Source stringclasses 1
value | Date int64 1.98k 2.01k | Text stringlengths 2 27.1k | Token_count int64 1 5.57k |
|---|---|---|---|
fomc | 2,002 | But shreds are not conclusive. | 8 |
fomc | 2,002 | I agree. But what we're struggling with at this point is, as I said, that it's very difficult to hypothesize that all of this increase in productivity we have seen has been structural. | 38 |
fomc | 2,002 | Well, I think it's impossible. | 7 |
fomc | 2,002 | That would be a very significant increase. So what we've done in the forecast is to assume that underlying productivity has been better over the past several years and will continue to be better over the forecast period than we had previously expected. But even with that upward shift in the level and the trend of produ... | 215 |
fomc | 2,002 | And it's very difficult to find significant indications that the data are themselves a problem. In fact, we have three independent sources of hours. We obviously have the formal hours that we create out of the payroll system. We have the household hours numbers, which look very much the same or if anything imply even a... | 92 |
fomc | 2,002 | I would note that in addition to that we also have measures of output from the product side, from the income side, and from industrial production. | 29 |
fomc | 2,002 | Exactly. | 2 |
fomc | 2,002 | No matter how we put those data together, in whatever combination we look at them we see a significant acceleration in productivity over the last couple of quarters. | 30 |
fomc | 2,002 | Yes. There is no evidence that the statistical discrepancy is a big issue. Parts of the GDP data, as you point out, are hard data. For example, we have full coverage of the motor vehicle industry for all practical purposes. The data would have to be tortured to alter the path significantly. So this is a very fascinatin... | 143 |
fomc | 2,002 | Yes, roughly speaking. It was a small revision, but still a downward revision. | 17 |
fomc | 2,002 | That's still a direction. So, it's really an extraordinary dilemma. Further questions? President Parry. | 20 |
fomc | 2,002 | Dave, in the baseline forecast you assumed that the prices of equities would increase through the end of next year. In view of the concern about corporate earnings and also the fact that almost every valuation model suggests that equity markets are overvalued, I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on the reasons why th... | 65 |
fomc | 2,002 | Well, as you know, over time we have struggled with what a neutral assumption means for the stock market. At times when we were more confident in our view that the market was overvalued, we just projected a flat nominal rate. With the equity premium having moved back up some distance and with forward price-earnings rat... | 285 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you. | 3 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Poole. | 4 |
fomc | 2,002 | This is a question that stems from a comment my Wal-Mart contact made to me yesterday. Apparently there's a longshoremen's contract on the West Coast that expires on June 1, and I didn't know whether you were aware of that or not. He said that Wal-Mart feels there's a 50-50 chance of a strike by those longshoremen some... | 135 |
fomc | 2,002 | I don't, and we haven't incorporated it in this forecast. So obviously that's something we'll want to take a look at. | 24 |
fomc | 2,002 | We do know what Wal-Mart's inventory levels are, or at least I presume that we could estimate them reasonably well. | 24 |
fomc | 2,002 | This wouldn't necessarily be a top line GDP figure. It may be something that Karen would need to take account of in her import forecast. | 27 |
fomc | 2,002 | All I'm saying is that it could distort the numbers that we're looking at in terms of both inventories and imports. And if that is happening, we need to know that. | 34 |
fomc | 2,002 | Yes. | 2 |
fomc | 2,002 | Further questions? If not, would somebody like to start the Committee discussion? President Moskow. | 19 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The story from the Seventh District is very much the same as in March. Our economy is recovering, but I'm hearing a lot of mixed messages from my contacts. There's a good deal of concern as to whether the rebound will have legs. Manufacturing in the District continues to improve, led by invento... | 902 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Parry. | 4 |
fomc | 2,002 | Mr. Chairman, economic recovery is taking hold in most of the West, as indicated by the modest increase in District employment in recent months. One lagging area is the Pacific Northwest, reflecting that region's dependence on high-tech manufacturing and aerospace. Consumer spending and confidence are up in the West at... | 897 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Minehan. | 4 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Since our last meeting, economic conditions in New England on balance seem to have stabilized. The region continues to lose jobs but at a slower pace than before, and its unemployment rate, while rising, remains well below that of the nation. Consumer and business confidence surged recently, an... | 329 |
fomc | 2,002 | You're the boss! [Laughter] | 8 |
fomc | 2,002 | Everybody on my staff, I should say. Manufacturing remains the one major area in which caution is the byword. Contacts continue to report disappointing revenues, negative profit growth, and continued laser-like focus on cost reduction. Some manufacturers, especially those in the defense and consumer goods businesses, a... | 780 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Jordan. | 3 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Probably the best indicator that economic activity in the region continues to improve gradually, yet business people remain very cautious, is the widespread increase in the demand for temporary workers. Like Mike Moskow, we have heard more about that recently, especially from advisory council m... | 1,206 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Santomero. | 5 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. At our last meeting in March I reported that economic recovery was taking shape in the Third District. That recovery continues, albeit at a moderate pace. I spent the last month traveling around our District to a series of meetings with bankers and business people. Most of these contacts told m... | 1,293 |
fomc | 2,002 | Excuse me, what was the .88 correlation between? | 12 |
fomc | 2,002 | The .88 was a one-quarter-ahead correlation between the change in capacity utilization and future spending on equipment and software. | 24 |
fomc | 2,002 | In manufacturing capital expenditures? | 5 |
fomc | 2,002 | Yes, spending on equipment and software. | 8 |
fomc | 2,002 | Total? | 2 |
fomc | 2,002 | Yes, the cyclical components. | 7 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you. President Guynn. | 7 |
fomc | 2,002 | Mr. Chairman, economic conditions in the Southeast are improving marginally but at the same time remain quite mixed. Several sectors began the second quarter with modest growth or signs of improvement, whereas some other areas continued to display significant weakness. For example, retail sales rose modestly in March, ... | 1,545 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Broaddus. | 5 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The information we're getting on the Fifth District economy currently is quite consistent with the national picture painted in the Greenbook. Growth at the national level for now is being driven primarily by diminished liquidation of goods inventories, and the same seems clearly to be true in o... | 1,151 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Stern. | 3 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Overall the tenor of the anecdotes in the Ninth District has improved recently. Let me just give you a quick rundown of that. Housing and residential construction, which has been a bright spot, remains a bright spot. Activity is strong, and sales of upper-end homes, which had slowed for a time,... | 487 |
fomc | 2,002 | President McTeer. | 5 |
fomc | 2,002 | Mr. Chairman, earlier you had a dialogue with Karen about what was the best way to get across the street. Since my prepared remarks are very brief this morning, let me tell you a joke about that. I heard it as a blond joke, but in deference to Cathy I'm going to change it to an Aggie joke. Aggie number one saw his budd... | 115 |
fomc | 2,002 | I think next time you better lengthen your remarks! [Laughter] | 15 |
fomc | 2,002 | The Eleventh District economy is showing more signs of strength than were apparent at the last meeting. In March growth was tepid and tentative; now business conditions overall are a little stronger. There are fewer signs of backtracking, and prospects for a sustainable recovery seem to have improved. The tone of our B... | 441 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Hoenig. | 4 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Tenth District economy is showing clear signs of improvement, although the recovery still is a bit sluggish in Colorado. I would also say that the manufacturing sector is showing clear signs of a turnaround. Our latest manufacturing survey found that production and shipments strengthened in... | 1,237 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Poole. | 4 |
fomc | 2,002 | Mr. Chairman, I've talked with a variety of business people all around the Eighth District in the last six weeks. The overall tone of their comments is that the economic situation just doesn't feel as positive as implied by the GDP number reported for the first quarter. It just doesn't seem to fit. In my view what prob... | 615 |
fomc | 2,002 | Vice Chair. | 3 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Second District's economy has been giving mixed signals since the last report, which is what we've been hearing from around the country. There are scattered signs of increased price pressures, mainly in manufacturing inputs and shelter costs. But overall, inflation remains relatively subdue... | 686 |
fomc | 2,002 | Governor Ferguson. | 3 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As others have already noted, the data and anecdotal information are sending very mixed signals about the strength of the recovery. I would like to bring another topic into the range of our discussion. This has been a particularly wet spring here in Washington. And since this Committee deals wi... | 460 |
fomc | 2,002 | I'm glad President McTeer is not going next! [Laughter] Governor Gramlich. | 19 |
fomc | 2,002 | You took the words right out of my mouth! [Laughter] I'm going to be brief, too, and I have no metaphor or Aggie jokes or anything of that sort. In some sense, very little has changed since our last meeting. There is still the tension between consumption and investment, still the tension between the CEOs and their busi... | 550 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you, I think we can take a break and complete the roundtable after the break. We're running well ahead of any historical schedule, so we can have a little longer break than usual if we choose to. | 43 |
fomc | 2,002 | Governor Bies. | 4 |
fomc | 2,002 | At this meeting I continue to believe that the consumer is the mainstay of the economy. And with disposable income back near pre-September 11 levels, I expect the consumer to continue to be the mainstay even though, as we said earlier in the day, consumer confidence could be very fragile given the news on the political... | 604 |
fomc | 2,002 | Governor Olson. | 3 |
fomc | 2,002 | The discussion in the Greenbook and the discussion today have focused on the conclusion that the economy is expanding but that there has been a lack of business participation through capital spending. The issue has not been whether but when the business community might participate to a greater extent. In other meetings... | 411 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you very much. Don Kohn. | 9 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you, Mr. Chairman. At the time of your March meeting, you had just received a string of surprisingly strong readings on demand and activity. The tone of that information motivated the decision to shift the balance of risks statement to neutral, and many of you expressed concern that the momentum of economic expan... | 2,171 |
fomc | 2,002 | Thank you very much. Questions for Don? President Parry. | 13 |
fomc | 2,002 | Don, I have a question about the perfect foresight policy. I think that's a very useful exercise, and one thing that's interesting to me is that there is an assumption that the value of the dollar depreciates at a rate of 3 percent per year. That certainly is reasonable, but our experience of recent years suggests that... | 164 |
fomc | 2,002 | Vince can comment on this since he did the Bluebook, but I believe the dollar depreciation occurs after the Greenbook forecast period. So it's after 2003. But you're right that after that point presumably a higher dollar would tend to damp the growth of output in the United States, would damp inflation, and--other thin... | 86 |
fomc | 2,002 | And that assumed dollar depreciation beyond the Greenbook forecast horizon is really capturing the tension that Karen noted in her assumption that the dollar remains flat. There are conflicting tensions, of course, with the most notable one being that if we didn't have that assumed dollar depreciation, the current acco... | 91 |
fomc | 2,002 | Well, it would be interesting to know the degree of sensitivity of that on the perfect foresight policy discussion. | 22 |
fomc | 2,002 | That is something we could easily incorporate in future Bluebooks, subject to our ability to solve the model when the current account deficit begins to grind even lower. | 31 |
fomc | 2,002 | Okay. Thank you. | 5 |
fomc | 2,002 | Governor Gramlich. | 4 |
fomc | 2,002 | Bob's question was about chart 4, and I'm on chart 5. If you told us a priori that you were going to get the equilibrium real rate by various kinds of simulations of models and using the TIPS rate, I think we all would have said fine, that's the way to do it. But one thing I've been observing--it has been true for a wh... | 150 |
fomc | 2,002 | I can talk about it; I'm not sure I'll necessarily be wise! I would note that we see a substantial uptick in the upper bound to the equilibrium funds rate around the end of 1997, the beginning of 1998. That corresponds with the introduction of the TIPS-based measure because that's when we had a fully articulated term s... | 225 |
fomc | 2,002 | I think the problem is even broader in the sense that the inflation compensation is really not that. It's a forecast of the CPI. And if the CPI has an upward bias relative to true inflation, then that poses an even more difficult problem--that the real rate is still higher ten years and out. | 60 |
fomc | 2,002 | Especially when there are significant changes in energy prices, which could have a bigger effect on the indexed debt real rate. | 23 |
fomc | 2,002 | I think this is also a manifestation of a lingering difference between the staff's assessment of the strength of demand and the market's assessment. Dave Stockton noted that the market and the staff had come perhaps closer together as the market revised its assessment down. But I think there is still some difference th... | 98 |
fomc | 2,002 | Yes, the fact is that the further-ahead futures rates from the eurodollar term structure are much higher than we would have in the Greenbook forecast and would imply real rates in the neighborhood--if you believe our inflation forecast--as high as these indexed readings. | 54 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Broaddus. | 5 |
fomc | 2,002 | I'd just like to make a quick pitch, Mr. Chairman, to have this "perfect foresight" simulation in every Bluebook. I find that very helpful because it allows us to consider short-run policy alternatives in the context of a longer-run strategy that really is focused on our goals. If we have more discussion of it along th... | 100 |
fomc | 2,002 | Any further questions for Don? If not, let me comment. I'll be brief, as all of you said, too. But then you revised and extended your remarks! [Laughter] This is probably a rather easy monetary policy decision. I sense from virtually everybody a desire to stay where we are with respect to the balance of risks statement... | 1,140 |
fomc | 2,002 | Three years probably. | 4 |
fomc | 2,002 | Oh, it's more than three years, isn't it? | 11 |
fomc | 2,002 | A budget resolution? | 4 |
fomc | 2,002 | No, I mean that this far into the season the Senate has not passed a budget resolution. | 19 |
fomc | 2,002 | I don't know the timing. | 6 |
fomc | 2,002 | I think it has been a long time since that last happened. The erosion in fiscal control is becoming very evident. Without a budget resolution there is no real cap on appropriations committees, and when we're in a political year who knows what will happen! Nevertheless, the budget is an ultimate threat out there, though... | 992 |
fomc | 2,002 | Mr. Chairman, I concur with your recommendation. | 10 |
fomc | 2,002 | Governor Ferguson. | 3 |
fomc | 2,002 | Mr. Chairman, I agree with your recommendation as well. | 12 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Guynn. | 4 |
fomc | 2,002 | Mr. Chairman, I agree as well. | 9 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Parry. | 4 |
fomc | 2,002 | I agree. | 3 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Stern. | 3 |
fomc | 2,002 | I agree also. | 4 |
fomc | 2,002 | President Moskow. | 4 |
fomc | 2,002 | I agree with your recommendation, Mr. Chairman. | 10 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.