 So, welcome to day two of the 2021 Inflation Drivers and Dynamics Conference. My name is Robert Rich, and I'm the Director of the Cleveland Fed Center for Inflation Research. Given the international scope of the conference's audience, let me say good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone. I would also like to thank the ECB for hosting this year's event, as well as my fellow conference organizers, Christian, Chiara, Peter, Mikayla, Ed, Matthew, and Rafael for all their hard work. We are very happy and excited to begin today's proceedings with the keynote speech by Ali Koybian. Ali Koybian is a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has been on the faculty since 2012. He is currently a co-editor at the Review of Economics and Statistics, as well as an NBR research associate in both the monetary economics program and the economic fluctuations and growth program. He is also a member of the Advisory Council for the Cleveland Fed Center for Inflation Research, as well as a consultant at the IMF in Banque de France. His research is dealt with the expectations formation process, the estimation of monetary policy behavior and the effects of monetary policy on the economy, central bank communication policy, the efficacy of inequality in household behavior, and with the efficacy of stimulus payments during the pandemic. He is known for promoting the development and usefulness of surveys for the elicitation of expectations, along with the application of randomized control trials to examine how the provision of information changes economic expectations. It's fair to say that his research has had tremendous influence on the topics covered in many of the conference's papers. Early speech today will focus on average inflation targeting and household expectations. If you have a question, please submit it along with your name and affiliation in the chat. There will be a Q&A session following the presentation. With those details now covered, please join me in welcoming Ali. We look forward to your talk, as well as a lively discussion afterward. Ali, the floor is yours. All right. Can everybody see the screen and hear me as well? I think we're good, Ali. All right. Well, thank you so much for giving me the chance to participate here today and present this paper on average inflation targeting, which is joint with Yuri Gorodnichenko, Ed Notec, and Rafael Schenle. Let me emphasize the caveat here that we most certainly are not speaking for the Federal Reserve system or any of the local Fed branches with this paper. So we're going to talk about average inflation targeting because last year, last summer, Chairman Powell made this announcement that the Federal Reserve was going to change its strategy from a traditional inflation targeting one to an average inflation targeting, flexible average inflation targeting strategy. This is an unusual announcement. We don't often see changes in monetary policy regimes like this. So obviously this is something that's going to be of great interest to macroeconomists. Now what was his logic, the basis for doing this change in policy, he explained it very well in the speech. I'm going to go ahead and repeat it right here because it'll help us anchor ideas for the rest of the paper. So he said, if inflation runs below 2% following economic downturns but never moves above 2%, even when the economy is strong, then over time inflation will average less than 2%. Households and businesses will come to expect this result, which means that inflation expectations will tend to move below our inflation goal and bring realized inflation down. Therefore, following periods when inflation has been running below 2%, appropriate monetary policy will likely aim to achieve inflation moderately above 2% for some time. So this was the justification for the policy change. And so the key difference between the regimes that we want to emphasize is under traditional inflation targeting, inflation should be moving towards the target regardless of where it has been. Whereas under average inflation targeting, a period of below target inflation should be followed by a period of above target inflation. So this seems like a small difference, obviously, but in New Keynesian models, this small difference is actually extremely powerful in terms of stabilizing economic activity. This difference in the systematic response of monetary policy to economic conditions matters quite a bit. And the big difference happens really at the ZLB, where this average inflation targeting means that there's the promise of inflation being higher in the future than would be the case under inflation targeting. Those high inflation expectations mean that you have a low real interest rate during the downturn. That low real interest rate stimulates consumption and thereby stabilizes activity. So what we're going to be interested in in this paper is how powerful is this particular mechanism in practice? And so we're going to look specifically at the expectations of households, who are the participants for whom this mechanism, through which this mechanism is supposed to operate. So we're going to look at the expectations of households around the time of the announcement. So we're going to have a daily survey of households that starts before the announcement and it's going to go through the announcement period. And that's going to allow us to study a few questions that speak to the power of AIT. So the first is really basic is, did any households actually hear about the announcement? So for the change in regime to have an effect on expectations, people need to know that the change in regime happened. So we're going to ask households whether they heard anything about the announcement and then do their responses actually speak to them, actually understanding the announcement. And so for those who heard the announcement, right, we want to know, did they actually understand what it means and did they incorporate it into their expectations? Okay. So did their expectations change in the kind of manner that we would expect relative to thinking that the Federal Reserve was doing traditional inflation target? Now, one thing that might happen here is you could say, well, you know, maybe households weren't paying much attention or it takes them some time to kind of figure this out or, you know, maybe the media, the Federal Reserve wasn't very good at explaining average inflation targeting. And so we might not find much of an effect within a few days like this. So we said, well, let's put our professor hats on. And what we can do is we can explain ourselves to households what average inflation targeting means. And so because, you know, we're professors and we do this as our job, we're going to do it clearly and concisely, right? And if we do that, you can ask, does that have an effect on people's expectations relative to inflation targeting? And so the answer that I'm going to try and convince you of today to all three of those questions is a decisive no. So households did not really hear about the announcement of the few households who did hear about Powell's announcement. They did not seem to either understand it or incorporated into their expectations. And most disappointingly to us, even when, when we try and explain average inflation targeting to households, to the best of our ability, we still don't find any effect on expectations relative to traditional inflation targeting. And finally, we've gone back because it's now been a year since this announcement and repeated the entire exercise a year later to see whether, you know, maybe it just takes time for people to learn how average inflation targeting works. And so we've gone back a year later, kind of repeated the entire thing, and asked, has anything changed after a year of experiencing average inflation targeting and hearing news about average inflation targeting, et cetera? And the answer, once again, is going to be no. So we're going to interpret these results as suggesting that these very powerful effects of average inflation targeting in New Keynesian models, right, which are operating primarily through this household expectations channel, are unlikely to apply to the US economy either now or in the future. All right, so let me tell you how the survey was done. So we built on the daily survey that the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland has been running since, I believe, March of 2020. And this is a daily survey of about 100 to 150 households. And so around the time of the announcement, what we did was increase the size of the survey so that the day before the announcement, we had 1,000 households that were responding. On the day of the announcement, we had 500 households in the morning, 500 households in the afternoon. The following day, we had 1,500 households. For the next couple of days, we had 500 households. And then finally, 300 households for a few days after that. OK, so we have this kind of larger daily survey around the time of the announcement. And in this survey, there's a block of questions that the Cleveland Fed has been asking in its regular daily survey. And then we had the ability to add some extra questions on whether they'd heard news about monetary policy. We asked about their expectations. And then we did a little information treatment on inflation targeting versus average inflation targeting. OK, so this is all in 2020. And then recently, we went back and over the period from mid-August to mid-September, we repeated the exercise of using the daily survey. So here we have about 7,000 households over this time period to which to whom we asked the same questions as we're asked in the previous year. All right, so the questions that we asked, I'll run through relatively quickly. We started by asking them questions about news. So have they heard any news about monetary policy or the Federal Reserve in the last week? OK, so that's the basic question to see if they've heard anything. And then if they answer yes, then we had some follow-up questions about how many pieces of news did you hear? Where did you hear the news? When did you hear the most recent piece of news? And then we asked about what they remember from these news accounts. So we're trying to figure out if the news that they heard actually about the announcement. So we say, what were the news about? And then we offer them several options, which all sound plausible. So one is there's an international meeting of central bankers. Another one, which would be wrong, is there's new leadership at the Fed. There was a change in interest rates. There was new lending facilities. And then we also added this new strategies at the Fed. We then asked, who was the news about? Again, we give them options, which sound reasonable like Bernanke and Yellen and Lagarde, but we were hoping they would say Powell. And then following up on these questions about news, we asked three questions that were targeting their knowledge of monetary policy. So here we're trying to assess whether the people who are going to have heard news are they going to have heard the right news, picked up something about average inflation targeting. So the first is about the Fed's broader economic objectives. So we ask them, what do you think are the two objectives, broad objectives that the Federal Reserve focuses on? OK, so we have maximum employment and stable prices as two of the options, but then we also offered low interest rates to reduce the government cost. Borrowing, high stock prices, bailing out institutions, strong dollar, climate change, reducing inequality. OK, so a lot of appealing options, only two of which were the right ones. And then we asked a second question on policy objectives, which is focusing on prices specifically. And this is probably the most important question for us in terms of identifying people who know the precise strategy that the Federal Reserve is using. So here one option was keep inflation as close to target as possible at all times. All right, so this is the traditional inflation targeting answer. The second option is make inflation equal to the target level on average. So this is the average inflation targeting answer. And then again, we offer a few other answers, which sound good but are not correct. So keep prices from rising and ensure inflation is sufficiently high to erode the value of government debt. Keep inflation low to promote a strong dollar. And then the third question we asked them in this topic was about the Fed's actual numerical inflation target. OK, so in terms of the news, I'm going to show you responses by the frequency of the day and the day of the announcement, we have both morning responses and afternoon responses. OK, so before the announcement, we had 24% of respondents saying that they had heard some news about monetary policy in the last week. And then in the afternoon of the announcement, you can see an uptick. It goes up to 30%. The next day, it goes up to 33%. So you definitely see a little uptick in people saying that they've heard some news about monetary policy or the Fed. And then in the days following that, it kind of starts to revert. So we can ask, well, where did you hear this news? This is kind of interesting because it speaks to how this news is actually getting to people. And so the day before the announcement, you can see most people were reporting that they were getting news about monetary policy either from the television or from newspapers. But then on the morning of the announcement, we see a spike in people saying they're getting news from friends or relatives, from social media, and a decline in the share of people that are reporting TV as the source of the news. So the news is first coming kind of from these informal channels. And then we see a little spike that's happening through official sources. And then gradually over time, we see the TV news kind of coming back up towards higher levels, social media effects kind of taper off and everything kind of goes back to its original levels. So what were the news about that people were hearing? So this is consistent with people hearing, some people hearing about actually the Fed strategy. So you can see the share of people that were saying the news I heard was about new Fed strategy rises in the couple of days after the announcement, right? It goes from 36% to about 45%. So you get this little uptick in people saying, I heard news about Fed strategies, but it's pretty small, right? As a share of the population, this increase that we observe is relatively small. Okay, so then we can ask, was there a change in people's ability to correctly identify the Fed strategy? And so here I'm going to show you the answers for this question regarding the Fed's pricing objective, right? So one answer they could choose is the Fed is trying to keep inflation close to the target at all times. And the day before the announcement, we had 40% of respondents were picking this as one of their options. Right, notice that the most popular answer was actually a strong dollar, right? So people could pick more than one answer here. So what happens with the announcement? Well, we see a decline in the share of people that are saying that inflation should be close to the target at all times. This is the Fed's primary objective. And a little bit of an uptick in the share of people saying that the Fed is trying to keep inflation close to... close to an average level. But that effect tapers off within a couple of days, right? So within a few days, the share of people saying that picking the average inflation target answer has kind of gone back to its original level. So has the traditional inflation targeting answer. Alright, so there's a little bit of an uptick, but then it tapers off very quickly. A year later, right, so this is the question where we would really expect to see a change after a year, right? If people are learning over time what the Federal Reserve is trying to do with prices. A year later, the share of people that are answering the average inflation targeting answer has gone to 30% from 27%. So qualitatively, there's no change in the distribution of these answers. Alright, there's a very small decrease in inflation close to the target at all times and very small increase in average inflation answer. But nothing meaningful to speak of. So even after a year, people don't seem to have learned about the Fed's pricing objective. Then we had some questions that were meant to try and identify what extent people understand. These pricing strategies. And so one approach that we use was to ask people hypothetical. Okay, so people received either question A or question B. And question A was suppose that the inflation rate in 2021 turns out to be around 1%. What inflation rate do you think the Federal Reserve will try and achieve over the following year or two? Okay, question B is the same thing, except we use a number of 3%. Yes, what's the purpose of these questions? Well, if you believe that the Federal Reserve is doing traditional inflation targeting, your answer to either 1 should be 2% or whatever you think the Fed's target may be. Alright, so the answer to question A and the answer to question B should be the same. Now, if you think the Federal Reserve is doing average inflation targeting, your answer to question A should be above 2%. Your answer to question B should be below 2%. So your answer to question A should be greater than your answer to question B. And so what we're going to test is whether, in fact, we see a difference in the average answers to question A relative to the average answers to question B. That's consistent with people thinking in this way. Alright, so we're going to look at these average differences between the answers to B and A, right? We would expect this average difference to be negative under average inflation targeting to be 0 under traditional inflation targeting. And we do this for each possible value of the Fed's inflation target that people can report. Okay, so like this 2% here, this is for those people who correctly identified the Fed's inflation target as 2%. What's the average difference between the answers for B and the answers for A? And we can see the average difference is positive rather than negative across the full sample. And this is true for any belief about the Fed's inflation target. When we restrict this to people who heard news about the Federal Reserve, the difference is now 0 on average. And finally, if we restrict it to people who correctly picked the inflation targeting regime, right? The pricing strategy of the Fed, even then we can see on average the effects are basically 0. Okay, so we're not seeing this correct responses to the hypotheticals that will be consistent with understanding what average inflation targeting means here. The other way that we try and assess the extent to which people understood the news is by comparing the expectations of agents before and after the announcement. Okay, so the idea is we want to look at a kind of a common set of individuals before the announcement, after the announcement, and see whether their views have changed following the announcement. Alright, so the way we're going to do this is through a different diff strategy where we're going to focus first on the people who report having heard news about the announcement because on average those people tend to be different from people who aren't paying attention to monetary policy. Alright, so we want to look at the change in their expectations before and after the announcement. But because other things can be happening during this time period, which can potentially affect say inflation expectations, we're going to compare that difference to the difference in expectations of people who did not hear news before and after the announcement. Okay, so we're going to run this regression of people's different expectations and we'll run through a lot of different measures here conditioning on some household observables and indicator variable for period after the announcement. An indicator variable for whether they report having heard news or not. And the coefficient that we're interested in is the interaction of those two. Okay. And so what we get for that coefficient is basically no, no effects. Okay, so if we put as the dependent variable, whether people can correctly pick the feds broader objectives or the feds specific pricing strategy. We find no effect coming from the announcement on those answers. We find no effect on people's beliefs about the inflation target. And when we look at their, their, their economic expectations, right, which is where we really kind of hope to see an effect. Right. For example, their inflation expectations. We see no difference in people's beliefs before and after the announcement. Right. We see no difference in the probability that they assigned to hire inflation in the future. We don't see any differences on their beliefs about GDP growth. We don't see any differences in their beliefs about their own personal income growth. No changes in how they perceive the credibility of the fed and no effects on their expected spending in September relative to prior to the crisis. Okay, so at this point, what we have is that most households didn't seem to have heard anything about the feds announcement. And of those who heard the announcement, it doesn't seem like it had any effect on on their expectations. Right. So we can think of a couple of different reasons why this might be the case. One possibility is simply, you know, the Fed strategy was poorly explained, either by Powell or by the news media that people relied on to hear about it. Or it could just be that the difference in the strategy between inflation targeting and average inflation targeting is just kind of too complicated or intricate for people to really understand. Okay, and so we want to try and differentiate between those by trying to explain ourselves to people what average inflation targeting is. Okay, so this is where we put on our, our, our econ professor hats. Okay, and we want to try and teach the fed communication people a lesson in how you do this correctly. Okay, so we split households into three groups. One group is the control group that gets no additional information. Then the other two groups are the ones where they're going to get to benefit from our expertise. Right. And we're going to explain to them. What these different pricing strategies mean. So for the regular inflation targeting treatment, we came up with the following explanation. We said, as of January 2020, the Federal Reserve was targeting an inflation rate of 2% per year. So we're telling him that the inflation target. Let me say effectively this means that when inflation is below the target, the Federal Reserve will try to push inflation back up to the target. And vice versa, when inflation is above the target, the Federal Reserve will try to push inflation back down to the target. Okay, so this is our simple explanation of traditional inflation targeting. The other group of people gets the explanation regarding average inflation targeting. And so here we tell them the Federal Reserve targets an average inflation rate of 2% per year. Effectively, this means that when inflation is below the target, the Federal Reserve will try to push inflation above the target for some time. And vice versa, when inflation is above the target, the Federal Reserve will try to push inflation below the target for some time. Right, so we wrote up these treatments and we thought, boy, these are really clear and concise. We're going to get people's expectations to respond to this. So what we then did is we looked at a variety of outcomes. So after doing these, providing these different pieces of information to people, we asked them some follow up questions, right, to try and measure whether the treatments had an effect on their beliefs. And so what we're going to do is regress those outcomes on indicator variables for whether people were in the traditional inflation targeting treatment, or whether they got the information about average inflation targeting. Okay, so the coefficients are going to tell us essentially how each treatment affected their expectations relative to getting no information, right? In principle, we would expect kind of bigger effects on, say, inflation expectations from the average inflation targeting treatment if we were successful in explaining what the difference was. And so what we find is that the treatments were indeed powerful in terms of moving people's inflation expectations. So we measured, we didn't want to ask the same inflation expectation as before the treatments, because people don't like being asked the same question over and over. So we asked a somewhat longer horizon question of what do you think inflation is going to be over the next five years. And so what you can see here is that in both treatment groups, inflation expectations went down, right? So we told people what the inflation target is, right, and how the Federal Reserve acts around that target. And in both groups, the average inflation expectation fell by about 50 basis points. Okay, but importantly, there's no difference between how inflation expectations responded to the traditional inflation targeting treatment versus the average inflation targeting treatment. Okay, so our wonderful explanation of average inflation targeting had no additional effect on inflation expectations relative to the traditional inflation targeting treatment. You can see there's also no difference in a measure of inflation uncertainty. What's the probability of inflation next year being greater than 5% and we find really no differences on anything else of interest. So if we look at people's expectations about GDP growth, again, the treatments as they reduce their inflation expectations, they reduce their expectations of GDP growth. But they do so by the same amount, people's expectations of the changes in their own income declines by the same amount. There's not much of a difference in terms of the credibility of the Fed nor is there an effect on when people think that mortgage rates are going to finally start increasing. Okay, so in other words, while these information treatments are successful in changing people's expectations, there's no additional value to the treatment about average inflation targeting relative to inflation targeting. People are not drawing a distinction between these two regimes. Okay, so jointly, we interpret all of this as saying that average inflation targeting is really unlikely to deliver the powerful stabilization effects that New Keynesian models predict. Because even if you're able to get to people and explain to people the change in the regime, people just don't seem to understand it in a way that shapes their economic expectations. And ultimately, the power of average inflation targeting comes from changing people's economic expectations, and that just doesn't seem to happen. So I'll stop here and I'm happy to take any questions that y'all have. Well, thanks, Ali. We'll now move to the Q&A. Again, if you have a question, please submit it with your name and affiliation in the chat. So, Ali, I'm actually going to begin with one of my own questions if that's okay. And I guess this is drawing upon, Emily, what you presented here, but I think also what Michael talked about and what Yuri talked about yesterday. And I guess it's just a general question about thinking about fed communication strategy to the public. And I guess the question is, you know, it's sort of a multifaceted sort of idea, right? Because maybe we need to think a little bit differently about what the medium is that we're going to use. For example, who delivers the message, you know, what the information actually should be that should be delivered. I mean, you know, people have made reference to the Bank of Jamaica's sort of, you know, the sort of ad that they put out and the video for that. But I guess my question is actually two parts. One is just sort of thinking about that whole medium. The other is just on a more basic level, are we trying to be a little bit too sophisticated to the public? I mean, I guess a basic question is simply this, like, do people even understand what inflation means? I mean, because I think there's a presumption of kind of where the starting point for the public might be. So I know that's a barrage of questions. I'll let you choose whichever ones you want to. There's other people that are asking too, but I just thought maybe I would start off the conversation with those if that's okay. Yeah, well, let me let me start with the first part, which is I think you're, you're right that there's kind of there's two distinct parts to this, right. So one is, you know, what is the medium that you're going to use to speak to the public to reach the public. So one of the one of the things that we get the first result that we have here really is, you know, the vast majority of the public did not hear about the announcement. I just didn't get to them. Okay, so there was no message. It didn't really matter what the message was because there was there was no message that was that was heard by by anyone right so you have to find a way to actually get to people to relay a message to them. And one of the things that comes out of this is, you know, just having a press conference or making a speech and relying on the news media to transmit that speech, that information to the public doesn't work very well. Okay, the public is not paying attention to news articles about monetary policy, even big ones like this that that, you know, get covered extensively in the news media. It doesn't have much much of an effect so that, you know, you kind of have to break through that that that wall in the first place then there's the question of what is the message that you want to transmit to the public. Right. And this is where the second part of the paper comes in, which is, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to transmit information that people are going to are going to fully understand. Right. So we see that the people who heard about the announcement they didn't seem to get it. They didn't seem to have any effect on their expectation. So clearly the the message that they did receive was confusing to them. Right. It didn't add much information. And even when when we try and kind of explain clearly to them. Right. So when we do the information treatment we're killing the first problem of the medium right where we're getting to them we have them. Looking at their computer we present the information to them, but even when we present the information in what we think is a clear and concise manner. It's it's not doing anything beyond that. And so that's where, you know, you really have to think about how do you get information to people about monetary policy in a way that they're going to process and digest correctly. And both are challenging. Right. So, you've got to you've got to be able to reach people in the 1st place and the 2nd, the message that you present to them has to be something that's that's going to that's going to be effective. In terms of changing their their beliefs or their expectations or their understanding of monetary policy. Okay, great. Thanks. We have some questions in the chat. I'll read them. But if you want to look in the chat also. Let me just mention. So Laura from the ECB says concerning the it it explain treatment. Could it be that the result that it explained had no differential effect above it explain comes from the fact that households expectations are upward biased in general. And they respond to the new knowledge that the average inflation target is 2% that is below what they were expecting. Then we disregard the rest. So, I mean, there, there, there definitely is, you know, an upward bias in the expectations, but in principle. You know, there should, there should still be a marginal effect coming from, you know, the difference in terms of where you are relative to to the target. Right. And that that should be showing up in the information treatments. And I believe we, we, we did a case where we, we looked at, you know, the subset of people whose expectations were close to the target in the 1st place. And so for whom that that dimension was smaller, like, do we see a difference there? And the answer again is no. So it's true that the at, you know, kind of the average shift that we see in expectations is largely coming from people learning about what the target actually is. But if they were understanding average inflation targeting correctly, there should, there should be an additional marginal effect relative to the traditional inflation targeting. And that, that we don't see. Okay. Another question. This is from Klaus at the ECB. Thanks for the excellent talk. You show that households did not understand what the obviously too complex novel AIT announcement implies for future inflation. Even not after one year, assuming that sophisticated financial investors have much better understood what AIT implies for inflation. And the monetary policy reaction function could this asymmetry allow big financial players to take advantage of less informed ordinary savers and borrowers and possibly politicians thereby adding to wealth inequality. I'm just the messenger. I mean, to the extent that well informed financial players have the ability to kind of take advantage of less informed participants, you know, then, then yes, that that would that would be the case right because clearly this is a policy that's that was received by by financial players that was understood by financial players and that was not by by others. So if we think that those people have the ability to, you know, extract a surplus from differences in information about policy, then I would assume also this would this would extend to this this policy change. I'm going to go ahead and ask another one of my questions is to follow up and I think there's this more general question which is from all of this. And this is a question that others have asked also, you know, whose expectations are really going to matter for the transmission of monetary policy. Right. I mean, so I guess that there's just this question. If the if households knowledge of the policy is not particularly well understood, but they're not sort of the key players for the transmission. I mean what I guess my question is sort of how much game do you think we'll get. I mean, obviously better communication and understanding by the public is important. But I guess I'm just trying to get a sense of what the marginal benefit overall may be what your thoughts happen to be in terms of the role of whose expectations may matter for the transmission. Well, I think in principle, all of the expectations can matter for the for the transmission right so you can think about, you know, the Federal Reserve speaking to financial markets. Right. Financial markets incorporating information about the future path of policy that information is going to shape both short term and long term interest rates. And then households are going to observe those those changes in interest rates and they may respond to those interest rates. Right. So that's one channel that's operating through financial markets. Right. And their understanding of monetary policy. But then we have other channels that are operating more directly through the beliefs of the households and the firms. And we know from other work that when the inflation expectations of households change, their spending changes, they respond to that. So when the inflation expectations of firms change, they respond to changes in those expectations. So both the inflation expectations of households and firms affect their decisions. Right. But the extent to which they're responsive to monetary policy announcements etc is different from from financial markets. Right. And so if you want those at those channels to be operating. That's going to require a different set of communication strategies than just relying on the financial market channel. Another question a question from Peter karate at the ECB Ali very interesting I'm worried a bit. Sorry, my screen just moved and I seem to have I'm worried a bit that the five year ahead inflation expectations should not necessarily be influenced by it versus it strategies. It should not be feasible to ask a question about short term inflation expectations again probably frame differently, like the current inflation is X percent. What inflation do you think the Fed is going to target over the next year. Yeah, so that that was that was kind of the hypothetical question that we did. Right. So the hypothetical was suppose, you know that next year inflation turns out to be 1% or it turns out to be 3%. You know, what is that going to mean for the inflation rate over the following 1 or 2 years. Right. That's that's basically what we were going for with the hypothetical question with the information treatments. You know, the challenge that we were running into was that you can't you don't want to repeat the questions to respondents. So prior to the treatments we had asked about their shorter run inflation expectations and so after the treatment we couldn't repeat questions about 1 year ahead inflation. So we went for a longer run measure. You know, we asked for what do you think inflation is going to be on average over the next 5 years which captures both kind of shorter run and longer run changes so in principle like it should be showing up there. As well. You know, but it's I mean, it's true in principle we could have asked for a shorter kind of medium run horizon like like 3 years. And maybe there would have been more of an effect there, but my my guess is because you know what people have found. In other settings is that the when people revised when households revised their their short run expectations by a certain amount they revised their long run expectations by just about the same amount. So the 2 are kind of moving in lockstep. And so it's unlikely that we would see, you know, a big difference, a big change in expectations at a short horizon and not and not at a longer run horizon. The 2 tend to be very, very highly correlated. For households. Okay, we have time for 1 more question and I'm going to save it from 1 of your former students. This is from Jane Rangard at Wake Forest. And Jane asks, are the households understanding of better from 1 side of the target. Do they think future inflation will be higher when inflation is below target, but remain high when inflation is above target. That's that's that's a good question. Jane. I don't think we've looked for an asymmetry in that way. In the results side, we'd have to go back and check that I don't remember us having. Having tried to answer that question. So thanks for the suggestion. We'll have to go back and do that. Okay. So with that, we'll conclude this morning's keynote session. Obviously, I want to thank Ali, the audience and the support staff for making this a very interesting and stimulating discussion. Thank you again. And I believe that we will pick up after a 15 minute break at 10 o'clock. So again, thanks to everyone. Thank you again for having me. I appreciate it.