FOMC Policy Announcement
You may not have heard any of these names before. It is certainly unlikely that you have heard of more than one or two of these individuals. Yet they decide how easy or difficult it will be for you to get a job when you graduate. They decide how expensive it is for you to buy a car. They decide how many pesos you get for a dollar if you travel from the United States to Mexico. They decide if the Dow Jones Industrial Average is going to increase or decrease. They decide whether the stock markets in Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and Frankfurt are going to increase or decrease. They decide the cost of your vacation abroad and the cost of the clothes that you buy at home. So who are they? They are the members of a group called the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). They are responsible for setting monetary policy in the United States. Of course, they do not literally decide all the things we just mentioned, but their decisions do have a major influence on everything we listed. This chapter is about what these people do and why their choices matter so much for our day-to-day life. We begin with an example of this group at work.
February 2, 2005 For immediate release The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to raise its target for the federal funds rate by 25 basis points to 2-1/2 percent. The Committee believes that, even after this action, the stance of monetary policy remains accommodative and, coupled with robust underlying growth in productivity, is providing ongoing support to economic activity. Output appears to be growing at a moderate pace despite the rise in energy prices, and labor market conditions continue to improve gradually. Inflation and longer-term inflation expectations remain well contained.
