Federal Reserve press conference, 2016-06-15 — Chair Janet Yellen

Question (Martin Crutsinger, Associated Press): Marty Crutsinger with the Associated Press. When the April minutes were released, they caught markets by surprise. In there, they showed—they seemed to show that there was an active discussion of a possible June rate increase, something that we hadn’t gotten from the policy statement that was issued right after the meeting. Was that a conscious decision to hold back and tell us in—when the minutes came out about the June discussion? And if so, could you tell us what surprises we could see in the June minutes?
Answer: So the minutes are always—have to be an accurate discussion of what happened at the meeting. So they’re not changed after the fact in order to correct possible misconceptions. There was a good deal of discussion at that meeting of the possibility of moving in June, and that appeared in the minutes. I suppose in the April statement, we gave no obvious hint or kind of calendar-based signal that June was a possibility. But I think if you look at the statement, we pointed to slower growth but pointed out that the fundamentals—there was no obvious fundamental reason for growth to have slowed. And we pointed to fundamentals underlying household spending decisions that remained on solid ground, suggesting that maybe this was something transitory that would disappear. We noted that labor market conditions continued to improve in line with our expectations, and we did downgrade somewhat our expressions of concern about the global risk environment. So I do think that there were hints in the April statement that the Committee was changing its views of what it was seeing in a direction. We continue to say that we think, if economic developments evolve in line with our expectations, the gradual and cautious further increases we expect to be appropriate. And I suppose I was somewhat surprised with the market interpretation of it. But the June meeting minutes—the minutes of the April meeting were an accurate summary of what had happened.