Bloomberg
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell likened the potential fallout surrounding the central bank’s interest-rate forecasts to a nuclear meltdown in what even he admitted was a stretched metaphor back in 2014.
“The market doesn’t really understand how the SEP works and how it gets put together,†the then-Fed governor said in March 2014, referring to the central bank’s quarterly Summary of Economic Projections.
He warned fellow policy makers that their good-faith projections — which include the so-called dot plot of rate forecasts — could thus lead to unwanted disruptions in financial markets.
“This is probably stretching a metaphor too far, but it’s like the scene of a nuclear plant that’s blown up, and a series of engineers are all saying, ‘We did the right thing. We did exactly what we were supposed to do. It was right here in the book,’†Powell said,
according to a transcript of the Federal Open Market Committee meeting that was released on January 10, along with other records of the 2014 gatherings.