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fomc | 2,001 | Mr. Chairman, may I suggest that the Committee reconsider using the word "necessary" to describe the reallocation of resources rather than "appropriate"? Several people suggested "necessary" during the course of the discussion and I think it may be a little better there. | 52 |
fomc | 2,001 | I think that's a good suggestion. Is that okay with everybody? SEVERAL. Yes. | 19 |
fomc | 2,001 | I didn't think we could rewrite the press statement as a Committee, but we did! The next meeting is December 11, 2001. We adjourn for lunch. | 35 |
fomc | 2,001 | I would first like to welcome our new members--Susan Bies and Mark Olson. | 17 |
fomc | 2,001 | Thank you. | 3 |
fomc | 2,001 | Thank you. | 3 |
fomc | 2,001 | Would somebody like to move approval of the minutes of our November 6th meeting? | 17 |
fomc | 2,001 | So move. | 3 |
fomc | 2,001 | Is there a second? | 5 |
fomc | 2,001 | Second. | 2 |
fomc | 2,001 | Without objection, they are approved. Mr. Kos. | 11 |
fomc | 2,001 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'll be referring to the charts that were distributed to you this morning. 1 The top panel on the first page shows U.S. and euro-area cash and forward rates. The 3-month U.S. dollar deposit rate, the solid red line, is little changed since your last meeting and as you can see the 3-month forwar... | 2,737 |
fomc | 2,001 | I've been hearing talk in the last week to ten days or so about this issue concerning whether or not we, the United States government, approve of this notion that has surfaced in Tokyo of purchases of long-term U.S. Treasuries by the Bank of Japan. We are the government. What in fact is our opinion on this issue? I gue... | 133 |
fomc | 2,001 | I have had conversations with lower level officials of the Treasury. The views have been somewhat vague in the sense of suggesting that if the yen goes down because of actions taken to stimulate the economy, that's one thing. But if there's a deliberate attempt to weaken the yen, that would be another. | 58 |
fomc | 2,001 | Well, how in the world can you distinguish between purchases for one reason or the other? | 18 |
fomc | 2,001 | Absolutely, that's the difficulty. | 6 |
fomc | 2,001 | Maybe I'll ask somebody the question. I won't have to ask you, though I may have gotten a clearer answer out of you than I will from them! [Laughter] I find this correlation between the 10-year Treasury yield and duration in the mortgage-backed securities market bizarre. It's not a correlation that one normally sees; i... | 121 |
fomc | 2,001 | I haven't looked at that. One should look at it over a decade or so and we haven't looked at it back that far. But I think--and this is only a hypothesis--this correlation has been getting tighter over time and the reason relates to the trends depicted in that top chart on page 3. That is, the mortgage market has been ... | 126 |
fomc | 2,001 | In the study the change has not been that great in the last few months. What would happen if you went back to the spring? Do you have any idea? | 33 |
fomc | 2,001 | I don't, but that is work we will do. | 11 |
fomc | 2,001 | My problem is that when I see somebody publish a chart like this I know the earlier data don't fit because if they did, the producer of the chart would show them. [Laughter] | 38 |
fomc | 2,001 | I haven't looked at that. | 6 |
fomc | 2,001 | Mr. Chairman, they are highly correlated because they are functionally related. The prepayment speed is a function of the level of mortgage yields, and given the close relationship-- | 35 |
fomc | 2,001 | Yes, I know that. Sure. | 8 |
fomc | 2,001 | Right. And if you look at a short period where there hasn't been much change in the underlying pool of mortgages, that function is going to show up as much closer. If you stretch this back over time, where there is a bigger diversity in the outstanding pools of mortgages, then the correlation will be changing. So I thi... | 107 |
fomc | 2,001 | Clearly, the 10-year Treasury note is a crucial element in the calculation of the option-adjusted duration. | 22 |
fomc | 2,001 | Exactly. It's a crucial element given the net extent of the distribution of mortgages. In a relatively short period of time, the distribution of mortgages isn't changing so you really see the function. Over time, as the distribution of mortgages changes--as some age and as prepayments occur--then you're going to see a ... | 97 |
fomc | 2,001 | Further questions for Dino? | 5 |
fomc | 2,001 | I move approval of the domestic operations. | 8 |
fomc | 2,001 | Without objection, they are approved. We'll now move to the economic situation. David. Oh, today it's a "double David." Karen is back? | 30 |
fomc | 2,001 | Yes. | 2 |
fomc | 2,001 | Karen, I hope your mother is doing well. | 10 |
fomc | 2,001 | Yes, she is, thank you. | 8 |
fomc | 2,001 | Gentlemen. | 4 |
fomc | 2,001 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The data that we have received over the past month presented the usual ups and downs for us to contend with. But before I discuss the details of our interpretation of that news, I thought I would take this rare opportunity to make the case that, at least in broad terms, events are unfolding jus... | 2,403 |
fomc | 2,001 | Our overall outlook for foreign economic activity is little changed from the outlook we had at the November FOMC meeting. We see continued weakness in the near term, with a recovery taking hold during the course of next year. In 2003, foreign growth is projected at about 3-1/2 percent. Our forecast reflects importantly... | 690 |
fomc | 2,001 | Questions for our colleagues? President Poole? | 9 |
fomc | 2,001 | When I look at the details of the forecast, clearly the timing of the consumer recovery is an important piece of this story. And I think your forecast has a significant increase in the saving rate in the first quarter of next year and a continuing negative on consumer durables, which I assume is a good part automobiles... | 209 |
fomc | 2,001 | That argument certainly makes sense. It is actually an issue that we have struggled with and in some sense we revised up our forecast a bit in the face of both the response to the strength in auto sales and what we can see happening with motor vehicle production going forward. In our view, however, that would not imply... | 215 |
fomc | 2,001 | Vice Chair. | 3 |
fomc | 2,001 | At our board meeting last week at the New York Fed we had a considerable discussion about the possible effect on the economy of additional terrorist activity. My own view is that the big surprise of 9/11 was that we thought it couldn't happen here and that if there is more terrorist activity, the American people will r... | 98 |
fomc | 2,001 | I think that is exactly what is implicit in this forecast. As I believe we noted at the time of the October meeting, we just didn't know how to cope with such an event in the forecast other than to make the assumption that it won't occur or that if it does, it won't have a big effect. But that clearly looms out there a... | 102 |
fomc | 2,001 | President Jordan. | 3 |
fomc | 2,001 | Thank you. David, as always, I can't quarrel with the baseline forecast because I don't have an alternative that is more convincing or in which I have more confidence. And I always find the alternative simulations and assumptions that you provide to be useful. But this time more than usual I have a problem reconciling ... | 379 |
fomc | 2,001 | Where I might differ with your presumption of how these developments could unfold is with respect to long-term interest rates. We think a couple of things are going on there. One is that we would expect, if the Committee were not raising interest rates as much as the markets currently expect--or as the markets began to... | 225 |
fomc | 2,001 | But your answer suggests that the consensus private sector forecast is for even stronger growth than in your baseline forecast of 4-1/2 percent real GDP in the third quarter and 6 percent nominal. That's not what I saw in the last Blue Chip forecast. | 52 |
fomc | 2,001 | Yes, indeed. But I don't think the Blue Chip forecast or our forecast is consistent with what is currently built into fed funds futures. In some sense the experiment that we tried to construct in the Greenbook was to ask how much of an upward revision would the markets have had to make in their outlook. Now, that wasn'... | 151 |
fomc | 2,001 | President Moskow. | 4 |
fomc | 2,001 | I had a question on the stimulus package. You identified rather clearly what the short-term benefits are, and you obviously placed a lot of emphasis on that. I was just wondering if you've given any thought to the longer-term impact of this package beyond the forecast horizon, particularly as it would affect multifacto... | 80 |
fomc | 2,001 | I don't think there are very significant longer-term costs in the package we have designed. We have designed a package that we thought was sensible--and we still do think it's quite sensible from an economic perspective. Whether it makes any sense politically is a different matter. It was designed to provide stimulus f... | 204 |
fomc | 2,001 | But I think the question was more related to what I assume is the effect of moving up a tranche of capital investment and getting an earlier technology. | 29 |
fomc | 2,001 | Yes. | 2 |
fomc | 2,001 | And presumably that's suboptimal from a market point of view, but the question basically is whether the effect is big enough to make a difference. | 28 |
fomc | 2,001 | The suboptimal part I'd say would be of a second order. Certainly in the longer run, because that package goes away, the cost of capital is not affected. You'd still have the same capital-output ratio over the longer haul and the same level of productivity at some point. | 56 |
fomc | 2,001 | The capital-output ratio is the same but the composition of the capital may not be optimal or as effective as-- | 22 |
fomc | 2,001 | Certainly to the extent that temporary tax policy is used to provide the stimulus, private decisions are distorted in the short run, and we would have a suboptimal capital stock. But I think that would be a pretty small effect. | 45 |
fomc | 2,001 | Have you actually done any analysis on this, David? Is there anything written--any papers or studies--on it? | 24 |
fomc | 2,001 | Well, since the proposal of some kind of temporary tax incentive was put forward, we've been working hard to develop the analytical apparatus. Obviously we have a couple of problems in doing that. One is that there just aren't enough observations in the data to justify thinking that we're going to be able to estimate t... | 222 |
fomc | 2,001 | President Minehan. | 4 |
fomc | 2,001 | Let me explore a couple of related issues. Dino talked about the different explanations various market participants are giving regarding the jump in the yield curves. A couple of people that I've talked to in the Boston area really have been affected, in terms of the way they look at the market, by the level of volatil... | 310 |
fomc | 2,001 | With respect to the financial markets' assumptions, to the extent that some of the factors that Dino cited have been at work, one wouldn't necessarily expect those to persist over the next two years. | 38 |
fomc | 2,001 | Right. | 2 |
fomc | 2,001 | And in some sense we have not level-adjusted our forecast for all of the recent upward movement in long-term interest rates on the assumption that some of that will fade away over the course of the first half of the year, as the situation becomes clear. So that volatility goes down. On the stock market portion of it, I... | 366 |
fomc | 2,001 | Just an observation, President Minehan. It is certainly true that if you look at implied volatilities on bond contracts, either the 10-year or the long-term Treasury securities, they are very much elevated. They are in a range we haven't seen since 1993; in some way it's similar to the observed volatility that Dino sho... | 91 |
fomc | 2,001 | Yes, it was the bond market volatility. | 9 |
fomc | 2,001 | It isn't obvious that the equity markets are more uncertain now than they were for most of this year. And in the Greenbook financial projection David didn't respond completely to the run-up in long-term yields over this intermeeting period in the same way he didn't respond completely to the remarkable and inexplicable ... | 120 |
fomc | 2,001 | Yes. | 2 |
fomc | 2,001 | So some of the run-up we've gotten in this period reflects some rollback of what we saw last year. | 21 |
fomc | 2,001 | How far are we from inserting some mortgage-backed security duration variable in our macro model? | 17 |
fomc | 2,001 | Far enough that I don't care to comment! [Laughter] I don't see any immediate prospect. | 20 |
fomc | 2,001 | I'm wondering because this conversation is leading us in a very peculiar direction. What concerns me about it is that we are seeing this very high sensitivity to long-term mortgage rates, for example in the extraction of home equity that tends to lead promptly to consumption expenditures. I wonder whether or not we're ... | 128 |
fomc | 2,001 | All the macro simulations you will care about will be at the shortest a quarterly frequency; and probably you'll really only want to think about it in terms of year-by-year effects. A lot of these market mechanisms, including the changes in the duration of mortgage-backed securities, affect the amplitude of interest ra... | 95 |
fomc | 2,001 | I know you're not because it's not in the forecast! [Laughter] | 15 |
fomc | 2,001 | Well, we'd still think those longer-term rates would be strongly linked to saving and investment flows in the economy. That would be important. I will anxiously await Dino's further research on this correlation between the option-adjusted duration and the 10-year Treasury. I wouldn't want to ignore an important piece o... | 65 |
fomc | 2,001 | That research project got shifted to New York! [Laughter] | 13 |
fomc | 2,001 | President Parry. | 4 |
fomc | 2,001 | I'd like to ask two short questions. The first one is to Dave Stockton and perhaps Don Kohn. In the Greenbook and also the Monday morning briefing there was a report about the Michigan survey of one-year-ahead inflation expectations, indicating that it dropped to 2.8 percent in September, to 1 percent in October, to 0.... | 163 |
fomc | 2,001 | Well, certainly, the point we were trying to make in our briefing was that we also find this very interesting. We pretty much wrote those data off when they dropped those first two months, thinking that it was completely outside historical experience. We were inclined to think it was a fluke. The longer the decline per... | 90 |
fomc | 2,001 | So, you don't think policy is as easy as you previously thought? | 14 |
fomc | 2,001 | Well, maybe Don will want to comment as well. But I certainly don't think that there has been a 2-1/2 percentage point rise in real short-term interest rates as perceived by anyone involved in spending decisions at this point. However, the survey results might be, on the margin, a reading that you would want to take on... | 100 |
fomc | 2,001 | I certainly agree with what Dave said. And the fact that long-term inflation expectations haven't changed very much would lead one to discount this survey result a bit. The question would be whether the implied rise in real short-term rates is exerting upward pressure on intermediate- and long-term rates. But I think w... | 149 |
fomc | 2,001 | I'd also like to ask Dave Howard a quick question. The revision to the forecast for Japan is pretty stunning, particularly real growth being revised down 1/2 percent in 2002. In addition, there's deflation in every quarter through 2003. One has to begin to wonder about the impact of this in the financial sector. My que... | 102 |
fomc | 2,001 | I think it's safe to say that it is a major risk. We have the Japanese economy coming back a bit toward the end of the period, mainly because world economic growth picks up. The Japanese do not yet appear to be fully ready to take the kinds of measures that need to be taken to remedy their problems. We see the problems... | 86 |
fomc | 2,001 | Thank you. | 3 |
fomc | 2,001 | President Minehan. | 4 |
fomc | 2,001 | Just one follow-up question. I wasn't very clear before on the issue of the drop in inflation expectations. With inflation being a measure of resource capacity use--whether or not we have excess capacity--is it possible that the declining inflation expectations are telling us something about people's expectations about... | 83 |
fomc | 2,001 | It could be, except that in the same survey from which those inflation expectations are drawn the unemployment expectations haven't really deteriorated as much. | 27 |
fomc | 2,001 | They haven't dropped at all? | 6 |
fomc | 2,001 | They have deteriorated some but nowhere near as much as one might have imagined if the outlook for inflation were the primary motivation. It could just be that people are thinking that 2002 will be an excellent year in terms of low consumer prices. Obviously, people could be hearing about zero percent financing for aut... | 106 |
fomc | 2,001 | The longer-term inflation expectations embedded in the yield curve dipped right after the September attacks, hit a low point at the end of October, and have come back up again. But on balance they haven't changed appreciably since last summer. So they're not showing the same-- | 53 |
fomc | 2,001 | The same bounce as the shorter-term expectations. | 9 |
fomc | 2,001 | President Jordan. | 3 |
fomc | 2,001 | On that same point, Dave, in the Michigan survey the 5-to-10-year inflation outlook didn't budge. And the survey that our people do together with the folks at Ohio State University showed the same thing. That survey indicated a very near-term drop in inflation, which correlates with people's experiences at the gas pump... | 98 |
fomc | 2,001 | Further questions for our colleagues? If not, who would like to start the Committee discussion? President Parry. | 22 |
fomc | 2,001 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Economic conditions in the Twelfth District have been weak, but there were a few signs of improvement recently. It's now clear that the terrorist attacks severely damaged economic conditions in tourist-dependent areas. In October, travel-related employment fell about 3 percent in Hawaii and Nev... | 1,043 |
fomc | 2,001 | President Moskow | 3 |
fomc | 2,001 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Seventh District economy remains weak and I must admit I'm having difficulty reconciling the numerous press reports of an imminent recovery with what I'm hearing from my business contacts. So far, most contacts in the Seventh District are not seeing signs of a bottom, let alone a recovery. ... | 1,011 |
fomc | 2,001 | President McTeer. | 5 |
fomc | 2,001 | It appears that the economy in the Dallas District has finally joined the national recession. Growth has been slowing since the fall of 2000, but employment continued to rise until this past September. The widespread layoffs in the travel and entertainment industry, combined with reductions in high-tech employment and ... | 812 |
fomc | 2,001 | President Hoenig. | 4 |
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