How Monetary Policy Is Made: Lessons from Historical FOMC Discussions

We construct a new dataset of FOMC meeting transcripts from 1966 to 1990 to analyze the sources of heterogeneity in individual monetary policy preferences and study how this heterogeneity shapes policy decisions. Using these detailed discussions, we manually quantify and characterize each FOMC participants’ preferred policies along with their reasoning and justification. We show that participants' beliefs about the effects of monetary policy—specifically, their perceived slope of the Phillips Curve—play a central role. Participants who believe monetary policy has stronger effects on real activity are more likely to cite output as a justification for easing, while those perceiving stronger price effects emphasize inflation as a reason for tightening. We then show that the Chair plays a unique and powerful role in reconciling these views, not just in setting policy rates, but also in minimizing dissent. The latter occurs because dissenters find their ability to influence policy in subsequent meetings is significantly curtailed.