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There's not much the Federal Reserve can do about gas prices, per se, at least not without derailing growth entirely, which is certainly not the right way to go.
After all, the Fed can't create more oil. We don't control the growth rates of emerging market economies. What we can do is basically try to keep higher gas prices from passing into other prices and wages throughout the economy and creating a broader inflation, which would be much more difficult to extinguish.
We have a rapidly growing global economy, emerging market economies are growing very quickly, and their demand for commodities, including oil, is very, very strong.
Indeed, essentially all of the increase in the demand for oil in the last couple years, in the last decade has come from emerging market economies. In the United States, our demand for oil, our imports have actually been going down over time.
So the demand is coming from a growing economy, where we've seen about a 25 percent increase in emerging market output in the last -- in the last -- since before the crisis.