a little bit less good returns in the fixed income market compared to the last 8 years. we ’ ve had a bull market in fixed income really going back to 1982. my first house i ever bought, mortgage rates at the time were 17 %. they ’ re now around 4 %. i got financing from the seller. i got a 12 % mortgage. i thought it was a really good deal. so now mortgage rates are around 4 %. we ’ ve had a very, very long bull market in fixed income. people are debating now whether this is the end of that bull market or it ’ s going to go on for a little bit further. so, we ’ ll see. 6 / 15 bis central bankers'speeches dr. olajide oladipo : thank you. if you look at the global economy, it ’ s looking buoyant now. also the national economy, which is the united states economy, is looking buoyant now. i wanted to ask you, looking at the united states, which region do you think is growing at the moment? president dudley : i would answer that question, which region is growing at the moment, in two ways. regionally, in terms of the geography of the united states, it ’ s really the south and west, and this has been a pattern for a long time, that there has been sort of a migration to – when they invented air conditioning, they made the south a lot more attractive to people. and so the south and west have been growing faster than the country as a whole for a very long time. now there are some pockets of weakness there because we had a big collapse in energy prices, so some of the areas in the south and west that are very dependent on the energy sector are probably a little bit less robust. so, that ’ s the first way i would describe it. the second way i would describe it is rural / suburban / urban. there ’ s been a tremendous shift in people ’ s enthusiasm for living in big cities, and that ’ s really one reason why new york city is doing so well because people basically want to live in the big cities, especially younger people. and so you ’ re seeing the cities, especially the big cities, outperform the smaller cities and outperform the rural areas. new york city has actually been very much a beneficiary of this, relative to many other parts of the country. dr. olajide oladi

rate payments for floating interest rate payments, et cetera. during the pre - dodd - frank era, most of these were firm - to - firm. financial institution to financial institution. now they ’ re all cleared centrally. this is a tremendous innovation because it reduces the amount of risk in the financial system. the doddfrank act has one of its chapters or titles all dedicated to the clearing of over - the - counter derivatives. and finally, we have some entities called financial market infrastructures. what is a financial market infrastructure? so, let ’ s say i buy a stock, and then that stock has to be transferred to me through some entity that actually clears and settles that stock transaction. the entity that actually manages that stock transaction – you selling stock to me, or me selling stock to you – that ’ s a financial market utility. they have to be robust as well. and one of the things the dodd - frank act does is it allows the federal reserve to have some oversight capacity to make sure that those financial market utilities are sound. so, there are definitely things that could be changed. i think you could definitely relax the regulatory burden on smaller banking organizations because i don ’ t think they pose a systemic threat to the u. s. financial system. i think you could take a look at certain regulations like the volcker rule to see if they could be administered in a less aggressive way. 3 / 15 bis central bankers'speeches so, it ’ s not in my mind a question of dodd - frank or no - dodd - frank. i think it ’ s a question of better financial reform legislation. dr. olajide oladipo : thank you. just like you said, the economy is picking up now, and at the same time, we are experiencing a kind of upward trend in interest rates. i wanted to ask you, do you think the current movement in interest rates is politically - driven? if not, what is the business reason for the upward movement? president dudley : well, if i said it was politically - driven, that would be an unbelievable news story. because we try to stay as apolitical as possible and set monetary policy, not based on the political winds and fortunes of the different political parties, but what we think is appropriate to keep the economy on an even - keel and to achieve our goals of maximum sustainable employment in the context of price stability. so, we ’ re basically trying to set the level of interest rates in a