Nov 17 2007
Fed to Publish Projections
The Federal Reserve is going to publish its economic estimates more frequently and expand them to include additional metrics.
Call it pay back to Alan Greenspan for his negative predictions (we republished a cartoon about this). It’s a subtle way to take power away from the various would-be prognosticators by publishing even more information. It makes the black box of the economy look a little less opaque.
Here’s the plan, from the Fed’s site:
In the future, the FOMC will compile and release projections four times each year rather than twice a year. In addition, the projection horizon will be extended to three years, from two. FOMC meeting participants will now provide projections for overall personal consumption expenditures (PCE) inflation, as well as for real gross domestic product (GDP) growth, the unemployment rate, and core PCE inflation. Projections of nominal GDP growth will be discontinued. Summaries and explanations of the projections will be published along with the minutes of the FOMC meeting at which they were discussed. These descriptions will provide a fuller discussion of the projections, covering not only the outcomes that most meeting participants see as most likely, but also the risks to the economic outlook and the dispersion of views among policymakers.
Read more about it in the Economist Magazine’s story.
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