The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is responsible for the Fed’s activity in the light green area – the Eleventh District – home to 27 million people in Texas, northern Louisiana and southern New Mexico. Roughly 96 percent of the district’s output comes from Texas. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Here is a chart showing the disparate behavior of the economies in the 12 Federal Reserve Districts, as measured by employment growth. You will see that going back to 1990 – some 22 years – the Eleventh Federal Reserve District has outperformed the other Federal Reserve Districts in job creation. In terms of employment, the Dallas Fed’s district went into the recession last and was one of the first to come out. We have since punched through previous peak employment levels. Here is the job creation record of the so-called mega-states within the United States since 1990. And last, and just for fun, here is the record of Texas’ job creation over the past two decades versus resource-rich countries, such as Australia and Canada, as well as versus the major countries of Europe, the U.S. and Japan. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Indulge me for a minute here. I share these with you not to engage in stereotypical “Texas brag” or because St. Andrews has become a popular destination for recent generations of undergraduate scholars from Texas. I do so to illustrate a point, specifically the influence of fiscal policy on the effectiveness of monetary policy.
To me, Raeburn’s work provides a fitting visual metaphor for the ideal countenance of a central banker: The Reverend Walker skating forward confidently and with grace upon a notably uneven, rocky surface on an icy, dark, blustery day. An alternative depiction is Edvard Munch’s The Scream from Norway’s Gunderson Collection, now on temporary exhibit at the National Gallery. (There are four versions of this pastel, one of which recently sold for $ million at auction at Sotheby’s. If you haven’t been into Edinburgh to see the Gunderson version, I am sure you read about Sotheby’s record-setting auction.) 6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  In sharp contrast to Raeburn’s painting of composure, The Scream depicts a panicked form. In an autobiographical epigraph, Munch wrote that he conceived of the painting after a period of exhaustion and despair: “I stopped and leaned against the balustrade, almost dead with fatigue. Above the blue-black fjord hung the clouds, red as blood and tongues of fire. My friends had left me, and alone, trembling with anguish, I became aware of the vast, infinite cry of nature”.1  I am going to conclude by suggesting that the image that best behooves central bankers as guardians of financial stability and agents of economic potential is that of Henry Raeburn’s Reverend Walker. To be sure, central bankers everywhere are fatigued and exhausted and increasingly friendless.