Kevin Hassett

Remember that?

Yes, yes.

He had people who had to calculate the weight of GDP.

I'm not kidding.

Now, they have the- I used to write the green book twice a year.

Is it the teal book?

Why did they do that?

That's probably where all their problems began.

No, I think that there was just an excellent... So the people who were there working with me at that time, the person who was doing consumption, there were two of them.

It was Karen Dinan, who's now a Harvard professor, and Chris Carroll, who's now at Johns Hopkins.

Two of the top consumption analysts over the last 40 years.

The people doing business fix investment were me and Steve Ulner.

And let's see, prices, that was...

Well, what's his name?

Actually, I forget the guy's name that was doing prices, but then we had Steve Braun, who's now at the CDA, who was putting GDP together.

But I think that the really big thing that was happening was that the data were actually telling us that there's a capital spending boom really early on.

And then the way the Fed worked then, and probably still does now, is that we take people who are assigned to be like the consumption person, the investment person, the government person, the...

net export person, and then they forecast that with very complicated models.

And then those forecasts get sent to the GDP coordinator and the GDP coordinator aggregates the models, the forecasts from each of the segments of GDP, and then thinks about like what that means for interest rates and discussion back then with Mike Prell, who was the research director and with Chairman Greenspan.

And then Chairman Greenspan might say, well, what if we move rates this way or that way?