Kevin Hassett

It's just sometimes he didn't want to answer questions directly because people very often will say, hey, so what are you going to do with interest rates next week?

Or something like that.

That's when he would be hard to understand.

I don't know.

I think that you should have...

Transparency about the things that matter to you if you're a decision maker.

Where did you come up with now's a good time to do this or that?

What do you think?

Like if you think that we're in a boom, how come?

And I think that one of the negative long run effects, probably the only one of Chairman Greenspan's presence, is that because he was always looking at every data item and then sorting it in his head,

And he was doing it in a really miraculous way, which made him a legend before there were computers and so on.

And he was always kind of suspicious of time series models, which are really conditional expectations that are getting better and better in the stock and Watson world at helping us think about the path of the near-term economy.

And I think the one thing I can say is that in terms of at least looking at the research papers, it feels like the bias against that type of work, which I think could be very useful for policy analysis and which we used a lot when we were at CEA to think about what the forecast would look like if we passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and we got the number right within a tenth or two out a couple of years with those models.

I think that those time series models probably need to be invested more.

in the Fed, and then if there's a bigger staff that's doing that, then I think that there'll be a lot of product that'll be useful for markets to digest about like, look, if we do it this way, if we do it that way.

No model is the right model, but you need to look at a bunch of models when you decide what you're thinking.

I think the Fed hasn't done a good job of helping people do that.

How alternative- Again, just like if you look at the economic report of the president, if you look at the analysis that we did in the first Trump term,

we put on the table the models we were using.

We ran horse races with models and figured out what's the best model for modeling this type of thing or that type of thing, and then would publish tables where we said, well, here's all eight models that help you do this, and here's the central tendency, or this is the one that we believe.