Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : ahhaha's ahs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ahda who wrote (1644)	3/27/2001 1:13:24 PM
From: Ahda	Respond to of 24758

Tuesday March 27, 9:30 am Eastern Time Greenspan: Need Better Measures of Techs WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Tuesday that better statistical measures were needed to give analysts a clearer picture of how new technologies are affecting the U.S. economy. ``Given the rapidly changing economic structure, one could readily argue that more statistical measures need to be applied to understanding the complexities of the new technologies that confront analysts,'' he said in a speech to the National Association for Business Economics. The Fed chief's text dealt entirely with the issue of improving statistical information, and made no mention of the economy's current state of health nor of the central bank's interest-rate policy. Greenspan has in the past urged that more money be devoted to improving statistical gauges of the economy, but the rapid emergence of high technology industries and the impact of information technology had made it all the more complicated for economists to assess how productivity has increased. The Fed chief noted that high-tech goods like semiconductors, computers and LANs (local area networks) account for just eight percent of manufacturing output but contributed two-thirds of the increase in manufacturing output between 1995 and 2000. Greenspan used the medical industry as an example of one in which current measures seem inadequate. He said applying price measures to new treatment methods that require shorter or no hospital stays indicated prices for medical services have been falling since the mid-1980s. ``This has raised significant questions as to whether our current measures of overall medical service price inflation are capturing the appropriate degree of productivity advance evident in medicine,'' Greenspan said. He said economists have made strides developing sophisticated models to show how the economy functions, but they still did not give complete answers. Greenspan noted that one of the most important insights from modeling has been the discovery that ``monetary policy could not permanently influence the level of the unemployment rate.''