Sen. Phil Gramm, chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, made the following statement today prior to the testimony of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan on the conduct of monetary policy:

Today we begin our semi-annual report from the Federal Reserve Bank, from Chairman Greenspan, on the state of the economy and monetary policy. As many of you know, we have worked out a bipartisan consensus as to how to proceed in the future as we move away from the Humphrey-Hawkins report toward a report that more meets the needs of the era that we are blessed to live in.

We were unable to pass permanent legislation to annualize this meeting, not because of a dispute about the nature of Chairman Greenspan's testimony, but basically because of a dispute about how many other reports to Congress we want to continue. There tends to be, in some hearts, a love of reports and bureaucrats and dust. But this is a free country, and if people need more reports, I'm sure we've got people at the Federal Reserve and other agencies who can do all the reports we need.

We're very glad to have you here again, Mr. Chairman. You have become a national phenomenon. We're told Wall Street is waiting for a big day today, and so are we. We are blessed with the strongest, most vibrant economy that I can remember in my study of American economic history.

There are many who would be quick to take credit, but I think if you had to narrow it down to who deserves more credit than anybody else on the planet, that person is sitting before us today, and his name is Alan Greenspan.

So we're very proud to have you here, Mr. Chairman. We're eager to hear from you. We're eager to begin our new set of hearings based on the state of the economy and monetary policy, and we welcome you this morning.