Thank you for this opportunity to speak at the 61st annual meeting of the National Association for Business Economics. At the Fed, we like to say that monetary policy is data dependent. We say this to emphasize that policy is never on a preset course and will change as appropriate in response to incoming information. But that does not capture the breadth and depth of what data-dependent decisionmaking means to us. From its beginnings more than a century ago, the Federal Reserve has gone to great lengths to collect and rigorously analyze the best information to make sound decisions for the public we serve. The topic ... (full story)