Dr. Blinder delivered these remarks at “Understanding Fedspeak,” an event hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Financial Economics and the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings on November 30, 2016.
Thank you. I’m glad to be here. This is one of my favorite topics, as some of you may know. I want to start with three very brief prefatory remarks about Federal Reserve transparency, the third of which will lead me smack into Jon’s paper. The first two may seem like irrelevant digressions; but they are not, for reasons you will see.
So, the first one is that anyone who provides his discussant with a paper that has no page numbers should be subject to corporal punishment. You will see why shortly.
The second thing I’d like to point out to everybody is that the literary quote that begins Jon’s title ends – he left this part out – “When we first practice to deceive.” I don’t think the Fed is trying to deceive, and I’d like to put that on the record.
My third prefatory point leads smack into the crux of Jon’s argument. Though he doesn’t quite state it this way, I want to state it this way very clearly and then harp on it.
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