This essay examines the persistent gaps in how the Federal Reserve communicates its monetary policy decisions, despite significant improvements in transparency over recent decades. It evaluates the weaknesses in the Fed’s current communication framework and proposes practical reforms to make policy reasoning clearer, more consistent, and more accessible. 

Trump’s second-term tariff strategy shifted from targeted, China-focused measures to a broad “reciprocal” tariff that essentially charges every country for doing business with the U.S. While tariffs can help in certain strategic areas, the universal approach simply doesn’t make as much sense.

This project replicates some empirical results of Stock and Watson’s seminal paper, “Vector Autoregressions” (2001), using a three-variable VAR model comprising inflation, unemployment, and the federal funds rate. Drawing on publicly available U.S. macroeconomic data from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) database, I estimate the reduced-form and recursive VAR models.