Although the tendency in recent months toward stabilization in the East Asian economies is encouraging, clearly those economies are not out of the woods, as recent events attest,
Our operating procedures, as you suggest, do tend to smooth out short-run fluctuations in short-term interest rates,
That greater tendency toward self-correction has made the cyclical stability of the economy less dependent on the actions of macroeconomic policy makers, whose responses often have come too late or have been misguided.
History cautions that extended periods of low concern about credit risk have invariably been followed by reversal, with an attendant fall in the prices of risky assets.
Indeed, our goal, in responding to the complexity of current economic forces, is to extend the expansion by containing imbalances and avoiding the very recession that would complete a business cycle,
We really can't forecast all that well, and yet we pretend that we can, but we really can't.