Jeremy Singer-Vine has cute little tool for translating economics jargon from the Federal Reserve meetings into plain English. The Planet Money Program on NPR used it to translate the FED’s latest plan into something much more readable without, I think, loosing much of the meaning. The design of the tool is quite nice but it must be pretty tricky to implement unless the FED’s statements are much more formulaic than I hope they are.
For example:
FED: Longer-term inflation expectations have remained stable, but measures of underlying inflation have trended lower in recent quarters.
Translation: Inflation has gone from low to super low.
My favorite part of the translation:
FED: Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in September confirms that the pace of recovery in output and employment continues to be slow.
Translation: The economy still sucks.