The Economist terms it Fedspeak. If you want to understand what the Federal Reserve is saying you had better increase your word power. The chart shows the escalation in pretentious verbosity under the last three Fed chairmen. After its regular Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) policy meetings the Fed states changes in policy in response to its evaluation of economic data. Fed watchers have noticed that the language has become stilted to the point that the economic gobbledygook issued under the notoriously verbose Alan Greenspan are now models of concision.
Two employees of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis quantified the expansive prose using the Flesch-Kincaid grade level index which evaluates how difficult a passage is to read based on sentence length and the number of syllables per word. The reports issued during Greenspan's watch averaged 13.6 meaning they were suitable for a college sophomore but twice during the 2008 to present time span the reports scored a 20 suggesting one needs four years of post graduate study just to read a Fed report.
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