Kevin Hassett
speaker
2,210 appearances
195 recordings
16 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 10 Aug
Kevin Hassett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 154 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 38.
Appearances
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?
Why was it, if you're a person forming expectations over the next five, 10 years, which is very often a planning horizon for buying a house or something like that,
could legitimately worry that inflation is going to come back up.
But it's very important to think about why the Fed was unable to control inflation for so long and it got out of control and what the Fed can do to signal that that's not going to happen again.
I can tell you that what Greenspan did when he saw like really reckless spending is that he testified and said, you guys can't do this, that it's going to make it impossible for me to run the Fed and keep inflation under control.
And what this set of folks did is they said, oh, it's transitory.
I wouldn't say, oh, it's transitory if it wasn't.
Well, obviously, the best way to address affordability is to increase real incomes, real wages that right before the COVID emergency, we had promised.
It's kind of like the ranges you and I just talked about.
Showing 1501–1520 of 2,210 · page 76 of 111
← Previous
Next →