Through The FOMC Looking Glass

Back in the day, when I was a member of the FOMC (1991-2004) I occasionally had an opportunity to push back against a push for greater transparency surrounding monetary policy. I was usually in the minority in thinking that transparency can be taken too far—that the reduction in flexibility for policymakers and the one-way bet opportunities for markets were too high a price to pay for any perceived benefits. I opined on that subject publicly a while back when the FOMC recently began publishing its collective forecasts (projections?) for macroeconomic variables.