kakeith406/op-fed huggingface dataset:
Prior discussion:
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: President Hoskins. 
speaker: MR. HOSKINS.
text: Mr. Chairman, I wanted to come here today also and congratulate Mike by confirming that the recovery started in the quarter in which he called it. However, I was not able to get hold of Mr. Smuckers to get my apple butter index and come down here and report. And that's unfortunate; that index is really reliable. 
speaker: MR. TRUMAN.
text: Mike had two quarters! 

MR. HOSKINS. "The District isn't showing anything much different from what anybody else's District seems to be showing, at least from what I've heard here."


Opinion: no
Prior discussion:
speaker: MR. KEEHN.
text: Mr. Chairman, I agree with Bob Forrestal. I would prefer to ease now in the direction of "A" but certainly find "B" with asymmetric language acceptable. 
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: President Boehne. 
speaker: MR. BOEHNE.
text: "B" asymmetric. 
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: President Jordan. 

MR. JORDAN. "I would be with John LaWare on preferring symmetric language at this point because I think things are in motion except--and this is not a policy issue but a communications issue--if we went with symmetric now, when that is released in the middle of October after the next meeting I would expect that the headlines would read that the Committee had tightened."

Full utterance: I feel a lot more comfortable with several [recent] developments: the rebound in July in reserve growth, in the monetary base, and in Ml, whereas everything was negative in June. And I would want to see that--especially [the growth in] reserves--continue to be positive. I wouldn't want foreign operations to show up and drain reserves. Partial analysis, of course, [indicates that] they do, but I would hope that would be offset, or sterilized, consciously or not either way. I would be with John LaWare on preferring symmetric language at this point because I think things are in motion except--and this is not a policy issue but a communications issue--if we went with symmetric now, when that is released in the middle of October after the next meeting I would expect that the headlines would read that the Committee had tightened. And that is enough to dissuade me from changing the directive even though my preference would be to do so.

Opinion: yes
About monetary policy: yes
Stance toward easing (NLI): contradiction
Prior discussion:
speaker: MR. PARRY.
text: It seems to me it would be desirable to make 3 points in the testimony. The first is the one you emphasized, that this is a technical adjustment designed to accommodate a decline in money demand and, therefore, it wouldn't be expected to produce lower growth in 1993. The other thing that might be worth noting is that the adjustment is really consistent with our prior inflation goals and doesn't represent any attempt on our part to increase the pace of disinflation. And, finally, we all have been talking about the uncertainties associated with this whole exercise, and I think it may be well just to confront very directly the possibility that M2 and M3 could undershoot even this adjusted target; I'd make that point clear. 
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: President Melzer. 

MR. MELZER. "I think some reduction in the M2 range is important."

Full utterance: I had some similar thoughts, but I would favor alternative II, though I could certainly live with what you have suggested. I think some reduction in the M2 range is important. I don't think one can emphasize too much this credibility point that you made and [the need to avoid] any perception whatsoever that we're caving in to political pressures. It's not just a question of the Fed's credibility as an institution. I think it's very important to U.S. economic policy right now in general that we guard that credibility. I have suggestions similar to Bob's with respect to things that could be said. There is the technical issue. I think the way to deal with Bob's point on inflation may simply be to say something along the lines of: "Just recognize the progress that has been made in bringing inflation down." That in a sense is a technical argument, too, that ought to be recognized in the ranges as a technical point without any implications with respect to rattling the saber. As to the future, I think Bob's point on controllability is a good one, as is what you said about controllability; it's something I've agreed with for a long time. I think the value of M2 when it was behaving was never as a target but as an indicator of what was going on in nominal GDP and not something that we could influence. I guess that raises another possibility in terms of things you might say, a la Steve Axilrod's suggestion, but it might not be a bad idea to point out at this time that we need to look at a broad range of things: other monetary indicators, the behavior of the economy, etc. It's just a good time to make the point that we're required to set these--you've made this point before--but we look at a broad range of indicators in making policy decisions. When you said "forget the whole thing," I trust what you were talking about was that at this point in time, given the uncertainties, it would be a mistake if we as the central bank backed away in a long-term sense from trying to understand the behavior of money and having money in some sort of--

Opinion: yes
About monetary policy: yes
Stance toward easing (NLI): entailment
Prior discussion:
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: And hopefully this recovery will lose all of its head wind, if I may use that phrase that I've got myself involved in. But as I said earlier, I think that policy is beginning to look better by the day in retrospect. And I find it hard to think of any reason why we would want to [change the stance of policy] over the next 6-week period. But if somebody has some great new insight, I would be most interested in hearing it. Governor Angell. 

MR. ANGELL. "I don't have the courage to vote to tighten at this point, Mr. Chairman, because I'm hopeful that this will get reversed."

Full utterance: Mr. Chairman, I agree with your prescription. I am very tempted, of course, to believe that we may be falling behind in regard to maintaining price level targeting by targeting the fed funds rate at 3 percent. I think all of us know the difficulty of targeting M2; we've all discussed that. Certainly, there's difficulty in targeting the fed funds rate. We know that's really no way to run monetary policy under changing conditions. Also, targeting nominal GDP poses real political dangers for us because it's just so difficult to go before the Congress and explain why we like 5-1/2 percent nominal GDP better than 6-1/2 percent when there's clearly a relationship between GDP and the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate at 6-1/2 percent GDP would be more desirable than the one at 5-1/2 percent. So, with Humphrey-Hawkins suggestions that we [emphasize] price stability as a second to employment and our knowledge that employment benefits from improvement in the inflation outlook, I'm inclined to believe that we ought to be thinking about tightening at this stage. But I just don't have the stomach for doing it, Mr. Chairman; I lack the courage to be what I think would be seen as somewhat rash. And it was that prediction of lack of courage on my part and your part that caused me some meetings ago to suggest that at some point in time we might find ourselves with the need for a very large-scale move. If you would turn to Chart 6 in the Financial Indicators package that Don has provided as he always does--I was mistaken in thinking the charts were missing from the other document because they're always in this document--you will see on that bottom chart for all commodities ex-food and ex-oil a price move that is somewhat of a preliminary indication of what happened at the end of 1982 and what happened in 1987. I don't have the courage to vote to tighten at this point, Mr. Chairman, because I'm hopeful that this will get reversed. And the price of gold being--

Opinion: yes
About monetary policy: yes
Stance toward easing (NLI): contradiction
Prior discussion:
speaker: MS. PHILLIPS.
text: I'd like to support Governor Kelley on this. I thought the one-page summary was probably one of the more positive new things coming out of this. A lot of these news services will extract from the summary; and if we give them what we'd like them to extract, I think we have a better chance of there being a fairer reading of the minutes. So, I support Mike's contingent on this. And like it or not, we are in a sound-bite, concise summary kind of environment. 

CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN. "But I personally don't feel comfortable with anything new in here."

Full utterance: I think you're raising a separate issue, which ought to stand on its own merits, and that is whether we look good or bad. As I understand the proposal that Governor Mullins and his subcommittee are making, it is to consolidate already existing documents and in effect not to create anything new. It's the new that I think we want to avoid in this particular context. And as far as I'm concerned, the issue being raised should be on the table at some point and maybe we ought to discuss it; it really should be in the context of the subcommittee's work. But I personally don't feel comfortable with anything new in here. In fact, the message is precisely to make the point that there is nothing new, not that we're trying to improve this.

Opinion: yes
About monetary policy: no
Prior discussion:
speaker: MR. PRELL.
text: Yes, we've used the ECI here. 
speaker: MR. LINDSEY.
text: And this has been falling like that since the '70s? 
speaker: MR. PRELL.
text: Well, undoubtedly, you [have to] go back to a period when interest rates were moving sharply enough to have significantly moved this. 
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: The computer prices are falling now at rates that are very large; and when you consider the size of the computer industry itself there is [unintelligible] effect [unintelligible] earlier period. 

MR. PRELL. "Certainly, this would be the case going back several years before this, but I don't have data going back much earlier."


Opinion: no
Prior discussion:
speaker: MR. MELZER.
text: The CRB futures price index is up by nearly 13 percent from its level a year ago despite a very significant decline in energy prices. An even sharper increase is seen in the Board's experimental commodity price index when the food and crude oil components are omitted. In addition, long-term interest rates have risen somewhat from their October 1993 lows. In our view, measured either by the growth rates of M1 and reserves or the ex post real federal funds rate, the stance of monetary policy has been very expansionary for about the last three years, and we weigh this sustained stance of monetary policy heavily in making our forecast of longer-run inflation trends. 
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: Governor Kelley. 

MR. KELLEY. "Number one is that consumer debt seems to be accelerating, and this is at a time when the ratio of consumer debt to worth is still at an all-time high."


Opinion: no
Prior discussion:
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: [Laughter] 
speaker: MR. KOHN.
text: As I said in my briefing, the use of asymmetry in the past has been an expression of the Committee's disposition about how it would like to react to incoming data. If you think the risks are more on one side than on the other and if for example you would like to react to stronger data before you reacted to weaker data, asymmetry would send a signal to the Chairman that when the data come in a bit to the stronger side, or the data don't suggest a weakening that you would like, he should give serious consideration to a firming move, acting on behalf of the FOMC, or to having a conference call. 
speaker: MS. MINEHAN.
text: Fine-- 
speaker: MR. KOHN.
text: It's sort of leaning to one side in reacting to incoming data. 

CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN. "If the CPI came in at 0, we probably wouldn't move."

Full utterance: Let me be very specific using Jerry Jordan's CPI as the model. Let us assume our normal expected CPI just for the sake of argument was .3 percent and we were asymmetric toward tightening. If the CPI came in at 0, we probably wouldn't move. If it came in at .6 percent, we would tighten.

Opinion: yes
About monetary policy: yes
Prior discussion:
speaker: MR. JORDAN.
text: What we have been doing on the funds rate does not look to me like either too low a level or one that came up too slowly. But I have problems with what happens between the 1-year and the 2-year maturities. Why is the 1-year forward rate for the 1-year maturity 7-1/2 percent? It leaves me in a position of thinking that we should not totally neglect the information that is coming from reserves, money, and credit and debt measures that say that right now we are in a good position; give it a little more time. 
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: President Hoenig. 

MR. HOENIG. "Their margins are coming under pressure and how much more they can be squeezed is on their minds."


Opinion: no
Prior discussion:
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: The question is, did we realistically have the option of saying, "this is a slippery-slope issue and we would prefer not to be involved." The answer is that it would have been 'irresponsible for us not to get involved. The reason I went up to the Hill at one point to speak on this issue to two-thirds of the Senate and about one-third of the House, all in one room, is that if I did not do it, it would not get done. That's because no one there had any knowledge of this except people in Treasury who are not-- 
speaker: SPEAKER(?).
text: Have no standing or are from a different political party. 

CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN. "But now that issue is moot because we have a Treasury take-out."


Opinion: no
Prior discussion:
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: Whatever happened to the chart presentation? 
speaker: MR. PRELL.
text: We didn't have it in February. It's an open issue for July. 
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: We don't have it today? 
speaker: MR. PRELL.
text: No. 

CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN. "That sounds like a precedent to me!"

Full utterance: That sounds like a precedent to me! [Laughter]

Opinion: yes
About monetary policy: no
Prior discussion:
speaker: MR. JORDAN.
text: The price of these things, converted into the equivalent of some other currency, has to fall either by a depreciation of the yen or by declines in absolute yen prices. Whether it is proper to think about that as deflation or not, I don't know. What else could happen? If the yen is not going to fall in value on the exchange market, then our economics would tell us that asset prices and goods prices had to move toward world levels. How else could this adjustment possibly be made? 

MS. JOHNSON. "I did not mean to suggest any pejorative notion by using the word "deflation.""

Full utterance: I did not mean to suggest any pejorative notion by using the word "deflation." I meant it literally as just that the rate of change of certain prices was negative. Now, it is certainly true that it is happening in the goods sector because to some degree what you described has happened. That is, we have opened up--a little maybe--Japanese markets to world trade. For example, if you use Japanese national income account data in real terms, the share of imports to GDP has risen sharply. In that sense, imported goods and the competitive pressures that they can apply through market phenomena are having an effect of the sort you might want. I'm not so sure that I see that as much of an explanation for why land prices have been falling and are still falling. Nor do I see it really as an explanation for the stock market behavior. So, the asset price story, which had its own special factors on the up side in the late 1980s--a speculative bubble kind of story, fueled perhaps by what in retrospect seems like a too easy monetary policy--has a different story on the down side as well. I am not particularly alarmed that Japanese goods prices are responding to competitive pressures from the outside world. I would think that it might be easier on all concerned if it happened through an end to the upward pressures on the yen rather than through falling prices of Japanese goods. But I am not aware of any rigidity stories, for example, that suggest that because prices have some downward rigidity all sorts of problems are being created. I am merely suggesting that in that environment Japanese monetary policy looks to be a bit tight, given what we know about capacity utilization, the behavior of wages, and what is happening to asset prices. All the pieces fit together to suggest that the stance of monetary policy could be eased a bit in an effort to get that economy growing again.

Opinion: no
Prior discussion:
speaker: MR. MCTEER.
text: I think it would be important for us to give Senator Mack the impression that we are eager to work with him on this--not the impression that he is dragging us along kicking and screaming. 
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: No, and we are trying specifically to do that. Where we think he has a view that would be very difficult to implement, we have been trying to communicate that opinion. Does anybody else want to comment? Governor Yellen. 

MS. YELLEN. "I think we are dealing with an imperfect law that asks us to communicate our objectives in an imperfect way."

Full utterance: I would like to associate myself with Governor Lindsey's comments. I would favor alternative III for 1995 [Laughter] and alternative II for 1996. I certainly understand the sentiments that you expressed, Mr. Chairman. This is not the most important decision we are going to make this morning. I think we are dealing with an imperfect law that asks us to communicate our objectives in an imperfect way. I certainly understand why you don't want the ranges to be the focus of your Humphrey-Hawkins testimony, and I understand that they can be confusing. Nevertheless, at the end of the day it seems to me that this is the law of the land and we ought to do the best we can to live with it and to have the forecasts that we put forward be ones that are defensible. If you are asked why we have selected these monetary targets, I hope you would be prepared to answer. Then I ask myself how you would go about answering. If you were to say that we are assuming a continuing upward trend in M2 velocity and if that were a defensible assumption, that would be fine. That would imply, in turn, real objectives that I would find perfectly appropriate. But if you were pushed that far, as I imagine you won't be, and if you were not prepared to say that an upward trend in M2 velocity is our underlying assumption, then you in effect would be communicating on behalf of this Committee objectives which I would not regard as my objectives and I don't think they are the objectives of this Committee. After Bob Parry said that our nominal GDP forecasts don't represent our objectives, I reread the instructions. They said the projections for both 1995 and 1996 should be based on what in our judgment would be an appropriate monetary policy. So, I thought that was the instruction under which we were to be operating.

Opinion: yes
About monetary policy: no
Prior discussion:
speaker: MR. JORDAN.
text: For now, I am comfortable with the idea that it is appropriate to move the funds rate down and see whether or not inflation in fact comes in at a lower rate. 
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: Vice Chairman. 
speaker: VICE CHAIRMAN MCDONOUGH.
text: Mr. Chairman, I support the recommendation of alternative A, symmetric, for the reasons that you gave. I also found Jerry Jordan's intervention just now quite convincing as well. 
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: President Parry. 

MR. PARRY. "I see no reason to change now."

Full utterance: Mr. Chairman, I would not favor reducing the federal funds rate. I would refer to President Boehne's comment about our deeds speaking more loudly than our words. If you look at the members' economic projections for 1996, we are saying in effect that we are at potential. The midpoint of the central tendency of the Committee members' forecasts indicates that the economy is going to grow 2.1 percent in 1996. The CPI appears to have increased 2.7 percent in 1995, and the central tendency of the members' forecasts has a midpoint of 2.8 percent. The unemployment rate is equal to or slightly below the natural rate and is expected to be there at the end of the year. It seems to me that the Committee's forecasts speak very loudly and are in conflict with reducing rates at this time. I realize that we are in a period where it appears that the economy has some weaknesses. The staff forecast calls for 0.8 percent GDP growth in the current quarter. The question is whether or not that slower rate will be temporary. If it's temporary, then policy ought not be changed. We can't make that determination right now. We are disadvantaged by a whole host of things including a lack of data and insufficient time to model the new information. I see no reason to change now. It would seem to be the prudent thing, in fact the opportune thing, to wait a few weeks before we make a judgment.

Opinion: yes
About monetary policy: yes
Stance toward easing (NLI): contradiction
Prior discussion:
speaker: MR. BROADDUS.
text: All those things incline me to caution. Sometimes I think inertia can be a good thing, and I am feeling the need for a lot of it at this point. I hear Jerry Jordan's point, but I do think it needs to be said that it may be more difficult this year than in most other years to move the funds rate back up later if things don't go the way we want them to. We are going to get a lot of new information that hopefully will clarify the economic situation in the fairly near future, and I think we ought to look at it before we move. 
speaker: CHAIRMAN GREENSPAN.
text: President Stern. 

MR. STERN. "There may be an opportunity here, were we to do nothing, to do a bit better on inflation."

Full utterance: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The current situation gives me some considerable pause. As I try to look at the real interest rate situation, Charts 4 and 5 in the "Financial Indicators" package don't suggest to me that real rates are particularly high, at least relative to history. There may be an opportunity here, were we to do nothing, to do a bit better on inflation. The mechanism that I have in mind would be through a stronger dollar than we now anticipate and what that would mean for inflation--recognizing, of course, that we can't really forecast exchange rates. They are far more a hope than a certainty. On the other side of this coin, I am certainly convinced that we cannot halt turning points in the economy, or at least I can't. As I said before, I am pretty convinced that the current quarter and perhaps the next quarter will be rather soggy based on inventory considerations and the time it will take to work through the inventory adjustments. Moreover, something that looks soggy could turn out to be something worse. The bottom line is that in this environment, and recognizing that I can't halt turning points, I find your insurance argument persuasive and I would go along with a 1/4 point reduction in the federal funds rate at this time.

Opinion: yes
About monetary policy: yes
Stance toward easing (NLI): contradiction