Kevin Hassett

And they didn't even have Netscape Navigator when I first started working at the Fed.

And so you had to use something called Gopher.

I don't know if you're old enough to remember this.

It really wasn't that good.

And Greenspan had an intuition that the computer was going to revolutionize the economy and give us

lots of growth.

It was a big positive supply shock.

And so then when the unemployment rate actually kind of went down, we had no evidence of the productivity.

Remember, Robert Gordon was saying it's everywhere but in the data.

But Greenspan decided not to hike rates.

because he believed that we were in the midst of a positive supply shock that was perhaps unprecedented.

And we had a kind of five-year run that's one of the best five-year runs we've ever seen, even all the way to the point where the U.S.

fiscal situation was in surplus.

And so I think that it's one of the great moves of Federal Reserve history that Greenspan saw that it was a positive supply shock that would be both pro-growth and deflationary.

Yes, I have a- You have more stuff about that down there?

Yes.

But I say that to reference today, it's really interesting that there's evidence in peer reviewed papers, or not quite peer reviewed yet, but at NBER, which is kind of-

A lot of my friends at NBR, by the way, it's a secret of NBR authors like myself, is that you'll very often take a paper and submit it to a journal and get the referee reports before you put it into the NBR working paper series.

Because if you got some stupid mistake, the referees will catch it.

You don't want to embarrass yourself in front of everybody by just throwing it out there.