Preaching patience, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia president Charles Plosser warned that while the economy is recovering, many challenges lie ahead, and the nation should not rush to make changes to prevent future crises.
“The race to reform will not serve the nation well if haste makes for faulty or misguided policies,” Plosser said at the Philadelphia Fed Policy Forum Friday, according to prepared text of his speech. He said policymakers need to “lower the odds of a future crisis while ensuring that we are better prepared to handle one when it arises.”
Not all the facts about the recent crisis have been collected, according to Plosser. “I believe that it is too soon to say with any confidence that we fully understand the current crisis,” he said. “We are still in the learning phase, positing a wide range of hypotheses about the role of market failures as well as regulatory failures, and formulating some rough estimates of the relative weights to place on various contributing factors.”
