WHEN: Today, Thursday, February 26th
WHERE: CNBC's "Squawk Box"
Following are excerpts from the unofficial transcript of a CNBC EXCLUSIVE interview with Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard on CNBC's "Squawk Box" (M-F, 6AM-9AM ET) today. Video from the interview is available on CNBC.com:
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
BULLARD ON JANET YELLEN
I think she's a very balanced and careful thinker on monetary policy and she does a great job in trying to forge consensus around the committee which is the key role of the chairman. She also represents us internationally and does a great job there so I really don't see these charges being well founded.
BULLARD ON UNEMPLOYMENT RATE
These labor markets are improving so rapidly that I think unemployment will be down below 5% in the second half of this year so if you're sitting around and you haven't even come off zero and the unemployment rate has come down below 5% that seems a little bit extreme to me.
BULLARD ON CONSUMPTION
Consumption does look relatively strong. I mean it depends on how you read some of the data. Anecdotal reports I get from the districts seem to be very positive about the decline in gasoline prices. This is something that really matters to the lower half of the income distribution. They have been spending a lot more – a higher fraction of their income on this – so I think you are seeing strength coming from the lower oil prices.
BULLARD ON DODD FRANK
Dodd Frank to me was a list of a bunch of things that you could do and some of these things might prevent a future financial crisis, but it's untested as to whether any of those things would really work. There's still a – quite a ways passed a crisis here. There's still a raging debate about how can you actually prevent a future crisis.
BULLARD ON STRONG DOLLAR
The trade weighted value of the dollar is not that different from what it's been over the last fifteen years. We've grown at these dollar levels before I don't see why we can't do it now. And it's not much of a surprise. Basically, what happened over the last year was the ECB was a year ago thought to be very unlikely to do unconventional monetary policy, but as the year went on they got more and more likely and they finally took a big action in January. So naturally if they're going to be way easier than you thought and the Fed is going to continue on its policy of trying to normalize, the Euro is going to weaken and the dollar is going to strengthen.
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