6.1The weekend as a separation of decision from deliberation
Both acts were announced while markets were shut, and in both the announcement was the first public trace of a decision taken in a closed meeting. Skeptron's record of 1971 keeps the deliberations of 13 to 15 August apart from the announcement; Volcker's press conference says the Board and the Federal Open Market Committee spent the day developing the actions, and his answer on timing gives the reason for the Saturday: to act as soon as was sensible, and preferably while markets were closed. The weekend let each announcer present a finished decision before prices could move on rumours of it.
The separation has a consequence for the debates over motive. Both the domestic reading of 1971 and the procedural reading of 1979 are about what happened before the announcement: which options were weighed, by whom, for what reasons. The announcements show none of that. They show the decision and its stated reasons. Gowa's account of the choice among the administration's options (Gowa 1983) and Lindsey, Orphanides and Rasche's account of the debates within the Committee (Lindsey, Orphanides and Rasche 2005) concern the deliberation, of which none of the texts read here holds anything. On motive, the announcements are evidence only of what the actors wished to be heard to say.
6.2Where each announcement put the object of review
The address of 1971 placed review abroad. The import tax would end when unfair treatment ended, that is, when other countries' exchange rates changed. The suspension of convertibility would be replaced, the address implied, by a new international monetary system to be built jointly with the International Monetary Fund and the country's trading partners. The cause it named, speculators and unfair rates, lay abroad, and so did the means of review, negotiation with others. The suspension itself was called temporary and given an exception clause reserving discretion, and no condition of its end.
The texts of 1979 placed review at home. What would be watched was money and bank credit against ranges already set and reported to Congress; the one instrument given a condition of removal would go once credit growth fell into line with policy; the aggregates themselves would be redefined; financial markets and credit flows would be monitored; the instruments would be adapted as time passed. The cause was named as inflation and the expectation of it, generated at home, with a history dated to the mid-1960s. The procedure itself was given no term and no condition of reversal, and the range of the overnight rate was deliberately not forecast.
Neither announcement named the condition on which its central act would end. That is consistent with the study's larger finding, that in most of its cases with an act the record names no observable condition on which the act would end or be revised; the finding there concerns the modern records, and here it holds of the actors' own texts as well. Where the two announcements differ is in what they offered instead. The address of 1971 offered a process with others whose outcome it could not promise. The texts of 1979 offered a set of measures that anyone could watch, and declined to promise what the watched measures would trigger.
6.3What the texts can and cannot carry for each debate
For the debate over the escape clause, the address of 1971 is closer to evidence than anything else read here, because the escape clause is a claim about what the public was given to expect, and the address is what the public was given. It called the suspension temporary and named no return. On Bordo and Kydland's account the clause works only if a return to the old parity is expected (Bordo and Kydland 1995). The address gave its listeners no parity to expect, and told those who buy abroad that their dollars might buy less. That does not show what listeners believed. It shows that the address did not ask them to believe in a return. Whether that makes August 1971 a use of the escape clause that failed, or a departure from the rule that called itself a suspension, is a question the text frames and does not answer.
For Kydland and Prescott's argument, the texts of 1979 are suggestive in a different way. Their worry is that a policy maker will depart from a plan once others have acted on it (Kydland and Prescott 1977). The change of 1979, as presented, kept the plan, the targets, and changed the method in a way that made departure from the plan more visible: if the rate was to move freely, any later effort to hold it would be seen. The refusal to forecast a range was an attempt to bind the institution by making its restraint observable rather than by naming a rule; neither Kydland and Prescott nor Lindsey, Orphanides and Rasche is reported here as saying so.
For the debate over accountability, the two texts mark the ends of the field. The address is an executive acting and explaining to the public, with no body named that could confirm or undo the act; the statement to the Joint Economic Committee is a delegated agency explaining to an elected body and offering it standards to judge by. Posner and Vermeule hold the first shape acceptable in an emergency (Posner and Vermeule 2010); Tucker holds that delegated power needs accountability to elected bodies (Tucker 2018). The texts show which shape each act took, not which was better, and the difference between an elected President and an appointed central bank makes them imperfect tests of either claim. Gross and Ní Aoláin's models (Gross and Ní Aoláin 2006) fit neither well, since neither text, in what is read here, names a legal basis for its act.
6.4What the modern records keep and lose
The two Skeptron records keep the dates and the acts well, keep the deliberations apart from the announcement in 1971 and the method apart from its later results in 1979, and refuse to treat later rates or prices as effects of the day.
They lose, in both cases, almost everything the actors wrote about review. The record of 1971 loses the word temporary, the exception clause, the import tax and its condition, and every bearer the address names. The record of 1979 loses the ranges reported to Congress, the marginal reserve requirement and its condition of removal, the refusal to forecast, the statement to Congress, and every bearer the transcript names. A reader who relies on the records would conclude that neither announcement said anything about its own term or review, and would be wrong about the first in part and about the second in substance. The loss is a limit of short summaries, not of the events.
The study's ledger, which reads these records, is accurate to them; taken as an account of the announcements, it would understate what the actors wrote, above all in 1979, where the actor's texts name objects of review in some detail and the record names none.