Thursday, October 1, 2015

Janet Yellen on negative interest rates

Let me be clear that negative interest rates was not something that we considered very seriously at all today. It was not one of our main policy options. But one participate in the committee would like to see additional accommodation is concerned by the inflation outlook and thinks that we need additional stimulus, additional accommodation, to provide that and propose doing so by moving interest rates negative. That's something we have seen in several European countries. It's not something we talked about today. 

Look, I don't expect that we're going to be in a path of providing additional accommodation. But if the outlook were to change in a way that most of my colleagues and I do not expect, and we found ourselves with a weak economy that needed additional stimulus, we would look at all of our available tools. And that would be something that we would evaluate in that kind of context.