E. Gerald Corrigan

Regardless of what you use as your indicators or your proxies, I think that one way or another we have to try to project an underlying forward-looking consistency in policy that ultimately overrides all this noise.

With any troubled financial institution, but especially in the case of large institutions, I believe discipline will be better served in a context in which the authorities maintain a policy of what I like to call "constructive ambiguity" as to what they will do, how they will do it, and when they will do it.  In saying this, I recognize that financial market particants do not like uncertainty, but that is just the point.  Moreover, while I fully understand the yearning in some quarters for the cookbook approach to problems in financial markets or institutions--large institutions especially--I regret to say that in my judgment such a cookbook does not and never will exist.