Quotes About Uncertainty

purchases despite his unease.

Our situation seems to be getting trickier by the day,

implying that we had not yet made up our minds whether to end our tightening campaign or to raise rates.

But that outcome looked more and more unlikely.

As the panic worsened,

Investors were unwilling to buy securities they knew little about.

With so much still unresolved and with time from the meeting already lost, I did not share much,

I was less sure of how well Dan, a lawyer among economists, would fit into the FOMC,

the course of the economy is extremely hard to forecast.

That outcome, too, carried risks.

The prospect of improvement in the economy was nowhere in sight.

the hawks and doves alike exuded pessimism.

Uncertainty can also be bad for the economy as a whole if, for example, firms delay capital investment or hiring until they have more information about their access to foreign suppliers and markets.

Still, the situation was far from normal.

Or was it better to maintain ambiguity, as we did, which suggested we still had the capacity to carry out future interventions? I don't know.

The economy seemed to pick up for a few months, but by the time of our March 2003 meeting the recovery again seemed stalled. Shockingly,

My colleagues and I also were uncertain about the economic consequences of the war, especially its effect on energy prices.

In making the decisions we made in March 2008, we could not know all that would transpire.

The Bear Stearns rescue was followed by a period of relative calm, but we remained wary.

But we knew more shoes could drop.

Still, over time, optimism about resolving Europe's problems faded.

As doubts grew about the GSEs,

I was as reassuring as I could be, but I was not in a position to offer guarantees, implicit or otherwise.

Dudley was initially skeptical.