Zitat des Tages von Jerome Powell:
The Federal Reserve is committed to fulfilling our statutory mandate of stable prices and maximum employment.
One factor that favors easier adjustment in EMEs is that U.S. monetary policy normalization has been and should continue to be gradual, as long as the U.S. economy evolves roughly as expected.
Regional interest rate differentials persisted until around the time of World War I and helped shape the attitudes of Americans living in western areas toward the nation's financial system.
The only way to ensure that inflation expectations remain safely anchored near the FOMC's target is to keep inflation close to that target on a consistent basis.
We live in a world defined by the rapid pace of technological change.
As with so many sectors of the economy, technology is transforming the retail banking sector.
Although I have never worked in a community bank, I have been a customer, and I know from personal experience the special skills that these institutions bring to their customers.
The revenue stream for Social Security benefits comes from payroll taxes, which are credited to the Social Security Trust Fund - accounting for the program's finances separately from the rest of the budget.
The GSEs became powerful advocates for their own bottom lines, providing substantial financial support for political candidates who supported the GSE agenda.
No single housing finance institution should be too big to fail.
Mobile devices, high-speed data communication, and online commerce are creating expectations that convenient, secure, real-time payment and banking capabilities should be available whenever and wherever they are needed.
A risk-insensitive leverage ratio can be a useful backstop to risk-based capital requirements. But such a ratio can have perverse incentives if it is the binding capital requirement because it treats relatively safe activities, such as central clearing, as equivalent to the most risky activities.
Alignment of business strategy and risk appetite should minimize the firm's exposure to large and unexpected losses. In addition, the firm's risk management capabilities need to be commensurate with the risks it expects to take.
AIG's failure revealed systemic problems in the OTC derivatives market that went well beyond the failure of a single market participant.
The Federal Reserve places great importance on our relations with the Bundesbank. Few such relationships have been as important, over the decades, in promoting financial stability and prosperity around the world.
The Federal Reserve and other central banks have adopted broad public policy objectives to guide the development and oversight of the payments system. At the Fed, we have identified efficiency and safety as our most fundamental objectives, as set forth in our Policy on Payment System Risk.
In normal times, at the beginning of each month, the federal government makes a cash advance to the Social Security Trust Fund called the 'normalized tax transfer,' in an amount equal to the estimated payroll taxes for the coming month.
There is clear empirical evidence that the response of EME financial markets to different shocks, including changes in U.S. interest rates, depends importantly on the state of economic fundamentals in the EMEs themselves.
Congress created Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970. For many years, these institutions prudently pursued their core mission of enhancing the availability of credit for housing.
Higher asset prices increase wealth and, with a lag, induce higher spending.
My own experience is that the best outcomes are reached when opposing viewpoints are clearly and strongly presented before decisions are made.
The FOMC has considerable control over short-term interest rates. We have much less influence over long-term rates, which are set in the marketplace.
Higher capital requirements increase bank costs, and at least some of those costs will be passed along to bank customers and shareholders. But in the longer term, stronger prudential requirements for large banking firms will produce more sustainable credit availability and economic growth.
The Congress has tasked the Federal Reserve with achieving stable prices and maximum employment - the dual mandate.
We need a resilient, well-capitalized, well-regulated financial system that is strong enough to withstand even severe shocks and support economic growth by lending through the economic cycle.
Long experience, in the United States and in other advanced economies, has demonstrated that monetary policy is most successful when decisions are rendered independent of influence by elected officials.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the debate about monetary policy and the nation's financial system had been going on for over a century. Increasingly, the shortcomings of the existing system were causing too much harm to ignore.
Legislative reforms in the 1990s and the public/private structure led managements to expand the GSEs' balance sheets to enormous size, underpinned by wafer-thin slivers of capital, driving high shareholder returns and very high compensation for management.
All economic forecasts are subject to considerable uncertainty. There is always a wide range of plausible outcomes for important economic variables, including the federal funds rate.
Loss-absorbing capacity among banks is substantially higher as a result of both regulatory requirements and stress testing exercises.
The sale of Treasury bonds, notes, and bills finances the U.S. government, and those securities are, in turn, a primary vehicle for savings for a wide range of U.S. households. Treasury securities are also an important source of collateral within the financial system.
There is certainly a role for regulation, but regulation should always take into account the impact that it has on markets, a balance that must be constantly weighed.
It is worth noting that 'too big to fail' is not simply about size. A big institution is 'too big' when there is an expectation that government will do whatever it takes to rescue that institution from failure, thus bestowing an effective risk premium subsidy. Reforms to end 'too big to fail' must address the causes of this expectation.
Real short- and long-term rates were relatively high in the late-1990s, so financial excess can also arise without a low-rate environment.
Increased fragmentation of production across international borders - a natural outgrowth of the gains from specialization - meant more trade for any given value of final production, thus adding to the major expansion in gross trade flows in the 1990s and 2000s.
I am unable to think of any critical, complex human activity that could be safely reduced to a simple summary equation.
