Everything was out of balance and part of figuring out where we are now is figuring out where we were and how many imbalances were built into the economy. |
He [Greenspan] is going to say we're not in a recession, but the risks are very, very high, |
I think investors underestimated (Fed Chairman) Alan Greenspan's sense of show business. |
If the world gets the idea that this is the end of Fed tightening, the stock market will probably like that and you will have higher stock averages. What it boils down to, in terms of the economy, is the standard of living for wage earners is significantly higher. For (George W.) Bush, he has to neutralize that and for (Al) Gore, he has to figure out how to capitalize on that. |
It really is a question of how well the public responds to this. If everybody wants to convert their deposits into cash, there's going to be a big demand for cash during that period. It's unnecessary . |
Once we read the speech we knew it would be a gradual increase, ... The Fed doesn't want to be aggressive without the smoking gun of inflation. |
The economy is not in a recession. This economy had enormous spending imbalances that it had to work out. |
The Fed will deny that they even know there is an election going on. It is, and clearly has to be, a political organization. It is an enormously powerful public agency, and if you don't have a sense of the political structure you're operating in, you won't survive as a political agency. |
The great problem with doing that in real time is people live in real time and almost everybody's default forecasting method is to extrapolate the recent past. |
The mistake some people make about the Fed as a fundamentally, very politically aware organization, is they think that the Fed picks favorites in an election. I think every one of them (Fed governors) will go vote but the politics of the Fed are to defend the Fed. |
There are enormously long lags from a change in exchange rates to impact on production and employment. ...The dollar has already weakened and frankly this kind of move isn't going to matter very much. |
There is nothing that looks at the future capacity to have income as much as the housing sector, and the fact that this sector has held together as well as it has ... is indicative to me that consumers are feeling very good about their economic prospects and that they are going to continue to spend, ... Households are enormously confident and their wages are going up, and they've got income to spend. That's going to make it hard to slow down spending. |
There was an auto industry correction and a high tech inventory correction, and if we can get through that without tipping the economy into a recession then we can get through this. |
They simply don't want a recession. It's an insurance policy. |
They wanted a big splash today. And they got it. |