CNBC Excerpts: CNBC Exclusive: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard Speaks with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Today
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, Thursday, February 25th. Following are links to the interview on CNBC.com: http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000496771, http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000496773, http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000496785 and http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000496788.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
BULLARD ON RATE INCREASE
One of the things I want to do is get away from trying to predict how many increases there's going to be in a year. We want to be data dependent and I think we want to better coordinate with markets on the idea that you know, we will move, but we will move on good news about the U.S. economy.
BULLARD ON RECESSION PROBABILITY
No, I don't think the probabilities are particularly high right now. Of course, you always face risk. And we are at a lower trend growth rate so you could always argue that there might be a higher probability of recession because your trend growth rate is now lower than it was historically in the U.S.
BULLARD ON EQUITIES
The Wilshire 5000 – it was increasing at a rapid pace all through 2013, 2014, up until January 2015. If it had continued up at that same pace, we'd be sitting here talking today about a bubble in U.S. equities. That isn't what happened. It sold off. Now we're about 10 percent down from where we were January 2015. I think that's probably better pricing on U.S. equities.
BULLARD ON COMMITMENT
There will always be an expectation in markets out there and that's fine, but we don't want to have a commitment out there that we're definitely going to do something and we have committed in the recent past about zero rates.
BULLARD ON GROWTH RATE POLICY
The U.S. needs a medium term growth agenda and this doesn't have anything to do with monetary policy. It has to do with a whole package of things that would be more growth friendly than what we've had in the last – you know, in recent times. We've got very low productivity in the U.S. We need to get that higher, we need to get more capital formation, we need more entrepreneurship. We need to do a lot of things that would get you to higher productivity, higher long run growth rate in the U.S.
BULLARD ON DOLLAR IMPACT
We certainly look at the dollar as it impacts the US. The dollar is obviously a two or multi-player game where it depends what the other guys are doing. I think the main movement in the dollar was really during 2014 when they decided to do QE. It was the run-up to QE in Europe and that's the period where the Euro weakened substantially and the dollar strengthened substantially. That's almost all of the recent movement is due to that period from about May to December of 2014. Once they actually made the decision to do QE, the party was over. The dollar has strengthened a little bit since then, but mostly based on news.
BULLARD ON BREXIT
I don't think it's a risk event for the U.S. economy. It doesn't really matter for the U.S. whether the UK is in or out…If the UK votes yes then nothing has changed, if the UK votes no, now you got three years of negotiation to figure out how the hell to get out of this. So – or possibly some other kind of free trade agreement that isn't exactly the same as being in the EU.
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