YouSaid · the spoken record

Binyamin Appelbaum

lines on the record: 66
first: 2019-10-11
most recent: 2019-10-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think there's two sort of dimensions to this. The first is that since the financial crisis, we've seen the Fed embracing a responsibility for being the world's central bank. That was certainly true in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, where a lot of the crisis era programs that the Fed put in place to provide funding were really about funding the global financial system more than about funding American financial institutions.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To X philosophical, but nobody is truly independent, and the Fed certainly is not. I think what we can say about the Fed is that it has been provided with a degree of insulation to allow it to make short-term decisions on the basis of technical considerations, but its goals are set by Congress, its officials are selected by the president, it is subject to political pressure in a wide variety of ways. It clearly thinks about politics as part of the considerations that inform the direction of monetary policy. It is very easy to overstate what independence means.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said that he said it. Think that is fair. I would not call him a hawk. I think you don't want to overstate, and we've seen the Fed just cut rates. We've seen him talking about his commitment to drive down unemployment and to create jobs. I don't think he's anybody's idea of a hawk, but it's certainly the case that the easiest way to have continued to pursue easy policy under Trump would have been to keep Janet Yellen in place. And in the way that Trump made his early appointments, he certainly didn't pick people who were particularly minded to cut rates. There are clearly voices on the Fed who want lower rates than Jay Powell. And Trump has both bloviated publicly about how much he wants that, but then when he's had the opportunity to do something about it, he's consistently not taken advantage of those opportunities.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is an independent institution, in part because Trump, as you say, was not hugely intelligent about who he picked to run it. If he had clear goals, if he wanted easy policy, he should have picked policymakers who agreed with him. To be fair.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that they changed their mind about wanting the Fed to deliver the best outcomes, but that they were convinced that if you gave it a little bit of space, a little bit of independence, that would be better for the economy, both in the medium term and in the long term. And so there was less of that kind of communication. And I do think that we're now seeing a reversion to an earlier pattern in which the Trump administration is emulating much earlier presidential administrations in sort of explicitly telling the Fed what it wants and pressuring the Fed to do it. And that's something we have not seen in a long time.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because of you. Yeah. And it did, and it did. So clearly, you know, if you go back historically, the Fed was essentially an arm of the Treasury Department during World War II. And presidents in that era clearly thought of the Fed as taking instructions from them and they were not afraid to issue those instructions. And through Johnson and through Nixon and even into the Reagan era, we have examples of presidents, as you say, behind the scenes, but quite explicitly, directly and confrontationally putting pressure on the Fed. I do think that there was a change beginning in the 80s, but really taking hold in the 1990s, where presidents concluded that things worked out better if you left the Fed alone.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, that story is about President Lyndon Johnson summoning William McChesney Martin, the chairman of the Fed in the late 1960s, to his Texas ranch and literally shoving him against a wall and yelling at him for daring to raise interest rates. I love.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to be clear, there was an intellectual revolution. The Fed 40 years ago again really believed that there was some value and mystery that you didn't want to be too clear, that you didn't want to tell the public exactly what was about to happen. And there's just been this sea change. You know, Ben Bernanke famously said that 98% of monetary policy is communications, is managing expectations, that idea that the Fed's primary job is to communicate and to communicate clearly is a new thing in the world. And they're doing it in every way they can. So yeah, as you said, they're on Twitter. Fed presidents wander around giving public speeches all the time. There's a sense that some of this is a bit of a cacophony and sometimes the message gets lost in the noise, but they're trying. This is now clearly the goal in a way that it wasn't in an earlier era.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I wasn't around back then, but I think that a big part of the change is how much the Fed is communicating directly with the public. If you go back 40 years ago, the person who had my job was still spending a significant amount of time with Paul Volcker, had access to him, was hearing his thoughts, had the opportunity to question him directly, but that wasn't happening in a televised news conference. Volcker wasn't going out there and talking directly to the public on sixty minutes or holding town hall forums or all these innovations in Fed policy that we've seen in recent decades. So part of what happened at the Fed, as at so many other institutions, is they realized they could step out from behind the curtain and control their own communications, speak directly to their audience.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you feel a real responsibility. I don't know if I felt so much heady as sort of a little scared at first because a lot of people are counting on you to accurately represent what the Fed intends to do, what it's communicating. And you do have a lot of access. The Fed takes very seriously its efforts to communicate and to convey its messages. And one of the ways it does that, one of the primary ways it does that is through big media outlets like the Times or the Journal or Bloomberg. And it works very hard to explain itself to people like me, people in my job. And so, yeah, you do get to spend a lot of time with the leading figures in monetary policy talking to them, picking their brains, trying to understand what they're thinking. It's frankly fascinating, and it was really an interesting experience, particularly in 2011 when the Fed was in the middle of this sort of tumult and trying to figure out how to deal with a new set of economic circumstances.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it basically evolved through the financial crisis. I spent a lot of time in Charlotte writing about mortgages and the financial crisis, went to the Boston Globe where I continued to do that, then came to the Washington Post the week that Fannie and Freddie were taken over by the government as the paper's national banking reporter. And I covered the financial crisis for the next 18 months, about two months after I got to the Washington Post. The paper sent my wife a box of chocolates with a note saying, you know, we're sorry you haven't seen Binya recently, maybe again someday. So that was an intense period. And then I came to the Times in 2010, initially to cover financial regulation, but then was asked to move over to the Federal Reserve as Dodd-Frank came into law and those issues started to settle down a little bit. So in 2011, I basically began covering the Fed and monetary policy.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it really is. It's a remarkable story how Charlotte came to be a financial center, a really interesting story. But to be there in that financial center with all of these bankers sort of trying to figure out the path of the industry and innovating and competing, it was an exciting place to be.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Group to pin down. It's not the easiest. First story I ever wrote, I didn't get the millions and the billions straight. So there was a learning curve for sure. It was fascinating. You know, Charlotte in those years, Bank of America and Bakovia were both there and warring with each other. And it was sort of the center of this rapidly growing industry. And it was completely fascinating to be there and to be writing about it.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I didn't really. I got thrown in blind. I didn't know much about the subject at all. It was really one of the things I love about journalism is the opportunity to learn and to study as you work. And so it really was an immersion experience I learned as I worked.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After Jacksonville, I moved to the Charlotte Observer, and the managing editor called me in one day and asked me if I wanted to cover banking. And I was a little skeptical, but he told me, hey, you're the new banking reporter. So that's how it began.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of college, my first job was at the Florida Times Union in Jacksonville, Florida. I covered the news beat in a county outside of Jacksonville. The news beat meant anything that happened was my problem. I had to write about it.”
2019-10-11 · Masters in Business · Binyamin Appelbaum Discusses Monetary Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source