Abusing the 2004 FOMC Minutes

Vince Reinhart on the abuse of the March 2004 FOMC minutes to attack Alan Greenspan:

Greenspan was noting that letting the world know that top Fed officials were considering an issue would draw attention to that issue, which might sometimes be uncomfortable. This is a debatable proposition, to be sure, but not one that sounds conspiratorial.

That is, unless you have the imagination of Ryan Grim, who linked this obviously general discussion of the timing of the release of the minutes to the specific mention of housing prices 45 pages (and four hours in real time) earlier. To do so, Grim also had to elevate a mention about real-estate speculation by the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Jack Guynn, into Cassandra’s warning.

posted on 05 May 2010 by skirchner in Economics, Monetary Policy

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