Kevin Hassett

And then everybody would change their forecast.

So most of the stuff that really influenced decisions by Greenspan was coming out of that section of the Fed, not the section that was using, at that point,

updated version of what used to be called the MPS model that was developed by Albert Ando and Franco Modigliani.

That was a sort of big kind of general equilibrium model, ad hoc Keynesian general equilibrium model without a whole lot of expectations.

That was the model they were using back then.

And so I think it was very much data dependent.

Lots of work bottom up.

I don't know if you worked in the economic activity section, but we wrote a fellow named Greg Brown, who's now a professor at North Carolina, was my research assistant at the time.

And we wrote a computer code to do the business sector.

And I think back then at the Fed, the research assistant who wrote the code, you would name the code for that part of the program by the research assistant.

So there was like the GDP code that aggregates all the forecasts was named Ruth because there was an RA named Ruth.

And so when we finished the capital spending program, Greg Brown did a lot of the programming.

So he called it Trout.

And people say they're still running Trout at the Fed that are doing capital spending.

But the point is that we really, because we were the first ones to have computers, really, and we had the data and we were studying computers with computers.

I don't think it was a top-down thing.

No, I don't think that they, I know that the Fed wants them to be appropriately so, but I think that we lost control of inflation in recent memory, and it's more under control now, maybe not all the way there.

And so, you know, I think that people would be right to worry, well, suppose that the policy mix that we saw, you know, post-COVID in the U.S.

economy were the policy mix that came back

I don't think President Trump would do that, but say in the next administration, then wouldn't inflation go back up around nine or 10% again?