YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Barkin

lines on the record: 60
first: 2025-05-30
most recent: 2025-05-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Like kidlock enrichment. And we have a place in Paulie's Island where I play the Debado Club, which is a Peat Di Course down there. And thank you for mentioning golf. Golf is a lot like monetary policy and that I wish I were better at both of them”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was going to say, in terms of your other question, what would I want to see? You'd want to see inflation sustainably under control, or you'd want to see the economy tipping to a level that”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I heard it Another As are the economics, but whenever you look at the market, quote unquote, market's view on the number of rate cuts, you have to remember that in that assessment includes tail risks. And so, you know, if you think at any given point in time, there's a 20 or 25% of a recession, at which point the Fed might respond, then that's embedded in that. So when the SCP forecast has two rate cuts, let's say and the market has three. I'm not sure I view that as a difference. I just think one's got one's a modal and one's a weighted average. And I think those aren't the same things, just in defense of economic forecasters.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so first of all, I wouldn't be so tough on the professional forecasters. Another joke is that economic forecasting was created to make weather forecasting look good.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's an interesting thing to look at because it sort of gets to this question of expectations. We had price shocks like the oil price spike in 74 or the one in 78. And who knows whether we'll have those again. But those price shocks didn't just affect today's prices. It also affected the market's views on tomorrow's prices. And I say, I would just say that's a huge difference between the 70s and todays. you know, metrics of long-term expectations feel very grounded, even if you do have short term price spikes. I think that's because of an expectation that the Fed will do what we need to do if you were to see that inflation, which I hope we validated in 2022.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How there's a chart that makes the rounds that adjust the scales, but sort of puts the 60s and 70s up against the last five years and says there's just about to be another big bout of inflation. And I find that chart annoying, but I understand the fear, a reminder for all your listeners that in the early 70s, there's a strong historic sense that there was a set of mistakes made by the Fed of not being tough enough on inflation. that were then exacerbated in the middle and late 70s by too big oil spike price spikes. And, you know, I can't predict an oil price spike and neither can anybody else. And so who knows, you know, how that'll play out. The fact that I've found interesting about the 70s is how elevated long-term bond rates were and how high the term premium was and basically how much inflation expectations were embedded in long-term rates.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your best efforts, and I think if the standard is that every decimal on every forecast actually played out, then I think we're all guilty of missing that”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you started with being methodical, and that's probably accurate. Bernanke had the insight, which he published back in the early 2000s, that markets can do a lot of work for us if they have a good sense of the path, then we don't have to do as much in policy because they'll work the rate path for you. And I think there is some effort made to try to communicate clearly, certainly why I and my peers try to talk as much as we do to see if we can't bring some clarity to that situation. And so I think it's fair to say trying to do it, but we will move faster than people expect when we need to, as we proved in 2022. In terms of getting it right, I'll just go back to what I said about false precision a little bit ago, which is I think we're always going to be wrong. You're never going to precisely, you know, get the peak of inflation or the peak of unemployment or the trough of either.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My dad said, used to say, Tom, I want you to be humble because I know you well and you have a lot to be humble about. And I think the point he was making is don't be too full of yourself here. And so you could stand up, pound the table, and say, you know, by God, I see where this is going and inflation's rising or unemployment's rising. And therefore we need to move left or move right in support of one of those parts of our mandate. I mean, I listen to my colleagues who have many different points of view on this. I'm humble enough about my own forecasting ability. It just makes me think that I'll learn more, I'll learn more with time.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say sometimes our job is very straightforward and sometimes it's not. It's very straightforward when unemployment is high and inflation is low because you know which direction to go and it's relatively straightforward when the forecast seems pretty clear that you have stability and confidence in the forecast. You know, in today's world, neither one of those is true. I mean, inflation has come down but is not yet at our target. Employment unemployment is low, but the risk to it. And the forecast is unclear. And so you have to reflect on where you are, you know, where I think we are is modestly restrictive. In other words, a 4.3% overnight rate is constrained the economy a modest amount, but not a significant amount at a time where inflation is still over our target and unemployment is low. And then you just have to, I mean, you could choose, if you had conviction in the forecast, then you might choose to move whichever way you felt you had to move given that forecast.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different energy policy, you know, all that is, I think, locked in. I mean, we know the direction. We just don't know the destination. And it turns out people kind of want to know where they're headed before they pack. And so that's the challenge we've got right now is just determining what's the destination so that businesses and consumers can make the choices they make.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there's today and tomorrow. Today we're in the closing stages of bringing the economy back to normal. That's how I'd put it. I mean, unemployment's 4.2, that's a historically low number. Inflation headline 2.3, that's very close to a 2% target. GDP, if you adjust for the one-timers that were in the first quarter, is still growing in the 2.5% range. Think of it as a very strong stable economy. The challenge we all have is the uncertainty about where we're headed. And, you know, you or I could articulate an upside to that or a downside to that. I'm not making a comment on it, but it is elevated uncertainty. It's what I was describing as the fog. And so, you know, we're sort of on the brink of a different environment. And that different environment will have different tariff rates and different levels of immigration and different levels of government spending and different levels of regulation.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A big move in terms of where people are buying their groceries today, private label, e commerce, like I said, beef to chicken, all these things are happening. And I think it's because consumers, having gotten through the COVID period where they were exhausted, it was all coming at once. And by the way, they had lots of money because of repressed spendings during COVID or elevated stock market or stimulus checks. They just spent it and they paid it. And that's what we got the inflation in 2022. We're not in a period where consumers feel like they have extra money. And so those people who are out there trying to raise prices for whatever set of good or bad reasons, they're facing a consumer that doesn't want to pay it now and has got the time and the mental energy to make choices. And so I think, you know, that does fix high prices over time.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a great economist line. It has two meanings, and both of them matter. One is that if you as a consumer get high prices, the first thing you want to do is look for an alternative. Maybe you go to private label, maybe you go to from beef to chicken, maybe you go from a department store to a Walmart. But you're looking for some alternative. And so if a company raises its prices too high, then its customers are going to do something else and that'll teach the company that that price is too high. The other version of it is a supply side point, which is that if prices are high and successfully passed on, then new competitors will come in to increase capacity or lower prices. And so, and I really want to say this has happened. I mean, this has happened in this economy. If you look at earnings reports from all the major retailers, you know, you'll hear this. Customers are tapped out, customers are trading down.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where in fact, the original meaning of it was in our lifetimes. And so probably the right definition is somewhere between those two.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it just takes time to get back to tomorrow after you've had a surge today. The real life way to think about it is, okay, now you're, you know, somebody's lawn service and you don't really have big cost increases, but everybody else has raised their price. Maybe you look around and go, huh, maybe I can raise my price. And so there's a lot of attempts to raise prices that go through in the aftermath of an inflationary episode that might not have been they might not have the courage to do without an inflationary episode. And so I think it was this, the inflation way that we saw was definitely time bound. I mean, we have seen the supply chains heal. We have seen people back in the workforce, and we have seen prices come down. But the question of what the definition of transitory is challenging because the word first got used, I think, in March 21 or April 21, and now it's four years later. And so a lot of people think transitory means like a”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, though, there's been a lot of papers written about what drove the inflation. You know, to me, it's in all of the above. I mean, you had a surge in demand that came from fiscal policy and monetary policy and vaccines. As people got out of their house and felt the freedom to spend, you had constraints in supply, which came from labor constraints, people driven by the crisis, by the health crisis.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Land and making this attractive for developers. You almost can't stop thinking about it. And I think that really is the lever. If communities can provide real assurance that they can provide land and that land can get built on at a predictable and reasonable time period, I think then it works.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I keep saying is we're in a competition for developers. There are only so many, there are only so many construction people. And you want them to come to your neighborhood and build houses in your places. So how do you do that? Well, all of your local regulation and policies matter, permitting zoning, amount of time to get approvals, certainty to construction time. So that's one big piece of it. Another big piece of it is land availability. And once you start thinking about land availability, you almost don't stop. I mean, I drive into some community colleges and they've got a huge plots of land. And then I find out that the state doesn't allow the building of dorms on community college campuses. And you go now, okay, wait a second. You can get student housing built. Why can't we get that built? You go to some of these older rural towns that have been depopulated over the years. And they've got all this land that's dilapidated housing, but they can't fix it because there's absentee landowners. I mean, once you start thinking about the role of”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you have to ask the question why that is part of its cost, part of its land, and part of its resistance to growth by the inhabitants of various markets. And again, one of the benefits of having the six states I have is you can see places that are growing and housing is getting built and you can see places where it's not.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think, again, the demand for housing is much higher and it's much higher because the generations decided they want a house and household formation, as I talked about earlier and people valuing their house. As you say, we underbuilt housing for a generation coming out of the Great Recession. And so we have more demand than supply. The answer to that is to build more supply. And in my district, if you drive down 95 and you look at Wilson or Smithfield or Clayton or Rocky Mount, these are exurban areas that are not Raleigh, but not that far from Raleigh. You see, you know, development after development of 275 to 325,000 dollar houses going up in what used to be farmland there. If you drive to exurb in Charlotte or Greenville or Richmond, you'll see the same thing. I mean, houses are getting built, but there are communities, you know, Metro DC would be one of them where you don't see housing.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they're going to be increasing their demand at the same time that they're increasing supply. So you're still going to have a shortage of supply versus demand. I should also note that just because we raise lower short-term rates doesn't necessarily lower mortgage rates as we learned in the fourth quarter of last year.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I wouldn't buy your story that there are a lot of people who have decided not to move because they can't give up their mortgage. But I don't buy the story that if all we did was lower rates, then they would all give up their mortgage and the housing market would free up because every one of those people who moved is a seller and a buyer.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the commercial real estate side, folks are still trying to adapt. And it's much less flexible than the housing side because some of the space is very much built for purpose, built for an institution, leased for 15 years, as you know. And so I think we're still midway through an adjustment process where some amount of that commercial real estate is used more because people come back to the office. Some is redeployed into other uses, whether it be anything from data centers to residential and some is eventually taken off the market. But I think we're still very much mid-process on that.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's led to the price increase that we've had in housing? And unless we build a lot more housing, you're going to have that out there for some time. It's a bigger part of the basket and maybe public transit or parking is a lower part of the basket, but housing will”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See what happens. One thing I tried to look at when all this started was how did we ever end up with the five hour, five day a week, 40 hour work week? And the answer is that was General Motors. And Alfred Sloan back in the mid-20s just decided it. And five or ten years later, everybody was doing it. But none of us who were doing it thought that was perfect. If we stopped to think about it, it's just what we did. And so, you know, different sectors, different businesses, they'll evolve toward different models. I do think there are implications, as you say, on real estate. On the residential side, if some set of people are going to spend more of their time in their house, then they're going to value their house more. They're going to value their office. They're going to value their space, their garden, whatever. And so, and we saw that during COVID. People got shut up in their house. They decided they no longer like their house. They also decided they didn't like their roommates. And so the economists call that household formation. So you have a lot more households out there for the same amount of houses.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have flexibility we didn't know we had. That's what's starting. You can't bury that. And so I think there's a whole bunch of workers and a whole bunch of days who found out that like you and like me, you could work from home this day as opposed to working somewhere else. It's also true that there's a bunch of employees who discovered that they actually prefer to be at home rather than come into the office. By the way, there's another set that would prefer to come in the office, but there's certainly a segment there. And so we're in a marketplace. People will compete it out. And there are executives who believe passionately that their business is not going to deliver unless their people are there five days a week every week and their businesses who believe they'll get access to better people if they just allow them to be remote. And those two, often those two are in the same sector. And so they'll compete it out. One will have lower property costs, one will have higher collaboration. We'll see.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A wash with employees that now seem to be systemically short of employees. And a lot of that skilled trades, but I'd also put a lot of the care professions, nurses, teachers, elder care, childcare. A lot of people found those professions to be pretty unattractive during COVID and moved into other jobs. And there hasn't been a wave, you know, to replace them. And there's not that much money to available to increase the compensation to account for it. You hear shortages there. You hear shortages in state and local government still. So there's still places where the impact of the pandemic on the labor market has not yet. We're not back to where we were at the beginning. And some combination of training and development of people and compensation of people is going to have to happen if we're going to staff these appropriately.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think you've described accurately what's happened to wages. It's definitely bigger increases at the lower end and less at the higher end. I should add that inflation also hits lower income earners the hardest because they spend the greatest amount of their pay. And so nobody has this mental ledger that says my wages went up X percent, my prices went up Y percent. And so it's not like operating margin for a business. Those are two different ledgers in humans' minds. And so to a lot of lower income people, it doesn't feel like their wages have gone up as much because inflation's gone up and also because they don't discount the wages when they measured against inflation. Going forward, it definitely looks like we've got a labor market that is much more in balance, maybe even starting to loosen than the one we had a year or two or three years ago. You still hear tightness, as I said, in small towns. You definitely hear it in skilled trades. I think there are a set of professions out there that used to be.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's a turning point that you wouldn't otherwise have gotten if you weren't in the markets. We heard the same thing with household furnishings. There's a big boom in furniture during COVID, but about 2022, it backed off. We heard that from the furniture manufacturers well before you saw that in the data. And then I think explanations matter a lot too. And if you're trying to understand how it could be that we've had all this news from Washington, yet the unemployment statistics don't seem to show that much of a tick up in unemployment in Washington. Well, there are lots of explanations, including how those programs have been rolled out and what the timing of it is. And so if you're in the market talking to people, you actually understand the data in a fundamentally more sophisticated way.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the data is better than the anecdotes because it's a bigger sample. It's done in a serious and statistically appropriate way. It also comes in about six weeks late and is revised three times. And so the data really matters. But if you just count on the data, you're going to miss turning points and you're going to miss explanations. And so I don't make the mistake of talking to one company and saying, oh, okay, everything in the data is wrong. But I do try to understand what the data is telling me by testing, you know, with the conversations we're having in the field. And so a good example would have been May 1st of 2020. When I talked to a real estate developer in Western Virginia who was telling me that Tennessee has just opened the malls in Bristol and they're packed and of course Virginia was still closed down and that was my first indicator that you were going to see this big wave of spending when the lockdowns started to open up.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To help you see that part of the economy, which of course employs So many. And so I think if you're on the ground, you'll see, and I've got red parts and blue parts and purple parts of the districts, you hear what's on people's minds in very different ways based on where you are. And I really appreciate that part of my district.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But last week I was in Marion and Roanoke, Virginia, then I was in Arlington, Virginia, then I was in D.C. And I'm trying to get into the big cities and the small towns because you actually do hear about the economy differently in big cities versus small towns. For example, labor markets, you know, the labor markets in the small towns are unbelievably stressed still. And if you have a national conversation, you say, hey, labor market's sort of imbalance, unemployment's 4.2%. wage growth sort of moderate. It's still the case in these small towns that they can't find workers at restaurants and certainly in manufacturing facilities. You'll also hear a lot easier access to small businesses when you're in the small town. So when I was in Marion last week, I actually spent an hour and a half just wandering up and down Main Street. And I talked to every small business on Main Street about, you know, what does demand look like? Are you seeing any impact from tariffs? What are you going to do with your pricing? So it's a forcing device.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, three things I like about it. One is DC Metro unique. There's no other place in the country like that, obviously. And all that's implied there. Second is we have nine or ten, I'll call them, really fast growth New South regions, communities, cities, Charlotte, Greenville, Raleigh, Richmond. You put Northern Virginia. They're really very, very vibrant and fast growing. North and South Carolina, for example, are two of the four fastest growing states in terms of population, in terms of housing growth over the last several years. And then you've got a lot of rural markets. And that would be the Appalachian part of the district in North Carolina, West Virginia, and Western Virginia. But that would also include up and down I-95. There are a lot of small towns there. And so I kind of think about it as three different economies. And I think it's very interesting.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Him against deflation. It's also the case that there's some mismasurement. Take encyclopedias, for example. Let's assume encyclopedias were in the index in the 90s. Well, they're free today. They're on your phone. And so that's deflation that doesn't show up in the numbers. And so it just gives you a little bit of room there. So that's why too. You know, you sort of said we're not at two today. We weren't at two a decade ago. And I think I personally do think of false precision as being a concept worth considering here, which is I definitely didn't criticize myself that much when we were at 1.8. I mean, you're trying to get to two. The economy is not something that you manage so finely that in each and every month of each and every year, inflation comes in in exactly two. That's something that doesn't exist. Two's a target. And if you're off to on the above or on the below, you try to manage yourself toward it. And you recognize that you're not always going to be right on it.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zero was price stability. That's price stability, right? And two was an alternative that gave you a little bit of room. Eventually they settled onto our predecessors. And as you were suggesting, pretty much every central bank in the world has settled onto. And by the way, we've delivered to, or just around two, for almost all of the last 30 years. And so it doesn't strike me that it's a ridiculous target. It's an achievable target. It's a global target. It makes sense to people. By the way, you know, we're at 2.3%, I think, headline right now. So we're not even very far away from it. So I see no reason to move the target. Of course, you could argue about whether two's the right number or 2.2 or 1.8 or some other number. I'll say two things about that. One is one of the reasons why you go with two as opposed to zero is you don't like deflation. Deflation is when prices go down every year and then no one wants to buy anything because it's going to be cheaper tomorrow. And two gives you a little bit of.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would ask the first question Is it a good idea to have a target? And I'd want to make the case that it's a really good idea to have a target because it anchors the public in terms of where you're trying to go and it builds commitment and credibility among the FOMC that you'll take the initiatives you need to take when you're absent from a target. In terms of what should the target be? Original debate in the 90s was actually between zero and two.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Managing that. And so I think it really matters, but I don't think our metrics are very good. My shorthand for whatever it's worth is I think there are two competing things in every business's mind and every consumer's mind about inflation. One is what is it today? Because the best indicator of tomorrow is today. And the second is, do you trust the federal return it to 2% in the long term? And it's almost that simple a question. And as long as you trust the Fed in the long term, market expectations are a reasonable proxy for that. Then I think what you should expect for near-term inflation is some combination of today versus tomorrow. And you get there over time. And if you go back to the 80s and 90s after Volker and through Greenspan, we didn't go to 2% inflation in 1986 or 87 or 88. We were at four and then we were at 3.5% and then we were at three and then we were at two and a half. I think you get there over time. You don't get there quite as quickly.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, you know, you talked about market based inflation expectations. There's a lot going on in those market-based expectations, including liquidity and a bunch of other things. Survey-based expectations, it turns out, you know, if you ask someone a survey question and you bias it in any way, then they end up with different biases and different surveys have different ways of.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think the theory is very straightforward, which is that if inflation expectations, long term in particular, stay anchored, then that means that businesses will quickly return even after inflationary episode to prior levels of price increases. I really believe in it. I mean, in my business experience, I think the expectations of what inflation would be absolutely governed how businesses behaved both in terms of their pricing and their wage setting. You know, if you showed up at your retailer with an 8% price increase and inflation was 2%, they would say, why are you doing that? And if you didn't have the world's greatest reason, you weren't even walking in the door. And so I think the concept of inflation expectations is a very powerful concept. I really believe in it. And I believe it's what happens in the world. What I don't believe is that we have any good way to measure.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think the kind of relentless noise about tariffs is leading people to think that that's going to lead to higher prices, which is leading people to be more negative about their expectations. And you can see that in the expectations, let's say one-year price expectations have elevated significantly. And that's what's driving sentiment. But so far, that doesn't seem to be affecting spending on the consumer side. I think it does on the business side.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is trying to drive through a really dense fog. It's hard to put your foot on the gas because you don't know where the next cliff is. You don't want to put your foot on the brake because you don't know who's behind you. And so the only rational strategy is to pull over and put on the hazards. And that's what I hear businesses doing, which is pulling and pulling over the hazards, pulling over and putting on the hazards. Now, it's different on the consumer side. Historically, consumer sentiment has been a leading indicator of consumer spending, but we didn't see that two or three years ago when consumer sentiment got negative and consumer sentiment got very negative again recently. I think the reason we haven't seen that is inflation. It turns out, I mean, we all knew this in the 70s, but we've all relearned it in the last three years. It turns out consumers really hate inflation. Now, it doesn't stop them from spending. You know, if your wages go up and your prices go up, you have the same spending capability, but you're just much, less happy. And that's what we've seen. And I think today we'll see if we have more inflation.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd start to the people who complain. I'll start by saying we're given a privilege by Congress, which is the ability and the independence to set monetary policy on behalf of the economy of this country. We take that very seriously. I do think part of the trade there is that people on both sides get to critique what we do. And that just is what it is. And I think you just keep your head down and do the job you've been assigned and you don't spend time worrying about the critiques. So that's that part of it. In terms of uncertainty and volatility, I think in sentiment it's quite pronounced. Now, I think business sentiment and consumer sentiment is different. I mean, business sentiment feels to me like very tied to outcomes. If businesses are highly uncertain, they're not going to invest. They're not going to hire. They're going to defer growth plans. We saw that in 2019 as you referenced earlier. I think we're seeing that right now. Certainly the businesses I'm talking to, I've described.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stability is not what you should expect. And so we've had significant volatility. The pandemic obviously being exampled, the inflation episode being another one. And maybe that's going to be more like reality.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the thing I've been reflecting on is the question of, did we in our working careers just benefit from a period that with hindsight was an unbelievably low volatility period? You know, the wall fell while there were conflicts globally, there weren't very many. 9-11 felt like a big deal at the time, but Lehman Brothers was obviously a big deal. But over a 30-year period, it's pretty calm. And, you know, that I like to throw out there is in the 2010s, inflation was between 1 and 2% every single cycle. We added jobs every month in the 2010s. GDP was in the very narrow range of sort of two to three percent. We just had a very stable long-term expansion with very low inflation. And that was a very friendly environment, you know, I'd say for policymakers. But maybe that, if you look at, you know, through the sands of time, that kind of.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And look at where we've been here from raising it in 2018 to lowering it in 2019 to really lowering it in 2020, then to raising it again in 2022 and then lowering it again.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, I joke sometimes. I was on the board of the Atlanta Fed from 09 to 15, and during that six year period, interest rates did not change once.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, making sure we're better and working better and delivering better. I think we've done a great job in that. I'm also chairing the committee that oversees payments within the Federal Reserve, which is the one business the Federal Reserve runs and trying to make that a good and even better business. There are places I bring my business skills to bear, talent management, all of that stuff. In addition, as I said, I think being able to bring some insight, for example, on how businesses are going to behave in the context of volatility and tariff announcements. That's something that I think I can bring, you know, my business experience has a lot of benefit in the room. And that's, it's good to just say that you bring that benefit, but I try to reinforce that by spending literally five days a week in the market talking to businesses throughout my district, trying to truly dig into what's happening. I think that's a place I can also add value.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me start by saying one of the things that was very attractive to me about the Federal Reserve when I got to know it in Atlanta was these banks are private sector entities, which means you have a value proposition to highly talented people who have freedom to work hard and do what they know is right. But in addition, you've got very mission oriented people. So very talented and very mission oriented. That's a nice combination for something that's working for the public interest. And so that was definitely an attraction to me. I'm not trying to mess that up, so I'm not coming in and saying, all right, now, you know, here's what we're going to do because I was in the private sector. I'm actually, I respect the institution and trying to figure out how to operate within it as opposed to disrupt it. And so operationally, the Richmond Fed Overseas Technology for the system. And I oversee saw technology in my old life. And so.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're performance oriented or even competitive, what you really want to do is add value to whatever job you've got. And so for that job, for this job, I ask myself, what could I do that would be valuable? And what I thought I can do and what I spend my days doing is trying to understand what's actually happening on the ground with businesses because that's what I did for 30 years. I think that's a differential skill within the FOMC because anyone can tell you they're raising prices or lowering prices. to understand why and how things are going to play out and to spend enough time with people and feel comfortable enough with their businesses that you could understand the context that is behind whatever choices they're making. I think that is a place where I can add real value. And I convinced myself that and I guess I convinced the board of that as well.”
2025-05-30 · Masters in Business · Richmond Federal Reserve President and CEO Tom Barkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source