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美国联邦储备委员会主席艾伦格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代：勇闯新世界-the age of turbulence-27

联邦公开市场委员会

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The Federal Open Market Committee ，简称 FOMC.

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The next morning a Washington driver delivered me to Baker's nice 

old Georgian colonial on an elegant stretch of Foxhall Road. I was surprised 

to find waiting for me not only Jim but also Howard Baker, President Reagan's current chief of staff. Howard got right to the point. 

"Paul Volcker may be leaving this summer when his term runs out/' he began. "

We're not in a position to offer you the job, but we'd like to know—if it were to be 

offered, would you accept?" 

I was briefly at a loss for words. Until a few years before, I'd never thought of myself as a potential Fed chairman. In 1983, as Volcker's first term was ending, I'd been startled when one of the Wall Street firms conducted a straw poll of who might replace Volcker if he were to leave and my name turned up on top of the list. 

As close as I was to Arthur Burns, the Fed had always been a black box to me. Having watched him struggle, I did not feel equipped to do the job; 

setting interest rates for an entire economy seemed to involve so much more than I knew. The job seemed amorphous, the type of task in which it is very easy to be wrong even if you have virtually full knowledge. Forecasting a complex economy such as ours is not a ninety-ten proposition. You're very fortunate if you can do sixty-forty. All the same, the challenge was too great to turn down. I told the Bakers that if the job were offered, I would accept. 

I had plenty of time to get cold feet. Over the next two months, Jim Baker would phone to say things like "It's still under discussion" or "Volcker is thinking about whether he wants to stay." I felt alternately fascinated by the possibility and a little unsettled. It wasn't until just before Memorial Day that Baker phoned and said, "Paul has decided to leave." He asked if I was still interested and I said yes. He said, "You'll be getting a call from the president in a few days." 

Two days later I was at my orthopedist's office and the nurse came in to say the White House was on the line. It had taken the call a few minutes to get through because the receptionist had thought it was a prank. They let me use the doctor's private office to take the call. I picked up the phone and heard that familiar, easy voice. Ronald Reagan said, "Alan, I want you to be my chairman of the Federal Reserve Board." 

I told him I would be honored to do so. Then we chatted a bit. I thanked him and hung up. 

As I stepped back into the hall, the nurse seemed very concerned. "Are you all right?" she asked. "You look like you've gotten bad news." 

99 

FIVE 

BLACK MONDAY 

I'd scrutinized the economy every working day for decades and had visited the Fed scores of times. Nevertheless, when I was appointed chairman, 

I knew I'd have a lot to learn. That was reinforced the minute I walked in the door. The first person to greet me was Dennis Buckley, a security agent who would stay with me throughout my tenure. He addressed me as "Mr. Chairman." 

Without thinking, I said, "Don't be silly. Everybody calls me Alan." 

He gently explained that calling the chairman by his first name was just not the way things were done at the Fed. 

So Alan became Mr. Chairman. 

The staff, I next learned, had prepared a series of intensive tutorials diplomatically labeled "one-person seminars," in which I was the student. 

This meant that for the next ten days, senior people from the professional staff gathered in the Board's fourth-floor conference room and taught me my job. I learned about sections of the Federal Reserve Act I never knew existed—and for which I was now responsible. The staff taught me arcana about banking regulation that, having been a director of both JPMorgan and Bowery Savings, I was amazed I'd never encountered. Of course, the Fed had experts in every dimension of domestic and international economics as well as the capability to call in data from everywhere—privileged access that I was eager to explore. 

Though I'd been a corporate director, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, as it is formally known, was an order of magnitude larger than anything I'd ever run—today the Federal Reserve Board staff includes some two thousand employees and has an annual budget of nearly $300 million. Fortunately, running it wasn't my job—the long-standing practice is to designate one of the other Board members as the administrative governor to oversee day-to-day operations. There is also a staff director for management who acts as a chief of staff This way, only issues that are out of the ordinary or that might spark public or congressional interest are brought to the chairman, such as the massive challenge of upgrading the international payments system for the turn of the millennium. 

Otherwise he is free to concentrate on the economy—just what I was eager to do. 

The Fed chairman has less unilateral power than the title might suggest. 

By statute I controlled only the agenda for the Board of Governors meetings—the Board decided all other matters by majority rule, and the chairman was just one vote among seven. Also, I was not automatically the chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, the powerful group that controls the federal funds rate, the primary lever of U.S. monetary policy* 

The FOMC is made up of the seven Board governors and the presidents of the twelve regional Federal Reserve banks (only five can vote at any one time), and it too makes decisions by majority rule. While the Board chairman is traditionally the chair of the FOMC, he or she must be elected each year by the members, and they are free to choose someone else. I expected precedent to prevail. But I was always aware that a revolt of the six other governors could remove all of my authority, except writing the Board agendas. 

*When the FOMC changes this rate, the committee directs the Fed's so-called open market desk in New York to either buy or sell treasury securities—often billions of dollars' worth in a day Selling by the Fed acts as a brake, withdrawing from the economy the money received in the transaction and pushing short-term interest rates higher, while buying does the reverse. Today the fed funds rate that the FOMC is seeking is publicly announced, but in those days it wasn't. So Wall Street firms would assign "Fed watchers" to divine changes in monetary policy from the actions of our traders or changes in our weekly reported balance sheet. 

101 

I quickly got hold of Don Kohn; the FOMC secretary and had him walk me through the protocols of a meeting. (Don; who would prove to be the most effective policy adviser in the Fed system during my eighteen years, is now vice chairman of the Board.) The FOMC held its meetings in secret, so I had no idea what the standard agenda or timetable was, who spoke first, who deferred to whom, how to conduct a vote, and so on. 

The committee also had its own lingo that I needed to get comfortable with. 

For example, when the FOMC wanted to authorize the chairman to notch up the fed funds rate if necessary before the next regular meeting, it did not say, "You may raise interest rates if you decide you have to"; instead it voted to give an "asymmetric directive toward tightening."* I was scheduled to run one of those meetings the following week, on August 18, so I was a highly motivated student. Andrea still jokes about my coming over to her house that weekend to curl up with Robert's Rules of Order. 

I felt a real need to hit the ground running because I knew the Fed would soon face big decisions. The Reagan-era expansion was well into its fourth year, and while the economy was thriving, it was also showing clear signs of instability. Since the beginning of the year, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average had risen through 2,000 for the first time, the stock market had run up more than 40 percent—now it stood at more than 2,700 and Wall Street was in a speculative froth. Something similar was happening in commercial real estate. 

The economic indicators, meanwhile, were far from encouraging. Huge government deficits under Reagan had caused the national debt to the public to almost triple, from just over $700 billion at the start of his presidency to more than $2 trillion at the end of fiscal year 1988. The dollar was falling, 

and people were worried about America losing its competitive edge— 

the media were full of alarmist talk about the growing "Japanese threat." 

Consumer prices, which had gone up just 1.9 percent in 1986, were rising at nearly double that rate in my first days in office. Though 3.6 percent inflation was far milder than the double-digit nightmare people remembered from the 1970s, once inflation begins, it usually grows. We were in danger of forfeiting the victory that had been gained at such great misery and cost under Paul Volcker. 

*For the record, even as I learned "Fedspeak," I would joke to the staff, "Whatever happened to the English language?" 

102 

(未完待续, To be contd)
 

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