00:00Well, this last week, we've gotten a lot of bad news on the employment front with ADP and Challenger and the other numbers that have come out.
00:07Does any of that, you don't have another meeting to vote at, but does any of that give you pause about the Fed pausing at this point?
00:15For me, no. I think we've been in a situation where inflation has been too high for too long.
00:22And by many readings, it's been kind of marking time has been at a plateau well above our target for the better part of two years.
00:31That's not acceptable. And for me, I think we can't lose sight of the inflationary concerns.
00:38The labor market is very turbulent right now. And some of it is because there are some big structural things that are happening in the economy.
00:44When I talk to businesses, they're reluctant to hire entry-level people at the same ways that they did before because they think things like AI can replace that and they can deploy resources for other things.
00:56And I'm hearing that kind of reticence. There's also the reality that during the pandemic, a lot of companies ramped up because the demand ramped up and they've been slower to right size.
01:07We see a bunch of that right sizing happening as well. And then we have issues around the labor supply and whether the immigration shifts are going to be temporary or permanent.
01:18And if they're permanent, then we're going to have a lower steady state job creation.
01:22So for all those reasons, I think it's very hard to make a clear statement.
01:27And then, of course, we don't have a jobs number today. Right. So we're not getting the data in a timely basis.
01:33My team tells me it'll be April or May before we start to be able to draw clear signals from the data to really understand what's going on.
01:43Yeah, we wanted to wish you a happy non-jobs day today.
01:47You started a long and varied career at the Fed in 1995.
01:52Since then, what have you learned about the economy and about inflation?
01:57Well, I think for the economy, one thing that is true is that it is a very complex economy. It's very large.
02:03And to understand it, you really have to get out and see all parts of it.
02:07And one of the things that's been great in my role here is I've had a chance to do that.
02:11I think it's given me a deeper understanding of just how people engage and experience the economy and how they make decisions to move it forward.
02:19In terms of inflation, you know, what I've learned is that we really don't want to have inflation.
02:24Once inflation gets entrenched in people's minds, it changes how the economy evolves.
02:28And it's one of the reasons why I think that we need to keep our policy in a restrictive posture so that we get inflation back to 2%.
02:35That's paramount.
02:36High prices and the prospect of rising prices really do have a lot of families on the edge.
02:42And you all have reported a lot about the K-shaped economy.
02:46There are lots of families that are feeling very precarious right now, and that's a source of concern.
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