The data on consumer and business spending released since the last FOMC meeting have been largely consistent with this outlook. Nonetheless, as I will discuss shortly, I see significant downside risks to this outlook. These risks have been brought into particularly sharp relief by recent readings from a number of household and business surveys that have had a distinctly downbeat cast.
4/8  BIS central bankers' speeches  And the underperformance of bank equities may actually be testament to such concerns. Of course, weak bank equity markets are not, in the first instance, a public policy concern. But they may become such concern if they persist and morph into a systemic phenomenon.