We need to react to changes in financial markets, as we did this fall, but our objective is the maximum sustainable growth of the US economy, not particular levels of asset prices.
As I have testified before the Congress many times, I believe, at root, the remarkable generation of capital gains of recent years has resulted from the dramatic fall in inflation expectations and  BIS Review 7/1999  –2–  associated risk premiums, and broad advances in a wide variety of technologies that produced critical synergies in the 1990s.