I am happy to be here today, and I thank the organizers for inviting me. It is a particular pleasure to be back in Israel, where my career as a central banker began. At the Fed, I face a somewhat different set of responsibilities, and my lecture today is on the special challenges that face the Federal Reserve and the global economy in an increasingly interconnected world. Over the past 50 years, global trade has more than tripled relative to world gross domestic product (GDP), and the ratio of total exports to global GDP now stands at about 30 percent--though, interestingly, the rate of growth of global international ... (full story)