 2,008 | Well, we don't account for that in our compensation model. That said, as I mentioned, the models have been surprised about how low compensation has been. That would be one possible explanation for that residual. If that factor were to diminish, it would imply that that residual would diminish, but we haven't built such... | 68 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. | 3 |
fomc | 2,008 | Other questions? President Bullard. | 7 |
fomc | 2,008 | I want to ask a question about exhibit 7, which talks about factors affecting the GDP forecast. The second bullet point mentions judgmental adjustments, which were tempered this time relative to last time. Last time I described this as a regime-switching model, and you said that was perhaps too much. The economy sort o... | 148 |
fomc | 2,008 | It's hard for me to think of it in these probabilistic terms. I would say that we still think that the economy is going to have these negative effects that are associated with periods of low growth. Now, whether that is precisely a recession or simply just a low-growth period, it's hard for me to distinguish. | 63 |
fomc | 2,008 | But the rationale is that you switch into the recession and you get the correlations from-- | 17 |
fomc | 2,008 | Yes. The way to think about it is that we switched into a low-growth period. Whether it is precisely a recession or just simply a low-growth period shouldn't be the demarcation point. We still think that the economy is operating in a low-growth period. There is probably not as much severity to that low-growth period, b... | 76 |
fomc | 2,008 | But then you're switching into the low-growth period, and then we take the correlations for low-growth periods, which I guess are maybe not as severe as in recession periods. | 34 |
fomc | 2,008 | Just as a factoid to throw out here, one of my colleagues on the Board staff, Jeremy Nalewaik, has estimated some of these models looking at switching between high-growth periods and low-growth periods, where a low-growth period does not necessarily have to be a recession. Using the GDP data through the first quarter p... | 172 |
fomc | 2,008 | President Lacker. | 4 |
fomc | 2,008 | I want to make sure I understand what you just said. Your response suggests that there's a third state that's even worse than we are in now, that one could possibly go into, and that what you've tempered is the probability that we're in that worst state? | 51 |
fomc | 2,008 | Again, we want to step back a bit from taking this regime-switching too seriously as implying that there are just two states of the world or maybe three states of the world. There are lots of different states of the world. What we are trying to do is look at the residuals in our spending equations and ask how they beha... | 485 |
fomc | 2,008 | I don't want to belabor this too much. I was curious about what you tempered. I think President Bullard was looking for whether you tempered the probability on state 2. I'm with you in not wanting to place a lot of probability on n states, but it sounds as though the growth trajectory--you know, the magnitude of the ad... | 89 |
fomc | 2,008 | That's correct--and the timing. So there are two aspects. One is that we have interpreted some of the surprise as a persistent strengthening in aggregate demand that we had not anticipated. The other is that the economy is not as weak now, and therefore the bounceback in activity next year won't be as strong. As Larry ... | 85 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. | 3 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. Any other questions? Okay. We are about ready for our go-round. Let me remind you about the proposal to add a long-term line to our projections. The rationale for doing so is that the current system doesn't necessarily let the public know what our views on the steady state of the economy are. To show my own ... | 194 |
fomc | 2,008 | Mr. Chairman, I will begin my remarks this afternoon with a brief update on the conditions in our District. Overall, District economic activity continues to expand moderately, with strengthened energy, agriculture, and export manufacturing more than offsetting the softness in our housing, retail sales, and other types ... | 1,038 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. President Yellen. | 7 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The intermeeting period has been full of surprises. Real-side data came in considerably stronger than I anticipated, so like the Greenbook I have adjusted up my forecast for growth in the current quarter. At the same time, the adverse fundamentals that will weigh on household and business spend... | 1,697 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. President Fisher. | 6 |
fomc | 2,008 | Mr. Chairman, you are going to get a contrapuntal tune here. That is the beauty of this table and the different perspectives around it. I am going to take a different approach today than I have in the past. I am going to talk a bit about the Eleventh District first, which I don't often do. The reason for that is, becau... | 2,210 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. President Lockhart. | 7 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to start with some anecdotal feedback from the region. As you know, we have a lot of Branches, so we have a lot of directors, and we ask our directors a lot of questions. The anecdotal feedback from our 44 directors about the second half can be characterized as subdued. Almost all ... | 1,394 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. President Rosengren. | 8 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Despite some encouraging data recently, the Boston Fed economic outlook continues to see the economy growing below potential over the next several quarters, further weakening in labor markets, and core PCE trending down in response to excess capacity. Overall, our forecast has not changed signi... | 1,121 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. President Plosser. | 8 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In the Third District, as anticipated, manufacturing activity, residential construction, and employment have remained weak. Nonresidential construction has now softened, although vacancy rates in Philadelphia and around the District remain relatively low. Retail sales remain sluggish. Bank lend... | 1,786 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. President Lacker. | 7 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Economic activity in the Fifth District has remained soft in recent weeks. Our retailers report declining activity in June, especially in autos. We are still hearing scattered reports of delayed or canceled new construction projects, either because of a lack of financing or because demand is ex... | 1,339 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. Why don't we take a break until 4:45 and have some coffee. Thank you. | 22 |
fomc | 2,008 | Why don't we reconvene. President Bullard, whenever you are ready. | 15 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The District economy continues to be sluggish. Severe weather, combined with a very wet spring, is hampering agriculture in some areas. Major flooding has caused significant damage already, and the situation continues to develop. Many business contacts in the District emphasize energy costs alo... | 794 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. President Pianalto. | 7 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The last two months have brought an interesting shift in my conversations with my business contacts. Their concerns have shifted from problems in financial markets to the rapid increase in input prices. Energy prices are the focus nationwide, but steel prices are also capturing the attention of... | 1,042 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. President Evans. | 6 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Most of my contacts continued to report sluggish domestic demand, and they are not currently seeing any improvement in activity. In addition, their comments often focused on the substantially higher costs that they are facing for a wide range of nonlabor inputs. With regard to business activity... | 1,547 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. President Stern. | 6 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, like some others--maybe many others--I, too, have raised my forecast for growth for this year, basically just extending what's happening in the first half of the year, and I've raised my projection for growth next year marginally as well. Still, I must admit to some significant reservatio... | 625 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. Vice Chairman. | 6 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think we face an extended period of relatively weak economic growth, quite weak domestic demand growth, and overall growth significantly below trend. I think this is both likely and necessary. It's likely because we have more weakness ahead as the housing drag continues, financial headwinds r... | 1,674 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. Governor Kohn. | 7 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My forecasts for both economic growth and inflation are within the central tendency of the rest of you and a little stronger than the staff's outlook. In fact, my 2008 projections for economic activity for the second half of the year were revised very little from two months ago. Growth turned o... | 1,944 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. Governor Warsh. | 7 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. At this point everything has been said, but everybody hasn't said it. So let me try. [Laughter] Let me make three summary points, and then I will talk about three issues that I think are harder. First, on the economy, through late May, as the Greenbook suggests, the real economy proved more res... | 1,552 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. Governor Kroszner. | 9 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thanks a lot. Well, as I've mentioned many times before, I have thought about this as sort of a long, slow burn scenario; and as we well know, the embers are still smoldering. It seems to be less of a risk that they could re-ignite, causing a major conflagration; but there is still some chance of re-ignition, and I thi... | 1,819 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. Governor Mishkin. | 7 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, we have seen recent data that actually have been stronger than expected. Also as time goes on, there seems to be a lower probability of financial meltdown and these adverse feedback loops that we've all been discussing. But I don't think we want to become too sanguine about the current da... | 2,049 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you, and thank you all. First, on the long-term projections, I think there's consensus that we should just go ahead and have a trial run. The staff should review the transcript and make gold out of straw there. We should consult with the subcommittee, and we should think about maybe even a couple of alternatives.... | 2,988 |
fomc | 2,008 | Good morning, everybody. PARTICIPANTS. Good morning. | 12 |
fomc | 2,008 | We have two major items this morning. We'll first complete the discussion of policy action and the statement; and in the second part of the meeting, we'll discuss supervision of investment banks and some related policy issues. Over lunch, if time permits, we'd like to hear Laricke Blanchard talk about congressional dev... | 90 |
fomc | 2,008 | 4 Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will begin by referring to the draft announcement language in table 1, included in the package labeled "Material for FOMC Briefing on Monetary Policy Alternatives." As Chairman Bernanke noted yesterday, this version is only slightly revised from the version discussed in the Bluebook. Rather... | 2,407 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thank you. Are there questions for Brian? President Lacker. | 13 |
fomc | 2,008 | Thanks, Brian, for including these two new lines of the real federal funds rate. As I remarked yesterday, one use of the figures is to look back and judge the degree of accommodation relative to other historical episodes. My understanding is that the Greenbook forecast of headline inflation four quarters ahead is highe... | 134 |
fomc | 2,008 | Unfortunately, President Lacker, I haven't made that computation, so I can't confirm that. | 18 |
fomc | 2,008 | Okay. Just a comment then. | 7 |
fomc | 2,008 | Governor Mishkin. | 4 |
fomc | 2,008 | Just a quick question: When you do this based on the Greenbook projection for headline inflation, how far forward are you going with headline inflation? | 29 |
fomc | 2,008 | Well, in any given quarter, it's four quarters ahead. | 12 |
fomc | 2,008 | Four quarters ahead. | 4 |
fomc | 2,008 | Yes. | 2 |
fomc | 2,008 | Any other questions? | 4 |
fomc | 2,008 | May I? | 3 |
fomc | 2,008 | Vice Chairman. | 3 |
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