Speeches, Interviews, Essays

Forward Guidance “This and other forward guidance provided throughout that fall had an immediate impact. Almost overnight, financial conditions tightened. Market participants began pricing in expected future rate hikes, and businesses and households started readying themselves for a new interest rate landscape, pulling forward real estate purchases, restructuring debt obligations, and locking in longer-term fixed-rate…

Fed Funds “Right now, inflation expectations seem to have stayed stable and we’ve taken rates up now almost to 4.00%, so if inflation stays high we’ll keep doing what we need to do on rates.” Restrictive “The way I think about is, it’s helpful to be somewhat more cautious as you’re in restrictive territory, because…

Fed Funds “Yeah. I would refer listeners and viewers to my speech in Louisville last week, which was all about the level of the policy rate that would be sufficiently restrictive. And the answer in that talk, which used tailor type monetary policy rules, was 5 to 7%. So, I do think that the committee…

“The experience with the pandemic and the war highlights the challenges for monetary policy in responding to a protracted series of adverse supply shocks. In addition, to the extent that the lower elasticity of supply we have seen recently could become more common due to challenges such as demographics, deglobalization, and climate change, it could…

Inflation Explained“In this allium analogy, there are three distinct layers. The outermost layer consists of prices of globally traded commodities—such as lumber, steel, grains, and oil. When the global economy rebounded from the pandemic recession, there was a surge in demand for these critical goods, leading to sizable imbalances between supply and demand and large…

An Academic Conference Speech “So my comments here are going to depart from the equations and from the modeling, and I am going to turn to this topic as a consumer of this literature and talk about some of the more qualitative aspects of these idea.” “I’ll close with this example, I think, because it’s…

An Academic Conference Speech “This is an academic talk that I’ve presented before in 2021 if you want to see more detail.” “I thought I’d use my time to talk about this deck here about Classic Policy Benchmarks for Economies with Substantial Inequality. This is part of a broader research agenda, which I’m going to…

Speech Sufficiently Restrictive “As we work to bring policy to a sufficiently restrictive stance—the level required to bring inflation down and restore price stability—we will need to be mindful. Adjusting too little will leave inflation too high. Adjusting too much could lead to an unnecessarily painful downturn.” “Historically, we’ve used progress on the federal funds…

Pause “Well, I think we’re entering a period now where the Fed policy, the funds rate is just entering a restrictive stance. So that’s the way I like to think about it.  We moved rates up very expeditiously, we did four 75 basis point raises in a row, we’re up 375 basis points on the…

Inflation and Restrictive Level “In short, we must get inflation on a clear trajectory toward 2 percent. The first step toward that outcome is to raise interest rates to a restrictive level sufficient to drive inflation back to our objective. The challenge, of course, is to determine what constitutes sufficiently restrictive given the tremendous uncertainty…