Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island?

Jane Gaskin did exactly that, trading in the family home to begin a new life in the

tropics.

But she soon discovers that Paradise has its secrets.

I'm Alice Levine, and this is the price of Paradise,

the island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption, and murder. Wish you were here. Follow the price of Paradise Now, wherever

you listen to podcasts. This is a series, I in the world, I'm John Bachelor. The Federal Reserve, Mr. Powell, awaiting the meeting and the decision about cuts to the interest rate now at a

23-year high and has been for almost a full year now or maybe a little more than

that. That interest rate is a challenge to

businesses to grow, to expand, to make plans for next year. The cost of money is

high. What is to be done? The first thing to be done is to understand what you're talking about.

So I welcome Joseph Sternberg, a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.

He writes political economics. He's based in London, writing about the

Federal Reserve and the task at hand. But first Joe takes us inside and shows us the

Oracle inside the Federal Reserve. The Oracle has a name Ferbus

F R B U S. A very good evening to you who what is Ferbus and what is Ferbus and what is it what is he who it do?

Good evening.

Hey John, so Furbis is kind of like a,

think of it like a gigantic spreadsheet that the Federal Reserve uses to try to understand what on earth is happening out in the main street economy in the U.S.

So for a business, what you call an economic model and it's a very sophisticated

model. They have 170-ish equations, 500 different variables where they can kind of put numbers into this machine and get it to churn out estimates of things.

For example, predictions of what's likely to happen to inflation over the next year

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