Mistakes Made in Fed Misquotes

These days it’s not minding your Ps and Qs that’s as important as it is your Rs and Ds.

Our eyebrows were raised when we read a blog by David Nicklaus, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In a posting on March 31, he wrote that Robert Rasche, research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, had been misquoted by an Arkansas reporter. The reporter apparently used the “D word” instead of “recession” when he quoted Rasche.

Nicklaus didn’t know who the reporter was and Rasche didn’t want to talk about it, but we did find that Rasche spoke at Arkansas State University in February.

That led us to an article by the Jonesboro Sun that includes this paragraph: “Things are not good, but they are not as bad as the 1930s,” Rasche said. “This is not your grandfather’s Great Depression. We are in a serious depression.”

Again, that last word was a misquote and was supposed to be “recession.”

Of course, we live in a glass house. We’re certainly not immune to the occasional error or even the more rare misquote, but to date never a Fed official on such a hot button issue.