The U.S. economy is a little paradoxical at the moment.
Unemployment is relatively low, and yet people are saying it's a terrible time to find a job.
The share market slumped in the first month of the war in Iran, and yet stocks are still way higher than a year ago.
Americans are feeling glum about the economy, and yet labor productivity is up.
It's times like this when it's helpful to get multiple perspectives.
Like, how about two presidents of the Federal Reserve banking system?
Regular listeners will know that there are 12 regional Fed banks around the country and Austin Goolsbee leads the Chicago Fed.
Austin comes from academia and says he doesn't have a bias for higher or lower interest rates, that he's neither a hawk nor a dove.
I always said I don't aspire to be a bird of any kind.
I just wanted to be one of the data dogs.
Beth Amick says she's also a data dog.
She used to work on Wall Street and now is the president of the Cleveland Fed, which covers Ohio and parts of Kentucky, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
And Cleveland has a bit of a rivalry with Chicago.
That was apparent right as we were getting the mic set up.
Does Austin need to fix his hair or is his hair okay?
Austin is bald, if you didn't know.
That was a kind of low blow.
Now I'm going to have no mercy.
I was going to have mercy on Cleveland and now there's going to be none.
And it was tensions between the academic Austin Goolsbee and the markets-oriented Beth Hammack that we were keen to hear more about.
So today, on the show taking the temperature of the economy, the latest on prices, unemployment and the stability of the entire financial system.
After the break.
Beth Hammack, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and Austin Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
Welcome to the show.
Yay.
Thank you for having us.
Thanks for having us.
So it's not every day that we get not just one, but two Fed bank presidents to talk with.
So I wanted to play a game.
I'm going to bring up the three main parts of the economy.
The Fed looks at inflation, jobs and the financial system.
And I'd like your assessment of what the outlook is, red, orange, yellow, or green.
Red, the house is on fire, three to green, meaning everything's looking swell.
Are you ready?
Yes.
I'm ready to go.
All right, let's begin with prices.
The Fed's goal is to have inflation at 2% a year.
What color are we at with inflation?
So just the color first, starting with Beth, red, orange, yellow, or green?
I would say orange on prices.
Okay, and Austin?
Yeah, at least orange.
Burnt orange.
Orange with a chance of meatballs.
It hasn't been great.
Okay, both in the orange range.
Beth, can you talk about your rationale for that color?
Yeah, inflation has been above our target for coming on five years.
We've been trading closer to 3% than our objective of 2%.
We made good progress by 2024, but for the past two years, it's been basically moving sideways.
And so part of my assessment and I'd agree with Austin that it's definitely at the The brighter, the more vibrant color orange.
I don't know if that's burnt orange, burnt sienna.
My Crayola box is a little bit old.
And Austin, what's your rationale?
I mean, just get in your car and look out the window, the price of gas here in Chicago.
And that summarizes what everybody already knows, which is prices are up and they're not happy about it.
We've been going the wrong way.
And we started last year with a series of what I kept calling it stagflationary dust thrown in the air where stagflation is, where both sides of what the Fed's supposed to be doing start getting worse at the same time.
The prices start going up faster than 2%. at the same time the job market's deteriorating.
And I was optimistic that we would get back to this path to 2 inflation.
But Yikes, it's going from orange to red lately.
We had tariffs increasing prices.
That was supposed to go away, kind of didn't go away.
And now we're at another stagflationary shock on top of it.
With the oil shock right now.
Yeah, there's a troubling moment.
I'd like to turn to the second of the Fed's dual mandate, jobs.
The Fed tries to keep unemployment low, also known as full employment.
And I'll let you go first, Austin.
What mood would your employment mood ring be right now?
Yellow.
I'd say yellow.
And it's an unusual environment in the job market because there are some measures that the job market looks bad, objectively bad.
The hiring rate is as low as it's been in years.
But there are other measures that look fairly benign, like the layoff rate is extremely low.
It's just a low churn, low hiring, low firing labor market, which is extremely unusual.
I think the thing that explains that is uncertainty.
Periods of uncertainty, you tend to see businesses stop hiring, but also not let go of the people that they have.
And we've had a lot of uncertainty, but it's mostly stable.
And Beth, what's your color and why?
Yeah, I would agree.
I think we're in that yellow-green kind of area.
Maybe a chartreuse.
Chartreuse is a good color for it.
Yeah, it's a good word for it.
I'll go with chartreuse.
I'm done with this conversation.
Chicago Fed, we don't have chartreuse.
Actually, you know what?
It's like the Diet Mountain Dew that President Barkin drinks at the epilepsy.
That's exactly the color it is.
We got some weird people in our world.
To me, the best indicator is really the unemployment rate, because with all the changes that we've had in immigration, it's hard to know what job creation should be to keep things steady.
The unemployment rate that I see right now is right around my estimates of maximum employment.
I think we're just in that zip code.
And so we'll see how that continues to play through.
It is a fragile type of balance in that it is this low hiring, low firing environment.
As the mother of two college-aged kids, I definitely am hearing about how it's been difficult for new entrants into the workforce.
But it does feel like there are still opportunities, there are still places.
And you know I'd say for my district, the fourth district.
What I hear more often when I'm out talking to employers is that they have a hard time finding the workers they need, particularly in places like the skilled trades or manufacturing.
The other big sector of the economy the Fed takes a big share of responsibility for is financial stability.
Beth Hammack, what colour would you give for your assessment of the US economy's financial stability?
I would say we're generally green right now from a financial stability perspective.
There are definitely pockets that I'm watching.
Private credit is certainly one of them.
But on the whole, I feel good about the state of the banking system.
Market seems to be moving very well.
Over the past month, you've seen financial conditions tighten a bit.
That may be a little bit tricky for businesses, as both interest rates have gone higher, equity prices have gone lower.
But in general I think, from a financial stability perspective, I think the economy is in a good place and Austin
I would split it in two ways.
You said the financial system, and there is a part of the financial system that, in our language, is about payments and the plumbing of the financial system.
And The Federal Reserve System literally runs 5 trillion of payments per day over its rails wire transfers, direct deposit, stuff like that.
On that, green, solid green, forest green, Amazon green, that's very stable.
I'm a little more anxious something about valuations.
And when you say valuations, you're meaning companies' valuations in the stock market prices of things like gold, for example.
Yeah, if you look at... prices compared to earnings and things like that.
It does look like there is a lot of frothiness that has happened.
And I don't know if that's bubble or if it's rooted in actual productivity improvements that have come from AI or other technologies.
But having lived through a few of those cycles, the kind of asset bubble driven, boom bust, they can end in tears.
Got it.
So forest green for the plumbing and what color for that more general financial sector?
Maybe that's yellow.
I don't know.
You're never going to hear me say the words aren't true.
Well, this has been a full spectrum of Economic Insights.
Thank you for joining Austin Goolsby and Beth Hammack.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, really our pleasure.
This episode was produced by Corey Bridges and engineered by Kweisi Lee.
It was fact-checked by Vito Emanuel.
Kate Kincannon edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.