next weeks before the scheduled fmoc meeting. movelked about the unusual and the path ahead.alk with the dallas federal reserve president, robert kaplan. >> if you had asked me two weeks ago, i was saying publicly, let's see how this unfolds and i will make a judgment at the meeting. it is too early to comment. what happened once the virus got to south korea and then to italy and it was clear there were diagnosed cases in the u.s., for me at least, the probability of a material deterioration in the u.s. economic outlook, the probability of that increased to a point where i came to the view that we would need to take action at the fmoc meeting. then i felt that the situation was changing so rapidly that i thought it would be wiser, and i will explain a little bit why, to act now and only -- and boldly where it could make an impact. it will not help with the number of diagnosed cases and it will not get people to want to go out. it will not do anything about the containment reaction if the casessis -- the diagnosed spikes. if we have a severe slowing in the economy that lasts f

can you speak to, is the fmoc talking about this, are we likely to see any emergency provisions from the cra activated or things that you normally do during a hurricane or that type of disruption to the economy? >> so we don't see any of that happening yet. of course we are thinking about what we can do should those things happen. there's no evidence yet, the economy continues to perform well. as i mentioned, we do hear concerns, particularly from those most directly exposed. but there's nothing in that nature. financial markets are functioning in an orderly manner and all that sort of thing. i think when it comes to those sorts of issues, though, we will be -- the supervisors will be working with banks to assure they work with their borrowers and that sort of thing. so i can imagine us doing those sort of things. but those things are not upon us at the moment. >> reporter: thank you, brendan greeley, "financial times." has the committee discussed any other monetary policy tools in addition to rate cuts and the pacing and timing of when they might be appropriate. >> as you know, we'r

obviously this is from the fomc meeting, i mean from the fmoc meeting, gathering of the 12 districts. they are concerned there are some disruptions and i think it dovetails personally from the ism manufacturing data which by the way blew the cover off the ball. coronavirus increased lead times. but what i'm looking out look remains positive. business is rapidly improving, construction is off to a good start this is 70% of the economy is saying what the "beige book" is saying, it is a concern but it has not hurt business yet? >> yes. very through and i, thus far am in that camp. the dow went down and retested 25,000 and held it nicely. the s&p held the october 3rdio t have a lot of data in general. they have priced in what they consider have, we'll really have markets going higher unless there is more bad news, but even markets could go higher on bad news based on that. the other thing we have backing up what you and i are saying, charles, you have 100 billion in the repo market. 50 billion injected by imf. 8 billion by congress and government. we have a lot of liquidity coming into th

and they directed the desk -- this is the fmoc telling the desk at the new york fed to include purchases of agency commercial mortgage-backed securities in such purchases so we knew they were going to buy these things i guess we didn't have the instruction of, in the amounts needed to support market functioning. so, again, they're in a no-limit situation here, kelly. >> right and the numbers are just going to get huger what did you think, steve, was the significance of powell going on the "today" show, which no fed chair has ever done. >> so, i think the fed took a lot of heat and got a lot of criticism back in '08, '09 it was maybe because of the particularly particularities of the crisis that we faced back then. but the criticism, as you remember, was too much helping of the financial system, too much assistance for the wealthy, nothing for regular people and i think the fed chairman feels this need and the fed as an institution feels a need to explain itself that it is going to be a doing a variety of things to help main street, to help average workers, and in fact, what it does do is

to instruction from the chair, which is apparently chair jay powell, in consultation with the frngs fmoc says [ inaudible ] emergency decision that was made but it looks like fed chair powell directly intervened in making this happen >> so they've done $1.5 trillion, and $60 billion of qe. it sounds like they're buying treasuries sounds like qe to me it's over chips and floating rate notes nominal bills, coupons the $500 billion not overnight they'll do it today, but it's a three-month repo operation then they'll do a $500 billion one-month. and then they're going to do a three-month -- i'm sorry to do this it's three two-month operation at $500 and one one-month operation at $500 billion. that's $1.5 trillion, if i'm not mistaken >> that's huge we'll talk more about this the market way off its lows when that announcement originally passed and now it's losing a little bit of steam again. again, the lows of the session today, the dow is down about 2,220 points after this announcement, we went down to about 700, 750, and we're back down about a thousand barry james is here, president and p

along with what bob was saying we adjust the outlook of 50 basis points of both the march an the april fmoc meeting. >> that's zero. >> yes exactly. we also expect the committee to increase its monthly purchase rate of 80 to 100 billion per month and extend the purchases into q3. you can call it qe if you want or a provision of liquidity into the market but this is very different from friday when it seemed like people not uncomfortable with how the treasury market was trading but on friday i got the first inklings of problems there. >> what's the latest with the rapid tracker of gdp >> kelly, if i thought it was meaningful i'd bring it to you. >> okay. >> we are tracking 1.5 i don't think that accurately reflects the market on the expectation of q1 gdp. it's a formulaic thing for times going well but right now the data that will tell us the impact of the coronavirus is not out yet. the good news on that i guess is that the data hasn't been that bad. >> okay. >> it is relatively good so that we have been tracking 1.5 to 1.7. we'll see if in the coming weeks the february data and then after t