WASHINGTON (MNI) – Following are excerpts of the transcript from
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s press conference Wednesday:
QUESTION: You’ve been working hard to improve communications with
both markets and the general public. What’s your assessment of how
that’s done?
BERNANKE: I think we’re making progress, I think it was an
important step to make clear what our inflation objective is. I thought
that was important. We put out a statement that described the overall
policy approach of the Federal Reserve. We’ve taken a number of steps to
improve communication, including these press conferences, of course, but
also by expanding our projections, and by continued work doing press,
sorry, doing testimonies and speeches and most recently, as you know, I
did some classes, I taught some classes at a local university.
So, we’re doing our best, both to achieve really two objectives.
One is to help make the Fed a little more understandable to the average
person. Many people don’t understand the arcane aspects of the Federal
Reserve and monetary policy. To be good voters and good citizens, they
need to understand something about what the Fed does and also to
communicate with markets so that markets can better appreciate, you
know, what our monitoring policy plans are, in order, so that interest
rates and other asset prices can appropriately reflect those plans.
I think the evidence of the latter point is that there is better
understanding of The Fed’s policies and, you know, we’ve seen, for
example, less volatility in interest rates, related to greater certainty
about what The Fed is likely to do.
But I want to emphasize that this is an ongoing task, it’s a work
in progress and we’re going continue to look for ways to make ourselves
better, more understandable and more transparent to the public.
** MNI Washington Bureau: 202-371-2121 **
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