Tom Barkin

Well, I'm looking forward to digging into them with my team.

And I like every voice in the room and every argument in the room.

That's what we do as a discipline is we sit down and try to take those arguments apart and figure out which parts of them really resonate with the way we think about things and which parts don't.

And we're looking forward to doing that.

On the neutral rate, in general, I just want to agree.

It's not that useful as an operational tool.

The models out there, even the one that I talked about, have a confidence interval of about 200 basis points.

And so you could say it's three, which is around the SEP median.

You could say it's three and a half or two and a half.

But if you add a 200 basis point range to it,

You say that's not that helpful for making operational decisions on monetary policy.

What is more helpful, and the reason I favor the model we've got in Richmond, is how are you seeing the economy react real time to the level of rates you've got in the market?

And if you see it weakening, that's a signal that maybe you've got it too high.

We had a balance sheet conference yesterday that was very well attended, and I thought lots of thoughtful papers, including hers.

And I thought she made an extremely articulate, well-reasoned argument, and I'm looking forward to digging into it further.

Do you anticipate the Fed making a change?

Well, the judicial processes and political processes will operate however they operate.

What I do every day is show up and try to argue for the best monetary policy we can and make the case, as you said, in a persuasive way to my colleagues.

And that's what I'm going to continue to do.

I think you have to be very adaptive to what's playing out here.