FOMC transcripts show abundant laughter during the 2001-2006 bubble years
Evidence
Bitter comic mordancy can be ripping fun; but a nagging voice whispers: isn’t it just too easy to make fun of the Invisible Hand? Isn’t there something lazy about Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart? Is the right response to the nightmare of crisis fatigue to laugh it off? What if the people who helped bring on the crisis were quite literally laughing all the way to the bank as the financial system approached the precipice? Gales of merriment apparently rocked the meetings of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee, as revealed by a tabulation of all the recorded instances of stipulated “[laughter]” in meetings transcripts from 2001 to 2006, reproduced in Figure 1.1. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 28
Categorization
- CANDY: The Fed insiders literally laughing through the pre-crisis years as a charted data point is a pithy, shareable detail.
- corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 28
- XREF: connects to: Federal Reserve meetings before the crisis were marked by frequent laughter — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 28
Broader Connections
- Federal Reserve meetings before the crisis were marked by frequent laughter
#corroborates(0.95) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 28