Owatonna, MN Correspondent — The balance sheet is still far larger than it was before the crisis, and gradual reduction is appropriate for exactly that reason. It got that way over years and it should come down over years.

Moving aggressively risks a sharp tightening the real economy may not be ready to absorb. The Fed should hold the measured pace and stay data-dependent rather than commit to a timetable it may have to abandon, because abandoning a timetable is worse than never publishing one.

Clermont, Florida Correspondent — Markets have grown used to a large balance sheet, and that habituation is itself part of the problem you’re unwinding.

Reduction is necessary. Speed is the variable. If it goes too fast and conditions tighten sharply, the Fed may have to stop or reverse, and a reversal teaches everyone that the announced path was never real.

I’d take a steady pace the market can absorb over an aggressive schedule that risks overshooting. My clients are small professional firms with lines of credit. They don’t follow the Fed. They find out what it did when the renewal comes back different.

Orange County, California Correspondent — Commercial real estate is where this shows up first and most visibly, so let me be concrete.

We underwrite on an exit cap rate five or ten years out. Every assumption in a deal I signed off on in 2016 was built on a rate environment that’s now moving. That’s not a complaint. It’s arithmetic, and it was always going to arrive.

What matters is the pace, because a repricing the market can see coming is absorbed in the underwriting and a repricing it can’t see coming is absorbed in defaults. Runoff on a published schedule lets a lender adjust. A surprise acceleration to demonstrate resolve produces stalled projects and a construction loan that doesn’t convert.

Normalize. Publish the track. Keep the option to slow if the data turn.

Gastonia, NC Correspondent — Normalize, but don’t slam the brakes.

My instinct is to be suspicious of anybody at the Fed who wants to look decisive, because decisive is not one of the things that institution is supposed to be. Boring is the whole job description.

Years of extraordinary policy trained households and markets to cheap money. Untraining them is necessary and unpleasant, and doing it fast just means doing it twice.

Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent — Normalize. Don’t slam.

The balance sheet was a crisis tool. Crisis tools that stay become furniture, and furniture ought to be moved out of the hallway. Moved, not thrown out a window.

Yanking the tablecloth to prove courage is how you get a land-price accident and then a speech about unforeseen tightness. If conditions tighten more than the data warrant, they can slow. That’s not weakness. That’s driving.

Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent — This town lives on rates whether it admits it or not. Rooms, construction, and the refinance that makes a renovation possible.

Get back toward normal. Normal isn’t 2009. It also isn’t a dare.

Aggressive runoff that surprises the credit window shows up here as a project that stops at steel, and we have monuments to that from the last time. I’d take a boring quarterly reduction everybody can price over a show of force that has to be reversed after one bad auction. Reversals teach people that policy is a mood, and moods are expensive in a desert that runs on confidence.

The President hasn’t been shy about wanting easier conditions, and central bankers hate being told what to do. They also hate being wrong. Publish the track, watch inflation and employment, and pause if you need to pause.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent — Municipal borrowing is how a county builds a school without a fantasy. When the Fed moves from extraordinary to ordinary, that borrowing price moves, and it moves for us about a year after it moves for everyone else.

I want ordinary. I don’t want a dare.

Aggressive reduction that ignores mixed data is a philosophy course, and we don’t need one. We need a path — so many billions a month, announced, adjustable. Tighter conditions later this year are a risk rather than a rumor. If the labor market is solid and prices are behaving, keep walking. If something in the pipes groans, shorten the stride.

The prior decade taught boards that money would stay cheap. Unteaching that with a shove is how you get a council that defers the school and blames the calendar.

Long Island, New York Correspondent — Assessments and mortgages here already know what rates do.

I’m for normalization because emergency policy that lasts a decade isn’t emergency policy anymore. It’s a regime, and regimes create habits — in boards, in households, in funds that bought paper they’d never have touched at an honest price.

Going harder than the announced path to demonstrate backbone converts a management job into a shock. Shocks here show up as the house that doesn’t sell and the closing that doesn’t happen.

Give me the boring reduction and the option to slow if the data sour. An institution keeps its independence by looking like an institution.