Tom Schlesinger Quotes (22 Quotes)

It's certainly unpredictable as to how long this is going to go, and how deep it is going to be and what the impact will be.

I would be nervous about picking an inflation-targeting champion as my next Fed chairman given the potential impact on employment growth.

It'd be fascinating to hear what he thinks, if he'd actually tell you. The guys who are most frequently mentioned for the job are all ivory tower types. I don't think anyone has the breadth and experience dealing with the business community as Greenspan did when he came on the job. Certainly they don't have as much experience as he accumulated in the past 17 years.

It would be unhealthy for the Fed to get bogged down in an internal debate about the merits and demerits of inflation targeting if it prevented

He might try to draw a bright line in the hearing - say that he won't be drawn into commenting on issues not directly related to the Fed's responsibilities, ... We'll have to see how that plays. It is important that the Fed chairman be seen as independent.

The Federal Open Market Committee does not appear from any of its official statements or from the speeches and testimony of its members, to be concerned about excessively strong labor markets or the prospect of wage inflation,

It's more difficult for a governor to have anything resembling a common touch if their personal finances are in a different solar system.

The yields indicate that markets aren't concerned about inflation or that they're confident that the Fed is on the job and will contain it. But there's some sort of subconscious, collective belief that sustained manageable inflation is too good to be true and eventually the other shoe will drop.

They are not using that possibility as a justification for their tightening campaign, in contrast to past years when there was a lot of concern about tightening labor market.

I remember thinking, man, if you think that's problematic, wait until you stick around Washington a little bit longer.

Certainly the Fed has voiced more concern over inflation for public consumption that it has in previous years, so it's not surprising that markets would respond accordingly. It just really doesn't jive very well with the facts on the ground.

This is the most sluggish recovery on record, which seems to puzzle the Fed chairman. But it reflects the Greenspan style of running things he presided over a similarly tepid recovery in the early 1990s. Tom Schlesinger, director of the Financial Markets Center, a monetary-policy watchdog, thinks the lopsided economy is the most disturbing hallmark of Greenspan's governance. The Fed has said almost nothing about this, except vice chairman Roger Ferguson says there's nothing the Fed can do particularly, ... The jobless recovery appears to be a new feature of the US business cycle. Yet the principal agent of economic management says nothing.

People got thrown for a loop by the stock market crash at beginning of the decade. It doesn't seem impossible that local housing bubbles bursting would have an effect on people's views of savings. Obviously consumption would take a hit if people save at the historic rate.

It's quiet clear in the infamous '92, '93, '94 period, the Fed was pretty darned determined not to open up and certainly not to disclose the fact it had these complete transcripts.

Bush has done a good job of using his free hand to break from a narrow group of selections in terms of background.

Greenspan is an orthodox thinker in most ways, but you have give him credit for questioning consensus thinking.

More than any of his predecessors, he has gone public with every issue under the sun. I'm not sure there's a right answer, but I think it's worth talking about in a public forum what ought to be boundaries of the Fed governors' comments.

At a basic and obvious level, it ties into gut level concern of ordinary people.

It will come at a really interesting time because the Fed has been so much more successful in recent years than central banks in countries that favored a more rule-oriented approach. One has to wonder why the Fed would abandon the approach that has worked so well.

There will be a perceptible political call by people for a more rule-bound policy after the magician (Greenspan) leaves the stage.

He does have an academic background. He had to make things clear to undergraduate students, even if they were undergraduate students at Princeton.

The White House is vulnerable to the perception that it is prone to picking insiders, cronies and folks with a political ax to grind.