page_title: Fedspeak
section_title: Other usage
hierarchical_section_title: Fedspeak / Other usage
caption_attribution_description: English: Federal Open Market Committee participants’ assessments of appropriate monetary policy: Midpoint of target range or target level for the federal funds rate, March 15, 2017.
context_page_description: In monetary policy of the United States, the term Fedspeak is what Alan Blinder called "a turgid dialect of English" used by Federal Reserve Board chairmen in making wordy, vague, and ambiguous statements. The strategy, which was used most prominently by Alan Greenspan, was used to prevent financial markets from overreacting to the chairman's remarks. The coinage is an intentional parallel to Newspeak of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel by George Orwell.
  Fedspeak when used by Alan Greenspan is often called Greenspeak. An alternative definition of Greenspeak is "the coded and careful language employed by U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan."
  Edwin le Heron and Emmanuel Carre state that "Nowadays, 'Fedspeak' means clear and extensive communication of the Fed's action." Chairman Ben Bernanke and Chairwoman Yellen have effected a major change in Fed communication policy departing from the obfuscation that characterized the previous three decades. In 2014 a new detailed level of Fed communication was dubbed Fedspeak 3.0.
context_section_description: In the 2010s, the Federal Reserve Open Market rate-setting committee (FOMC) began publishing dot plots to tabulate all individual committee member projections of target interest rates in a single graphic. In 2016, the president of the St. Louis Fed James Bullard began a movement away from the dot plot exercise, citing a gap of opinion between market economists and FOMC members.  As of 2018, the FOMC has continued to publish dot plots in its economic projections, detailing the variety of opinions of the committee members for the "appropriate target range for the federal funds rate" in future years.
caption: The U.S. Federal Open Market Committee "dot plot" for March, 2017: participants' assessments of appropriate monetary policy: Midpoint of target range or target level for the federal funds rate.[21] The chart resembles a plot of objective economic data, but each dot represents a mere opinion of an individual committee member predicting a hypothetical future.  The horizontal axis shows the future time in years, and the vertical axis shows the federal funds rate in percent.
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