[This is the most sluggish recovery on record, which seems to puzzle the Fed chairman. But it reflects the Greenspan style of running things; he presided over a similarly tepid recovery in the early 1990s. Tom Schlesinger, director of the Financial Markets Center, a monetary-policy watchdog, thinks the lopsided economy is the most disturbing hallmark of Greenspan's governance.] The Fed has said almost nothing about this, except [vice chairman] Roger Ferguson says there's nothing the Fed can do particularly, ... The jobless recovery appears to be a new feature of the US business cycle. Yet the principal agent of economic management says nothing. |
As a group, they will have a sense they have something to prove and that what they have to prove is they can be tough on price stability. |
At a basic and obvious level, it ties into gut level concern of ordinary people. |
Bush has done a good job of using his free hand to break from a narrow group of selections in terms of background. |
Certainly the Fed has voiced more concern over inflation for public consumption that it has in previous years, so it's not surprising that markets would respond accordingly. It just really doesn't jive very well with the facts on the ground. |
Greenspan is an orthodox thinker in most ways, but you have give him credit for questioning consensus thinking. |
He does have an academic background. He had to make things clear to undergraduate students, even if they were undergraduate students at Princeton. |
He might try to draw a bright line in the hearing - say that he won't be drawn into commenting on issues not directly related to the Fed's responsibilities, ... We'll have to see how that plays. It is important that the Fed chairman be seen as independent. |
He's Alan Greenspan all purpose sage, ... He seldom has anyone tell him, 'Why don't you be more like Fed chairman of the past?' |
I remember thinking, man, if you think that's problematic, wait until you stick around Washington a little bit longer. |
I would be nervous about picking an inflation-targeting champion as my next Fed chairman given the potential impact on employment growth. |
I would bet anything they rue the day they got trapped into these terms like measured, patient. The signals Greenspan and others have given is that measured still the way they want to present their stance. It's now measured with a 'but,' behind it though. |
It will come at a really interesting time because the Fed has been so much more successful in recent years than central banks in countries that favored a more rule-oriented approach. One has to wonder why the Fed would abandon the approach that has worked so well. |
It would be unhealthy for the Fed to get bogged down in an internal debate about the merits and demerits of inflation targeting if it prevented |
It'd be fascinating to hear what he thinks, if he'd actually tell you. The guys who are most frequently mentioned for the job are all ivory tower types. I don't think anyone has the breadth and experience dealing with the business community as Greenspan did when he came on the job. Certainly they don't have as much experience as he accumulated in the past 17 years. |