excerpt from speech: I recently had the opportunity to guest-teach a couple of business school economics classes. It was great to be back in the classroom. Don’t get me wrong–I like my current job. But it was nice not to have to vote on anything.I opened my discussions with a pair of questions, asking students to put themselves in the place of a monetary policymaker choosing a target for the federal funds rate. First I gave them a set of hypothetical facts about the state of the economy–a slowdown in housing in the wake of multi-year housing boom; rising mortgage default rates; preliminary indicators of a possible slowing in business investment. And then I asked them:“What are you going to do?”The students dutifully responded that this situation could call for a reduction in the funds rate. They’d obviously been doing their homework.

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