I suspect that, at any given meeting of the FOMC, virtually every member of the Committee disagrees with some aspect of the staff's forecast - quite possibly in mutually inconsistent ways. Nevertheless, we take the staff forecast as an informative and highly useful starting point for a productive discussion of the prospects for the economy and the way that policy should respond.
The Investment Boom of the Nineties With this background, I now review the recent behavior of investment, concentrating on business fixed investment, or investment in nonresidential structures as well as equipment and software. (For now I omit residential investment - that is, investment in housing - and investment in inventory stocks.)