WASHINGTON (MNI) – The following is an excerpt from Federal Reserve
Chairman Ben Bernanke’s press conference Wednesday following the Federal Open
Market Committee meeting:
BERNANKE: The Fed will always keep, we’ve innovated quite a bit in the last
few years and its always possible we can find new ways to find support for the
economy. Its certainly true, there’s no doubt that with interest rates near zero
and and with the balance sheet already large, that the ability to provide
additional accommodation is not unlimited and that that is just a reality and
that actually is an argument for being more aggressive now.
And its a really good objective to get the economy moving, to get some
momentum. That protects the economy against unanticipated shocks that might
occur and gets us off the zero bound earlier and so, exactly for those reasons
the kind of risks that arise when the policy interest rates are close to zero
and the greater difficulty of providing additional policy support. I think its
an argument for being somewhat more proactive now when we still have the ability
to do that and try to get the economy, you know, back to a healthy condition.
–MNI Washington Bureau; tel: +1 202-371-2121; email: dcoffice@mni-news.com
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