Previous Session | Sessions | Next Session
Session 17: Communicating Monetary Policy
Even as the communication of U.S. monetary policy decisions has evolved toward greater transparency over time, questions have emerged as to the appropriate amount and type of information a central bank should communicate about its forecasts and decision process. This session considers the challenges faced by monetary authorities as they seek to communicate with the public and the marketplace—particularly during periods of crisis—and discusses lessons learned in recent years by the world’s major central banks.
Sponsor: NABE Financial Roundtable
Presentations
Speakers
Robert McGee
U.S. Trust, Bank of America Wealth Management
Tim McGee is Chief Economist at U.S. Trust. He is responsible for the economic forecast and other economic research with a focus on investment strategy. In addition, he serves on the Finance and Investment Strategy Committees.
Prior to joining U.S. Trust, Mr. McGee was a strategist and economist with UFJ and Tokai Banks. He is well known in Japan for his regular market column in the Nikkei Financial Daily. In 2000, Business Week magazine recognized him for making the most accurate forecast in its annual survey of economists. More recently, both Bloomberg and USA Today recognized him for outstanding forecasting accuracy. He has appeared on CNBC, Reuters, and Bloomberg TV and has often been quoted in various publications like the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.
Mr. McGee began his career in the academic world teaching at Florida State University and New York University. He also spent three years at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and one year as a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. He has published numerous articles in academic journals.
Tim received his B.S. from the Georgia Institute of Technology and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin. Some of his memberships include the American Economic Association, the National Association of Business Economics, The Forecasters Club of New York and the Money Marketeers. He currently serves as Chairman of the American Banker Association’s Economic Advisory Committee. In that capacity he will also serve on the ABA Government Relations Committee. Recently, he joined the New York City Economic Advisory Panel.
Ethan Harris
Chief Economist
Lehman Brothers
Mr. Harris is managing director and chief economist at Lehman Brothers in New York. He is responsible for the firm’s forecast and analysis of the US economy. In this capacity Ethan has written extensively about the linkages between geopolitical events and the economy, the unique nature of the current business cycle, and the outlook for monetary and fiscal policy. Mr. Harris’ work has received extensive coverage and in both the print and broadcast media. In 2006 his team earned the number one ranking among economists for the fixed income Institutional Investor poll. Ethan joined Lehman Brothers in 1996.
Prior to joining Lehman Brothers, Ethan worked for nine years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At the Bank he served as the research officer in charge of the Domestic Division, and as the assistant to the President of the Bank. Ethan also worked for several years as an international economist at JP Morgan.
Mr. Harris has a PhD in Economics from Columbia University, where he was a University Fellow. He earned a BA in economics from Clark University.
Adam Posen
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Adam Posen is Deputy Director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, where he has been a Senior Fellow since 1997. His research focuses on macroeconomic policy and performance, European and Japanese political economy, and central banking issues. The Institute will publish his new book, Reform and Growth in a Rich Country: Germany, partially supported by a major grant from the German Marshall Fund of the United States, in early 2008. As Deputy Director, he leads the Institute’s recruitment of senior researchers and its outreach initiatives to press and the general public, coordinates with partner research institutions and Institute supporters, and oversees adminstration and finance for the Institute’s $9 million annual budget and 48 person staff.
A widely-cited expert on monetary policy, he has been a visiting scholar at central banks worldwide, including on multiple occasions at the Federal Reserve Board, the European Central Bank, and the Deutsche Bundesbank. In 2006, he was on sabbatical leave from the Peterson Institute as a Houblon-Norman Senior Fellow at the Bank of England. He has also been a consultant to several U.S. government agencies (including the Departments of State and Treasury and the Council of Economic Advisors), the European Commission, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, and to the International Monetary Fund on a variety of economic and foreign policy issues. He is a member of the Panel of Economic Advisers to the Congressional Budget Office for 2007-09.
Dr. Posen is the author of the book Restoring Japan’s Economic Growth (IIE, 1998; Japanese translation, 1999), the co-author with Ben Bernanke, et al, of Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience (Princeton University Press, 1999), and the editor and part-author of three collected volumes: The Euro at Five: Ready for a Global Role? (IIE, 2005); The Future of Monetary Policy (Blackwell, forthcoming); and The Japanese Financial Crisis and its Parallels with U.S. Experience (IIE, 2000; Japanese Translation, 2001). He has also published more than thirty papers on monetary and fiscal policy in leading economics journals, academic and central bank conference volumes. He co-founded and chairs the editorial board of the refereed journal International Finance.
He is a frequent contributor to the opinion page of the Financial Times, and has also published in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Die Zeit, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, among many other leading newspapers. He is the Associate Editor of The International Economy magazine, for which he writes a regular column “The Monetary Realist”, and he also writes a monthly column for the German national paper Welt am Sonntag. Dr. Posen has been a consultant on fixed-income and foreign exchange markets to some of the leading global financial companies and private investment firms.
From 1994-1997, he was an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he advised senior management on monetary strategies, the G-7 economic outlook, and European monetary unification. In 1993-94, he was Okun Memorial Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, and won the Amex Bank Review Awards Silver Medal for his dissertation research on central bank independence. In 1992-93, he was resident in Germany as a Bosch Foundation Fellow.He received his Ph.D. and his A.B. (Phi Beta Kappa) from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.
Dr. Posen is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a research associate of the Center for the Japanese Economy and Business of Columbia University, a fellow of the CESifo Research Network, and has been a Public Policy Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (in 2001).
Vincent Reinhart
American Enterprise Institute
A former director of the Federal Reserve Board’s Division of Monetary Affairs, Vincent R. Reinhart has spent more than two decades working on domestic and international aspects of U.S. monetary policy. He held a number of senior positions in the Divisions of Monetary Affairs and International Finance and served for the last six years of his Federal Reserve career as Secretary and Economist of the Federal Open Market Committee. Reinhart worked on topics as varied as economic bubbles and the conduct of monetary policy, auctions of U.S. Treasury securities, alternative strategies for monetary policy, and the efficient communication of monetary policy decisions.
He holds a M.Phil. and M.A., Columbia University and a B.S., Fordham University.
Previous Session | Sessions | Next Session
