Defining Degrees Of Suckage

The Federal Reserve has issued tips on how to parse the minutes of the closed-door meetings of the Fed's policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee -- further lifting the veil of secrecy that had cloaked the secretive panel for years. Two Fed staffers offer guidance on how to gauge the depth of support for various policy-maker views expressed in the minutes. "To give an indication of how widely expressed a particular view is at a meeting, the minutes use common quantitative wording: 'all,' 'most,' 'several,' 'few,' or 'one,' in descending order," they wrote. To further de-mystify the inner working of the Fed, we suggest using simple phrases like "This month the economy sucks just a little bit less than it sucked last month."