As the world prepares to comprehend, in their own recency-biased manner, the minutes of the most recent FOMC meeting, we thought it worth a reminder of just how Fed communications have ballooned in the past 20 years. The first statement, issued on Feb. 4, 1994, was a mere 99 words. December’s ‘most important FOMC statement ever’ was a stunning (record) 867 words – and even so Jon Hilsenrath managed to interpret and write on it in 3 minutes. As we noted earlier, the minutes tend to be a platform for even greater ‘communication’ – and notably are not the actual minutes of the meeting but a prepared annotation of what the Fed wants the public to know about the meeting. Transparency and communications, it would appear, has been transformed from clarifying to endless caveat-ing.
Since 1994… notice the ‘kink’ when unconventional policy began
and it’s just gotten worse and worse as QEternity was launched.
All those words just to say – we’ll buy it all forever…
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via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/-cqhXjaoYKs/story01.htm Tyler Durden