Bullard, James

In response to a question about an ultra-low rate policy:

"I have not been a fan of going to really low levels," Bullard said today in a Bloomberg Television interview.  "Why is it zero this time?  I don't quite get that, though I know some people want to go in that direction."

In response to a question about the implications of the slowdown in money supply growth:

 “If you want to go to quantitative measures, then all of the issues about money come back to haunt you.  You have to talk about velocity and shocks to velocity, and you have to think about all the other things that are going on.  That is a debate that existed in the Eighties and probably sort of petered out in the Nineties, but it might be re-merging now.  But I don’t know exactly how the Fed is going to play that going forward.”

 In response to a question about quantitative easing and unconventional methods.

 “I think these issues are being discussed right now, and I don’t know how it’s all going to come out. I will point out that you have the 1979-82 period and there the famous monetarist experiment, for those of your viewers that were around at that time.  And in that case, gave up interest rate targeting, went to quantity targeting, lots of controversy about exactly how that worked and so and so forth, so it’s been done before.  And you could do it again.”

 “I think the Fed has plenty of tools that we can use.  One of the main things that I’m concerned about is somehow we can communicate what we’re going to do to a private sector that is used to thinking in terms of interest rates, because for the time being it looks like that is going to be off the table for a while.”