St. Louis Fed President James Bullard has gone from hawk to dove this year but he has a sense of humor about how wrong he has been.
“If you’ve followed my forecasts, you’ve probably lost a lot of money,” he said today.
In January he was forecasting 3.2% growth this year; at this point the consensus is down to 1.8%. You can reconcile the difference with the sequester. Most Fed officials thought Congress wasn’t crazy enough to ghost-ride the economy into the abyss (joke’s on us, right!). The real puzzle is how job creation has been so strong despite lackluster growth. It could be a full-time/part-time thing but there are no clear answers.
