For near-term inflation forecasting – say, for the current quarter and the next – the staff relies most heavily on a disaggregated, bottom-up approach that focuses on estimating and forecasting price behavior for the various categories of goods and services that make up the aggregate price index in question.
* * * Thank you, President Mester and Treye Johnson, and thanks to everyone for joining us. My job today is to listen, so I will keep my remarks short. But I do want to say that these conversations are incredibly valuable. They give context to reams of data and definition to a huge and complex economic picture.