Jerome Powell Quotes

The future path of the federal funds rate is necessarily uncertain because economic activity and inflation will likely evolve in unexpected ways. For example, no one can be certain about the pace at which economic headwinds will fade. More generally, the economy will inevitably be buffeted by shocks that cannot be foreseen.

Experts kill me. Economic experts, that is. Corporations, foundations, publications and governments pay them by the bucketful, and they fill buckets with forecasts that change more frequently than white-collar, workers do shirts. What Lies Ahead is the usual title. What Lies would often be more appropriate. If women's hemlines changed as rapidly as an economist's forecasts, the fashion people and the textile industry would be more profitable than any other. In fact, if all the country's economists were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.

Economists have allowed themselves to walk into a trap where we say we can forecast, but no serious economist thinks we can.

No one can forecast the economy with certainty.

I would be uncomfortable raising the federal funds rate if readings on wage growth, core consumer prices, and other indicators of underlying inflation pressures were to weaken, if market-based measures of inflation compensation were to fall appreciably further, or if survey-based measures were to begin to decline noticeably.

Our ability to predict how the federal funds rate will evolve over time is quite limited because monetary policy will need to respond to whatever disturbances may buffet the economy.

The outlook for the economy, as always, is highly uncertain.

I'm an economist, I do a lot of forecasting, and I'm probably one of the most successful forecasters in terms of very specific kinds of forecasts.

The global economic outlook remains fragile and uncertain. Global economic imbalances persist and we must address them or risk future instability.

Every economy is uncertain. Referring to this or any economy as 'uncertain' is an unnecessary and pessimistic redundancy.

I don't think the economy telegraphs very clearly where it's going.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen.

As chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers during the 1990s, I had to make projections about where the economy was going to be one, two, or three years ahead; frankly, I often found myself facing a cloudy crystal ball. Forecasting a few years out is hard enough; forecasting seventy-five years out is essentially impossible. Slight changes in life expectancy, immigration, wage growth, and interest rates could have large effects on the solvency of the (Social Security System.)

Communication has become a fulcrum of policy [of the Federal Reserve]. Policy makers shape expectations and, thus, economic behavior.

The Fed should not be responding to the ups and downs of the markets, and it is certainly not our policy to do so. But when there are significant financial developments, it's incumbent on us to ask ourselves what is causing them.

Paying interest on reserve balances enables the Fed to break the strong link between the quantity of reserves and the level of the federal funds rate and, in turn, allows the Federal Reserve to control short-term interest rates when reserves are plentiful.

We're not very good at forecasting, and we don't know how to measure the impact of economic policy.

Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.

Even when [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben] Bernanke said the recession was over ... you think that would have been a bigger boom somewhere, but it seems we just take everything in stride.

The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.

The world changes! So we're in a situation today where the only policymakers that have flexibility are central banks. But they don't have the instruments! So they've had to experiment, and the more you experiment, the more uncertainty and the higher the risk of collateral damage.

It is more important what the jobs report shows in December and January -- that will affect how many rate hikes we'll have this spring.

An economist is someone who knows all the answers to last years' questions.

We do not have, nor have had, and never will have an opinion about where the stock market, interest rates, or business activity will be a year from now.

Of all the weapons in the Federal Reserve arsenal, words were the the most unpredictable in their consequences.