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Raphael Bostic

lines on the record: 49
first: 2025-05-16
most recent: 2025-05-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“But it's always super exciting when a red shoulder or a red tail hawk comes swooping in or a Cooper is. So just like when they ask parents their favorite child and they say, we love them all, I love all my birds.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Serious question, you know, that's very good. You know, when I first started, I got asked in my hawker dev, and I said I was an owl.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we'll just have to, I mean, I think they're hoping that this is a short episode and we can get to a new steady state so they can understand how to run their businesses.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And I think forecasts for sales, forecasts for costs are much higher for small businesses. When we talk to small business leaders, you can see this in our survey responses. They're the ones who are feeling most at risk.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just read the Bloomberg headline on it, and it seems like it was done. And so until there's uncertainty, we've asked our businesses, like, what kind of plans are you making for this year? And many of them are like, well, I don't really know. We're going to keep change to a minimum until we get that resolution. And so if that uncertainty continues, then I expect we're not going to see the same level of big investments or those sorts of things. And that will then push out the time before we'll be able to get to that equilibrium.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have 90 days in two settings, right? So you have the reciprocal tariff 90 day window. You have the China tariff 90-day window, which is at a different periodicity than that. And we have all these negotiations and we don't know how any of them, well, we know the UK. But other than that, you know, it's all up.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I will say I'm required to do this. So you know in that platforms. I have one cut for the year in part it's because I think the uncertainty Is unlikely to resolve itself quickly. So 90 days.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the question is, does that require a different kind of conceptual model about what response functions will be for businesses and for families and households? That's the bigger question that we're having to wrestle with, which is, which is But it is not so much about the idea that there's a policy and it changed how financial markets are thinking about risk. There are lots of other things that do that as well. And that's just part of the landscape.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I don't think it's different in character, but it is different in magnitude. And so, look, we take all non-monetary policy as given, right? And then I just respond in thinking about where we need to go based on where that part of policy is and where businesses are and all those sorts of things. These changes here that are being made are very much like that. Like trade policy is not something that the FID manages. And there are lots of different ways you can influence it. And so that's what we're seeing here. I think for me, one of the things that's been quite interesting to reflect on is that in your standard econ, if you do your models, it's all marginal this and marginal that. And there's calculus. So these are small, small changes on the status quo. And what we see today Are decidedly not small changes relative to the status quo.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Preconceived notions of where the world is. And in this instance, I think about all the advances that have been made in technology, in job searches. So a lot of natural unemployment is about, you know, it takes time for the match to happen between an employer and an employee. Now, you can sit over lunch on your phone and submit like 100 applications to things. Businesses are using AI type tools to review resumes to really be able to pick out the people. And that match happens faster. If that's the case, then the natural rate should be lower. And now the question is, how much lower? And this we argue about. I actually think it's much lower than others in my building do. But I think the experience would show that change did happen. And it happened in ways that we could get more people employed and in a sustainable way without being a problem, without that being a problem.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unemployment levels fall to numbers that were inconceivable, right? So at one point, unemployment was a 3.5% somewhere like that. When I first started my career as an economist, the unemployment rate that was viewed to be the natural rate of unemployment was, I think it was like 6%. And so the idea that you could get to three and a half without seeing inflation was just, it was like crazy talk, right? And so for us to then just, well, let's let it go. And then it kept going and kept going and kept going. I think that was a tremendous, you could call it an achievement, but it was a discovery. That a lot of our perceptions are understanding of what the possible could be might be constrained by our own.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me say two things on this. First, I'm very pleased that during my tenure here, the two mandates have not been in conflict. They've not been in tension. So I've not really had to face. Challenge. We've either had low inflation, so we could worry more about Employment, or we've had really rock solid employment, so we could worry About inflation. Look, I think one of the things that was quite interesting toward the end of the 2010s was the effort by the Fed, and it started before I got here to be less preemptive. Around anticipating that inflation must happen because we've Never seen an environment where inflation didn't arise. And so And so there was a philosophy that was embraced to say, okay, we should actually see signs of inflation before we get too crazy on this. And what we wound up seeing was.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The cost implications are going to be and the ability of firms to absorb them in their margins as opposed to having to pass those on. And so again, this is another one where I think the details will matter in a pretty significant way. And we'll have to see where it goes.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's a very interesting question. I would say It's possible. One of the things that's been quite interesting is I think in this environment, wage growth has been a trailing indicator as opposed to leading indicator. And so what we will see if that continues is that a lot will depend on the extent to which consumers are willing to take on price. If they're unwilling to take on price, then the dynamic that we have is pretty set. And then I think we'll see different strategies taken by firms as to how to manage their increased cost basis and to the extent that this necessary you might see some reductions in the staffing level. I don't think you'd see reductions in wages. But again, a lot of this depends. There's a big difference between 10% tariff rate, a 40% tariff rate, and an 125% tariff rate as to what”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, I think one of the questions that I ask is to what extent, once we get through and get to some degree of steady state, we will still have those aspects of the U.S. economy still in place at the same levels of strength. And something we're going to continue to look at and look for as we go through the rest of 2025 and into 2026”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I never use those cards, right? So I try to stay away from that stuff because it means different things to different people. But if that's what you want to call it, I'm happy for that.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the year with the idea that there was a lot of momentum we're still over 2% GDP. Hiring is happening at a robust clip. And we could avoid having sort of a recessionary or negative outcome. I felt like the bones of the economy were pretty solid and strong. And that's why I talk about the resilience and all those sorts of things. So even with a slowdown, I thought that we would still see pretty robust growth. People would still have jobs. One of the things that was quite useful for us to see was that wage growth was returning to pre-pandemic levels. So we were evolving to an environment that was fairly sustainable.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my outlook at the beginning of the year was that the economy would continue to grow in a solid way and inflation would return to 2% over time. And my expectation was somewhere toward the end of this year, we would be at that point where it would be appropriate for us to have a neutral stance for policy. So I had maybe three or four rate cuts.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Potential in your output. And we were not putting any cost value on that. And we learned that there is a cost value on that. And so the change of philosophy that might be going on right now, and we'll get to see how many people really start to set up these supply chains with the eye toward diversifying locations just for a reducing variance, that's a new thing. And that could be quite interesting to look at moving forward.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we have to actually acknowledge people are not ruthless utility maximizers. Firms aren't either. And in fact, what's been interesting for me in this pandemic period is the old model, I'm calling this more a high level, was cost minimization. And that means find the place where you can produce everything at the lowest cost, do all your stuff there, because that makes you the most efficient, right? What that doesn't do though is acknowledge that if you're locally reliant or dependent, if anything happens in that locality, your ability to produce goods basically goes to zero, right? So there's a higher variance.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, the chair famously had a speech on the stars and expressed some skepticism that the stars were always going to be reliable guides. I think there are really two things. And I was like major undergrad in addition to econ. One of the things I took or have taken from being in both those professions is that economic models are models. They are stylized characterizations of how the world actually works. We should all understand and appreciate that there is a confidence interval around any number that comes out from these models, even though some economists may declare them as truth and you should never deviate from those sorts of things. It's one of the reasons why a lot of the rules are useful, but the actual numbers that come out never hit right where the role is. And so there are other things that are going to influence what makes sense from a policy perspective. And those are the things that”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking about those bigger issues right now and just say, look, we are in a period of tremendous transition where we had received wisdom, cost minimization in production, free and open trade. And that equilibrium is being broken. And when you're in disequilibrium in Econ, there's the, I forget what they say it, but there are an infinite number of possible new equilibriums that you could achieve. And so what we're trying to do now is kind of figure out, are there ways to narrow and get a sense of what are the ranges of possibilities given where things are going so then we can start to think about those parameters, make judgments about what best long run policy might look like.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That has implications for just potentially have implications for what a baseline new level of inflation is likely to be writ large. And if that is what happens, then sure, all the fundamental dynamics and measures are going to change as well. But we haven't seen that. And it's been interesting. I've talked to a number of producers and they have production in multiple countries. And they say, you can put the same plant in three different countries and they will have different levels of productivity. And that is interesting, but it also means that the specifics of where they put things down, how much production happens in those places, and then where assembly and it all comes together is incredibly material. Folks don't have the answers to those things now. So I actually try to shy away from.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a lot of debate on sort of RSTAR and non-turbulent times for sure. And so today, I think you would see the same thing. Look, I think pre-pandemic, coming out of the great financial crisis, and actually even before that, we knew there was a long secular decline in RSTAR, demographics and a whole host of other things were believed to be behind it. And the notion that you could see inflation moved the way it has kind of caused people to have to step back and say, well, wait a minute. Maybe our notion of the immutable is not so immutable. And I think that debate is being taken on board right now. And so the other thing to think about is, look, to the extent that we are in a period where firms are redoing their supply chains and perhaps not looking for lowest cost location.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have an upward, put an upward force on inflation. And so that means that our policy is going to have to anticipate and to some extent potentially push against those inflationary forces to the extent that we see them. So that will put a limit on where our current policy stance is. Economy wide new fundamental As to an R star type of thing.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody's hands goes up. And in part, that's by design, right? So we know there are negotiations going on. We know it's a 90 day moratorium in some of these instances. So that change that's out there means that it's going to be very challenging. I try to go back to just our basic mandate. We got price stability and we have maximum employment, maximum sustainable employment is how I like to think about it. And so what I try to do is figure out, okay, given all the things that are going on, what's that likely to do for us getting closer to our 2% target in inflation? And what's that likely to do in terms of the movement of labor markets relative to some broad notion of full employment? Today, what I would say is what I hear from analysts when I talk to my economists in the building, relative to the pre-tariff environment, tariffs.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In an environment now where there's so much variation and discrete price discrimination country to country and sector to sector, it's really difficult to know how to add it all up. And then you overlay that the numbers can change. We're expecting one of the things I do when I talk to folks in public settings, show of hands, how many people think that the tariff numbers that we see today are going to be the tariff numbers that we see a month from now.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think of it like that. But first of all, I think being able to say a blanket statement on anything like this is going to be quite challenging. It would be challenging if you just picked one tariff rate for the whole world.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the only way to really understand how things are going on people are doing on the fly is to be there with them and to be continually asking them and seeing how their decision making and their changes are evolving as they get more insights. So as the tariff environment shifts, as the numbers move around, there's learning when you see, oh, their strategy was A and now their strategy is M, like that's saying something about their thought process and what they're likely to do moving forward.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to be a lot of that that happens in the next several months. Look, we've just gone through a period where people were expecting tariffs. I think many people didn't expect the tariffs to roll out at the scale that we saw. And it's causing everyone to think about, okay, now if this is our new reality, how do I think about this? What am I going to do? And just as it was at the early stages of the pandemic, people are kind of doing it on the fly.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Picking up the phone and telling us things. And it's been something that's really helped us. So we knew fairly early on that people's horizon and the pandemic was expanding. So we did a survey, we do a number of surveys. We have a survey shop here and we did a survey of businesses and asked them, okay, in April of 2020, when do you think this will be done? They said September of 2020 in January of 2021, we asked them. They said probably another 18 months, right? And it was this learned experience and we got to see their understanding of the environment evolve in real time in ways that really, I think, helped us understand what questions we needed to ask and what kind of decisions and policy changes that we should be looking for. It's been quite interesting. And I think there's going to be some of that.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, nobody calls me But we have a team that's out in the field, and they are getting calls on a regular basis. You know, when I got here, I was really, I didn't really know any of this, but we have a network of staffers whose job it is is just to have relationships with business leaders and with community folks all over the southeast and come and see them and talk to them in really conversational, unstructured ways for 90 minutes, two hours just to get a sense of where are they, how are they feeling, what are they worrying about, what are they excited about, what's changed, and because the relationships are personal on some level, people do feel more comfortable.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By customers are being rejected by them. And then they'll have to make a decision about what is their production function going to look like. And once they make that decision, then they'll decide what kind of workforce they need. I'm expecting that those lessons will be learned quickly. And as I go around, I talk to chambers of commerce. I do open discussions in cities all across the sixth district. I say if you see someone doing something that's really different than what they were doing two weeks ago, you need to call us and let us know because we need to be collecting that information to try to understand whether a single impulse is actually a trend and whether there are some lessons that can be learned from the collection of the masses.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because for many of these things, if you wait for them to show up in the national data, you're two months behind, a quarter behind, sometimes a couple weeks behind, and then there's more of a scramble. We learned, and the great financial crisis, that we needed to be asking much more front forward and prospective questions about what businesses are seeing, what they're feeling, and how they're going to respond so that even if the revelation happens at different speeds, the impulses and the drivers will be more contemporaneous. And if you can discern those, then you might be able to get a head start on where things are going. What I would say today is, and it gets back to what we were just talking about, I think many firms will probably try to pass through costs to the extent they see them. They will learn pretty quickly whether those cost increases are being taken on.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we have a very dynamic economy. And that's. feature of the environment that we work in. I think part of what we try to do in Atlanta is try to get hints about the longer run things in real time as much as possible.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's too much. And then the third piece to this is sector by sector. Do you wind up seeing different responses? And then if you wind up with something like that, and I think that's probably where we're going to wind up, then forecasting at the aggregate level becomes incredibly challenging. I mean, you have to wind up doing a lot more. Your spreadsheets get larger. The math gets more complicated. And so, you know, I think our job will get a bit more challenging.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question is are they still okay with that? And to me, I would say there are two really interesting dynamics that I think are potentially emerging. One is I think firms are going to try to apply the lesson learned. From the pandemic, they have an assumption or an expectation that the consumer response is going to be exactly the way it was before. We will see if it actually is. And I think the concern about the level of prices that we've heard a lot about in the last six months suggests that maybe they won't, but maybe they will. And in fact, it might actually be more complicated in that For some households it may be the size of the change. So if it's smaller incremental, it may not register. For others, it could be one penny.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number of people who apply for a vacant position is up in some instances considerably. And the quality of the applicants is also up relative to where they were in the pandemic. Back then, they'd put a shingle out. And if they got someone, it was someone that they probably didn't want to hire. And they were hiring them anyway because they didn't have options. That's not the environment that we have today. And that's important. In terms of the impulse of firms to increase prices, I do think that's still real today. And one lesson that I think people did learn through the pandemic was if you tell people costs are up and it's obvious that that wasn't in debates, then people understand that the price might have to go up. And what businesses learned is that most consumers, most of their customers were okay with that.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I wouldn't put it exactly like that. I think that there is a reluctance among firms, and this is what I've heard from most firms, that they're going to hold tight today and see how things evolve. And because there's two-sided risk, because the economy might be stronger than people are projecting today, or it might be weaker, you don't want to take actions that might cause you to have to do extra things to get back to where you are. So I think there's a precautionary. Posture that's happening today, which is actually quite different than what happened during the pandemic. We ask our firms through our surveys, is labor market easier for you today or is it worse than it was a year ago? Two years ago, and uniformly the answer is easier. Easier to hire.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kept their jobs. It's very interesting when I think about the pandemic, a lot of it is people kept getting paid. Like the employment rate rebounded incredibly fast, but they didn't have things to spend on. They couldn't go to restaurants. Couldn't go on vacation. So the household balance sheet was actually quite stronger than you would expect to see in sentiment. Turning south. Today, that balance sheet is in quite a different place. I talked to a lot of folks and asked bankers, for example, compared to pre-pandemic where your customers balance is, during the pandemic, everyone's like a lot higher, 30, 40% higher. Today, that's not what I'm hearing. And many of them are back to pre-pandemic levels. Which might mean that family's response function may be back to a pre-pandemic setting. And Will has to see how that plays out”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when push came to shove, consumers continued to go out. People kept going to restaurants, going on trips, renovating their homes, all those things, and the economy remained robust. So the question we have today is which of those realities is going to play out? And the one thing I would say that's different today than in the pandemic environment is that going into the pandemic, we hadn't had a higher recessionary period. And we also didn't have a situation where the government was going to provide support for the economy in such a robust way. So you might imagine that even in the face of more negative sentiment, look, the pandemic was super stressful on many dimensions. And so it didn't surprise me people were a little kind of upset and rattled, if you will. But they got a lot of support.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't know that, and so Saikin Econ, yeah, and so for me, I know psychology is important. And I know psychology can shift people's decision making even when the information set doesn't change. And so understanding that psychology and how it translates into decision making is a critical thing. The very interesting thing with sentiment today is that we have had two realities with sentiment, right? The conventional wisdom is that when people are feeling bad, they do less. When sentiment turns negative, things slow down. I think there's been a history to show that that has been an experience more often than not. The anomaly or the odd one was just most recent one where sentiment was really down in the dumps, you know, the vibe session and all those sorts of things.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, a lot of times it can be different, but just as often as not, right? And so part of what I try to do in my approach is never assume, never have a preconceived notion or an expectation about what's going to happen, but rather just pay attention. And what I would say on the sentiment, which is quite interesting, you know, I was a psych major undergrad.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And less resilience does not necessarily mean recession. I would say even today, recession is not in my outlook, but it's less, right? So rather than 2% or 2.5%, it may be 1%, maybe a half percent. That's the thing that I'm looking to really understand as I try to keep my finger on the pulse of the U.S. economy”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are not sure whether that will trigger a recession. I will say in the last six months, actually the last three months, analysts have used the word recession. In their narrative about possibilities far more than they have for quite some time. And all of that people notice. And if folks think that there's going to be a possibility that they're going to lose their job or those sorts of things, they're going to engage differently. perceptions of what a safety net needs to be for them that rainy day fund Going to change, and they're willing to spend out of savings is going to change or even spend out of regular income. All of that would suggest. Less energy, that's less resilience.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just a joke. You're allowed to use the word uncertainty. Well, thank you. Folks are not sure about the cost of goods again.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that just didn't happen. Like last year, GDP was over 2%, which is faster than potential in the face. Look, I go around and talk to a lot of folks. For much of the pandemic, the second question I would get after, what are you going to do with raids is when is the recession happening? That was the overarching sentiment. I used to always say that's not my outlook. So people should expect that the momentum will continue. That momentum did in fact continue. And I call that resilience, right? That strength and that continued energy in the economy that allows firms to produce people to consume at robust levels. Then we come to today where there's a lot of uncertainty. And the uncertainty hits on many levels. And I'm sorry, I'm saying this word that nobody on the morning.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what we've seen through the last several years is an economy where all the analysts had expected things to start slowing down. Inflation went very high. We had challenges in terms of supply chains, which led people to worry maybe labor markets would loosen, people lose their jobs, sentiment expressed a lot of concern, consumers and households were all expressing their frustration with things. All those things would have suggested that you would see less economic activity.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little, I would say the overarching message that I've gotten from the people I talk to and from our survey responses and other things, and it's the reason why I was comfortable with our policy action last week is that there's just a tremendous amount of uncertainty out there. And because of that, businesses and households as well aren't really comfortable making big decisions. And as a consequence, the amount of energy I would have expected to see in the economy is going to be less than, and that expectation was at the beginning of this year, it looks like it's going to be less than that for the remainder of this year. And then we'll have to see how things play out to determine how much less. But that uncertainty definitely is weighing on consumers and business leaders alike.”
2025-05-16 · Odd Lots · Atlanta Fed's Raphael Bostic on Monetary Policy During Extreme Uncertainty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source