Eliciting GDP forecasts from the FOMC’s minutes around the financial crisis

Abstract

Stekler and Symington (2016) construct indexes that quantify the Federal Open Market Committee’s views about the US economy, as expressed in the minutes of the FOMC’s meetings. These indexes provide insights into the FOMC’s deliberations, especially at the onset of the Great Recession. The current paper complements Stekler and Symington’s analysis by showing that their indexes reveal relatively minor bias in the FOMC’s views when the indexes are reinterpreted as forecasts. Additionally, these indexes provide a proximate mechanism for inferring the Fed staff’s Greenbook forecasts of the US real GDP growth rate, years before the Greenbook’s public release.