The Outlook for the National and Regional Economy and Monetary Policy: Low-Frequency Policymaking in a High-Frequency World

Loretta Mester

No 70, Speech from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Abstract: Good afternoon and thank you for that very kind introduction. I also thank the Cleveland Association for Business Economics, CFA Society Cleveland, and the Northern Ohio chapter of the Risk Management Association for inviting me to speak today. The very first speech I gave in Cleveland as president of the Cleveland Fed was at your organizations' invitation. As they say, you never forget your first, and so it is with great pleasure that I am back with you today. Another reason I'm happy to be here is that I believe an important responsibility of Federal Reserve policymakers is to share their economic perspectives with the public. Congress has wisely given the Fed independence in making monetary policy decisions in pursuit of our statutory goals of price stability and maximum employment. I say \"wisely\" because a body of research and practical experience both here and abroad show that when central banks formulate monetary policy free from short-run political interference, the policy is more effective and yields better economic outcomes. But to preserve that independence, the central bank must be held accountable for its policy decisions. And a key component of that accountability involves policymakers providing information to the public on their evaluation of economic conditions, their outlook for the economy, and the rationale for their decisions.

Keywords: FOMC; Monetary Policy; independence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2016-04-06
Note: President Mester delivered similar remarks about the national economy to the New York Association for Business Economics in New York, NY, on April 1, 2016.
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.clevelandfed.org/en/newsroom-and-event ... egional-economy.aspx Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedcsp:70

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Speech from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by 4D Library ().