The decision was a testament to what former colleagues call Evans’s ability to build consensus. It also shows how one of the Fed’s 12 regional bank presidents can influence policy that is usually made by the central bank’s Washington-based board of governors, led by Bernanke.
“Through the power of his ideas and his powers of persuasion, President Evans was gradually able to gain some momentum behind this idea in the Fed,” said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust Corp. in Chicago, where he was an economist and supervisor for the central bank.
Evans’s campaign wasn’t the first time he has pushed against accepted economic ideas. Evans in his doctoral dissertation at Carnegie Mellon University argued that economists Edward Prescott and Finn Kydland had overstated the impact of technology in driving the business cycle, research that later won them the Nobel Prize in economics. Monetary policy also plays a part, Evans said.
“Even then, you could see that Charlie was struggling to get out of the mainstream view at Carnegie if not the world,” said Martin Eichenbaum, who was Evans’ thesis adviser and is now a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “He was questioning conventional wisdom back then and that’s what he’s doing now.”
Choosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from
via Evans Won New Fed Consensus Linking Rates to Unemployment – Bloomberg.
FED / Targeting unemployment and inflation
The Federal Reserve announced Wednesday that it will take unprecedented steps to bolster the economy, saying it will continue to stimulate growth until the unemployment rate falls to 6.5 percent or the inflation rate reaches 2.5 percent. The Fed said it did not expect unemployment to reach that benchmark until 2015. It was a historic … Continue reading »
How Long Will it Take to Get to 6.5 Percent Unemployment? | Brookings Institution
Job Market Monitor : Last week, the FED said that it will continue to stimulate growth until the unemployment rate falls to 6.5 percent or the inflation rate reaches 2.5 percent. The Fed said it did not expect unemployment to reach that benchmark until 2015. The Brooking Institute takes a look at it. *-* The … Continue reading »
How to get to the 6.5% unemployment rate target: roughly 270,000 jobs each month
The Federal Reserve predicts it will keep stimulative policies in place until the unemployment rate falls to 6.5%. But just how many jobs will it take to get there? As of November, the unemployment rate was 7.7%. In order to drop to 6.5% immediately, it would require 1.9 million jobs to be created right now. … Continue reading »
US / FED / Dallas Fed President, Richard Fisher, says Fed might set a target for unemployment
Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher, a top Federal Reserve official, said on Tuesday that his main concern now was unemployment, not inflation. He said another option the Fed might consider to signal its aims to markets was a target for unemployment, although this would be difficult because monetary policy alone was not responsible for creating jobs. … Continue reading »
FED / Lockhart / Aggressive Easing Needed For Jobs
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Dennis Lockhart said forceful central bank policies will remain needed to spur job growth even if Congress averts sudden tax increases and spending cuts at the end of the year. “I expect that continued aggressive use of balance sheet monetary tools will be appropriate and justified by economic conditions … Continue reading »
US / FED / Yellen Says Fed Should Tie Rate Inflation and Employment
Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Janet Yellen backed a proposal to link the Fed’s zero interest-rate policy to progress toward meeting its goals for inflation and employment rather than to a calendar date. “The Committee might eliminate the calendar date entirely and replace it with guidance on the economic conditions that would need to prevail before … Continue reading »
US / Job Gap / State-by-State
Each month, The Hamilton Project examines the “jobs gap,” which is the number of jobs that the U.S. economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment levels while absorbing the people who enter the labor force each month. As of September, our nation faces a gap of 11.1 million jobs, but the … Continue reading »
The American Job Gap
We face a 9 million jobs gap between the number of jobs we have and the number we need, and this doesn’t even address the low quality of the jobs being created. The chart below, taken from an Economic Policy Institute blog post, illustrates the gap. As Heidi Shierholz, the author of the post, explains: The … Continue reading »
US | Job Gap is 9 million
The labor market has added nearly 5 million jobs since the post-Great Recession low in Feb. 2010. Because of the historic job loss of the Great Recession, however, the labor market still has 3.8 million fewer jobs than it had before the recession began in Dec. 2007. Furthermore, because the potential labor force grows as … Continue reading »
The Big Job Gap
” The recovery is real, but it’s still really far from the recovery we need” writes Matthew O’Brien in The Scariest Jobs Chart, Private Sector Edition. (Choosen excerpts by JMM to follow) That’s been the consistent message of the past three years, with consistent job growth that hasn’t been near enough to end our jobs crisis much … Continue reading »
Fiscal policy, at both the federal and state and local levels: headwinds for unemployment reduction says Bernanke
The accommodative monetary policies I have reviewed today, both traditional and nontraditional, have provided important support to the economic recovery while helping to maintain price stability… Notwithstanding these positive signs, the economic situation is obviously far from satisfactory… Further, the rate of improvement in the labor market has been painfully slow. I have noted on …Continue reading »
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