Talk:Fedspeak

Examples
I spent time going through the links supporting the examples, and most of the links are broken. The Dallas Fed Greenspeak page seems to have been removed I searched everywhere and the current Dallas Fed site and cannot even find some reference to the material. So if someone is going to revert his most famous quote, then they have to revert almost all of these. Also, the last quote is an intentional self-parody, and clearly not official Fedspeak. Personally I love all these quotes and would like to help find more, the more Delphic the better. I don't get why an admin would do that.

I think we need to add something about Fedspeak 3.0 which takes the art in the opposite direction, trying to influence the market by giving fairly precise predictions of future interest rate moves. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Greenbe (talk • contribs) 03:59, 4 September 2014 (UTC)


 * If you mean me, I acted as an editor, not an admin. Quotefarms are never a good idea anyway. I've asked at RSN about using Wordspy as no one has raised this before at RSN, but I don't think we should be using tertiary sources. Dougweller (talk) 08:28, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't exactly know what a Quotefarm is I'm not an expert Admin like you, just some poor sap spending too much time arguing over this triviality. I honestly feel you are being too nitpicky here I realize citations are good I'm all for them but they take time and we can't have 3 cites after every word. Again, as stated I have no problem with you are anyone adding some qualifiers and soften the quote with something like "preceding quote may not be a good example of Greenspeak" or something but why remove his most famous quote?

Anyway .... so you know what actually happened here is before I entered the quote the first time I tried to access the Dallas Fed article because (a) I was sure it was in there (and I still am sure) and (b) I wanted to see if they had any other good examples I think article could use a couple more. I've listened to plenty of his and other Fed testimony and sometimes the back and forth uses interesting language. My issue now is it seems to be gone from Dallas Fed site, does anyone have a copy? By your standards we would have to remove the first two quotes because they are not verifiable in primary or secondary source? No way, I left them in intentionally. They are good examples and they match my experience and I have no reason to believe they are not true. The last example is no actual Fedspeak but a parody of Fedspeak to illustrate the technique. Anyone feel free to add qualifies.

In the end I found a nice book from mainline publisher that specifically shows irrational exuberance quote as an example of Fedspeak, so there. And cited.

Now onwards with improving the article. My understanding from many sources is that the term Fedspeak is generic when applied to any Fed chairman's comment on Fed policy in an official role. Rather than write just that, which sounds like my opinion and belief, I tried to find a few citations for other Fed chairman. Actually the article already discussed two of his predecessors, so I added his two successors to broaden it out and show that the meaning has changed. I chose the wordspy definition to add even though it seems dubious the definition was repeated in a lot of sources and it fit what I think the Greenspan interview defines Fedspeak vs Greenspeak. Frankly I don't know where the primary source for that is, I could not tell who lifted it from whom.

The Fedspeak term is used very often in financial journalism and scholars to this day but now in the context of the drastic change from intentional obfuscation to clarity. The reason they are pursuing clarity is because the Fed fears it is running out of tools to affect markets so they are trying to get the market to act as a multiplier of their policy direction and providing clarity could help. All this I did not write since it is time consuming to prove plus not needed. Just give the reader the idea that Fedspeak has many implementations, and has changed over time. If they want more they can read the Bernanke or Yellen articles or all kinds of papers on this topic.

If someone doesn't like my choice of quotes add more. I'm not going to revert anyone, unless it is clearly not an accurate quotation or completely off topic. Maybe at worst add some qualifiers or better fix it.

Anyway that is IMHO on this topic. I think your use of lots of Wiki jargon and avoid actually discussing what you think the definition of Fedspeak should be, is maybe a form of Wikispeak? If you want to delete revert everything I've written go ahead it's not that important to me. I know all about this stuff and didn't need the article. If novices who are just trying to follow something don't have a quick and clear explanation for some of these economics terms too bad. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Greenbe (talk • contribs) 23:06, 4 September 2014 (UTC)