Mostly Economics

Wow this is some publicity and hype.

How many times do we see central bankers of praise politicians and that too of of other nations? In this case it is actually a Regional Fed chair – Richard Fischer of Dallas Fed praising the not so new Indian PM. I just casually read Fischer praising Indian PM on some website. I thought it must have been just some comment. But no it is a speech titled Texas Jagannath (With Reference to Indian Prime Minister Modi, a Hindu Goddess and Wodehouse’s Big Money) .

The speech is given at US – India Chamber of Commerce:

I am so honored to have been invited to join Ambassador (S.) Jaishankar this evening to celebrate the U.S.–India Chamber of Commerce and its many distinguished awardees.

Mr. Ambassador, I am delighted you are here in Texas tonight. I am going to give you a few statistics in a moment that I think will make readily apparent the reason for this large audience and why so many Indian entrepreneurs and professionals come to Texas. Then I am going to give you a snapshot of where the U.S. economy is at present and what we are grappling with at the Fed. But first, with your indulgence, I want to briefly speak of the relationship between our two great countries, India and the United States.

The logic of an enhanced strategic relationship between my country and yours is crystal clear, beginning with a harsh geopolitical reality: You live in a tough neighborhood and need us; we, in turn, need all the friends we can muster in your geographic sphere. It seems very timely that we overcome the history that has separated us and begin working more closely together.

During the Cold War, it was the view of many in the United States that India was too closely allied with the Soviet Union. American businesses that looked at India found it afflicted with the legacy of the worst of British bureaucratic administration. (The old joke was that you could never get morning tee times at any Indian golf course because the bureaucrats had locked them up at least until noon).

From an Indian perspective, America seemed too hegemonic. Attempts by U.S. companies to invest and do business in your homeland revived memories of the East India Company.

We viewed each other through the lens of the time and against a background of our own histories, with suspicion.

But the (Berlin) Wall came down, the economy has been globalized and cyberized, and new threats to security have arisen, many of them from nonstate actors or forces who operate from within failed states to inflict damage elsewhere. This is a time for like-minded people to unite and work together.

We are like-minded in that we are democracies. But tonight we celebrate something even more fundamental. My reading of India is that, like in the U.S., your country men and women are more pragmatic and business-oriented than they are ideological or inherently bureaucratic.

The recent election of Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi offers the promise of making this abundantly clear. He was, after all, the chief minister for over a decade of the Gujarat, the most probusiness state in India. And almost every U.S. business leader I know has heard of Ratan Tata’s experience when he looked to Gujarat for an alternative to the frustration of his attempt to build a new car factory in West Bengal. As I understand it, Mr. Tata went to see Minister Modi, had a handshake deal in 30 minutes, and in 14 months the new factory was up and running. That almost makes Texas look like California by comparison!

So Mr. Ambassador, we are all watching for this first prime minister born since Independence to work his probusiness, nonbureaucratic, can-do spirit upon the whole of India. It is in America’s interest for India to thrive. We wish Prime Minister Modi, the government you represent with such distinction, and the Indian nation the very best of luck.

That is some marketing. One would expect such a speech from Texas Governor not Dallas Fed President.

How Yellen has become like a Hindu Goddess:

As you can see from this graphic, unemployment has declined to 6.2 percent, and the dynamics of the labor market are improving. At the Federal Open Market Committee, where we set monetary policy for the nation, we have been working to better understand these employment dynamics. This is no easy task. Bill Gross, one of our country’s preeminent bond managers, made a rather pungent comment about our efforts. He noted that President Harry Truman “wanted a one-armed economist, not the usual sort that analyzes every problem with ‘on the one hand, this, and on the other, that.’” Gross claimed that Fed Chair (Janet) Yellen, in her speech given recently at the Fed’s Jackson Hole, Wyo., conference, introduced so many qualifications about the status of the labor market that “instead of the proverbial two-handed economist, she more resembled a Hindu goddess with a half-dozen or more appendages.”[2]

Whether you analyze the labor markets with one arm or two, or six or 19, the issue is how quickly we are approaching capacity utilization, so as to gauge price pressures. After all, a central bank is first and foremost charged with maintaining the purchasing power of its country’s currency. Like most central banks around the world, we view a 2 percent inflation rate as a decent intermediate-term target. Of late, the various inflation indexes have been beating around this mark. Just this last Friday, the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) index for July was released, and it clocked in at a 1 percent annualized rate, a pace less than the run rate of April through June.

Does this mean we are experiencing an inflation rate that is less than acceptable? I wonder. At the Dallas Fed, we calculate a trimmed mean inflation rate for personal consumption expenditures to get what we think is the best sense of the underlying inflation rate for the normal consumer. This means we trim out the most volatile price movements in the consumer basket to achieve the best sense we can of underlying price stability. In the July statistics, we saw some of the fastest rates of increases in a while for the largest, least-volatile components of core services, such as rent and purchased meals.[3] So the jury is out as to whether we have seen a reversal in the recent upward ascent of prices toward our 2 percent target.

Interesting comparisons..

However, Hindu Goddesses with multiple hands are seen destroying some evil. In this case the evil is really unemployment and weak economy. Can Fed chair really do anything about destroying the evil?