The Fed announced Thursday that they would leave interest rates unchanged in September, ending months of speculation but leaving open the possibility to raise them later this year.
Alternating FOMC meetings come with a press conference at the end and September was one of those, meaning reporters were treated to extra-long statements from Fed Chair Janet Yellen. Financial journalists love to obsess over the nitty gritty of edits to Fed statements. The Big Crunch took a look at Yellen's statements to the press over the past two years.
For the moment, it seems to be business as usual with the current federal funds rate. In fact, Yellen's top three words over her tenure as chair—"rate," "inflation" and "percent"—were used the same number of times in this meeting as in June: 26, 22 and 19 times, respectively.
We looked in particular at the statements Yellen made to the press after every other meeting. That's seven statements since she became chair in February 2014. We concentrated on her statements, thus weeding out conversations with reporters as well as a variety of common words such as "the," "so" and "it."
It seems that Yellen is as interest-rate obsessed as the rest of us because she's said "rate" 157 times—more than any other word.