Thank you, Isabel, and thank you to the organizers for the invitation to be part of this discussion.1 As we get closer to the dinner hour, I will give you two thoughts to chew on about how monetary policy transmission has worked in the recent past and how that affects my view of appropriate actions when facing current challenges. The first of these is that initial conditions are crucial. To decide where policy should go, you need a clear sense of where you are starting from. By "initial conditions," I mean what is currently happening—not some average of experience in the past. This lesson was brought home to me ... (full story)