"A Lot Has Happened in Eight-Plus Years": Atlanta Fed President Bostic Looks Back at His Tenure

Khara Persad: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Economy Matters podcast. I'm Khara Persad, a member of the Atlanta Fed's Public Affairs team, and the host of today's show. We have a very special episode for you today, and it's also a little bittersweet. Our guest is Atlanta Fed president and CEO Raphael Bostic. Raphael will be retiring from the Bank in February, making this his final appearance on the podcast. But we're going to keep it cheerful, I promise. Raphael, thanks so much for making time.

Raphael Bostic: Khara, it's very good to be here. I'm always happy to talk with you.

Persad: Since I've been here, I've heard you say—and I've seen you in real life say this, we have it on record—that this is the best place you've ever worked. Are you going to say that in the next place you go to?

Bostic: Oh, that's a good question. Wow. Well, let me just say, we've set a high bar here, and so some really amazing things would have to happen in order for me to be able to say that. But you have to aspire to something. This has set a real standard for what an experience can be, just in terms of the day-to-day interests, the engaging aspects of it, and the interesting topics that we have to grapple with. A lot has happened in eight-plus years.

Persad: And my follow up to that is, when you look at the culture at the Atlanta Fed, what are you going to take with you, or hope you find again?

Bostic: I think we have a fabulous culture here. Culture was one of the first things—I think in my introductory video, I talked about how I was really concerned about what my experience was going to be at the Bank and whether I was going to just sit by myself on the 10th floor, isolated and no one talking to me, or whether I was going to have relationships with people. I committed to try to have relationships with people, and I think I've done a pretty good job of that, and being accessible. And that has been super rich, and it's been rich not only in the day-to-day in the building, but also as I've gone around the district. I talked to business leaders and have been to communities all over the place—and it's a uniform experience. A reality for me is, people have been willing to engage, they're very transparent and open, and as a consequence I've learned a lot and I've met a lot at the same time. It's been just wonderful.

Persad: I remember the first time I met you. I remember you were walking down the hall. It was during the pandemic—and I had sent you some emails before that, but we hadn't met before. And you were walking down, and I said to myself, "Just say hi, just say hi." And I did, and you stopped and you had a whole conversation with me. So that's been my experience as well.

Bostic: Well, I'm glad. I mean, it takes energy to do that. But I find that the rewards are really great, in the sense that every person knows that this is their bank, and it's their bank as much as it is mine. And I feel like that's unleashed a whole different kind of energy on a day-to-day basis, and also in terms of how people think about whether they're passive recipients of the culture or whether they're active participants in the culture. And we've got a bunch of active people here, and it's been really great to just revel in.

Persad: When you announced your plans to retire in November last year, how do you feel now compared to how you felt then?

Bostic: It's very interesting. These decisions are actually longer-arc decisions. I'm not an impulse decision person. With shopping, I'll go see the thing, go away, come back again—and so, this is really almost like a two-and-a-half-year journey. I started thinking about stepping away more than two years ago, as I was starting to see the Bank was really internalizing the things I've been talking about, and I was thinking that, well, maybe it's time to not have a caretaker, but rather someone who is going to try to push. I decided against it at that time, because I really wanted us to dive even a little deeper in terms of our agility journey. And you remember at the time, André [Anderson, former Atlanta Fed first vice president] and I had talked about how we were going to start doing those small group meetings to see how people were experiencing the agility, just to make sure that it had gotten further ingrained in how people operated. And we found there was still road to run on that, and growth—and I felt like it was the right decision at that time to stay. But then, things happen and the world evolves, and I feel like the Bank is in a very strong place. And so, I was comfortable making the decision. Now, the announcement date was a horrible day for me. I knew it was just going to make a lot of people very unhappy, and it's never fun to know you're going to be surprising people and leave them feeling worse about things than when we started. But I do think that, in reflection, I'm comfortable with the decision. I don't have any regrets on it. It's made this last month and the next month a period of celebration and community and communion, and that kind of height is really just very rich and exciting. And then, you know, I have to think about what's going to come next.

Persad: So, what is March 1? What's happening March 1?

Bostic: Well, I'm not going to set an alarm. I will try to sleep in as much as possible, and that'll be a good thing. And I will hopefully not set alarms for anything—except when I have to get up to make a plane trip somewhere, and catch a plane—for several months. And the idea is really just to exhale, to relax, to recover, and to try to just clear my head of all the things that I've had to be juggling, and then see what comes in. I don't think I'm at the end. I'm not going to just go sit in a rocking chair and look out at the street as people go by. But I have been running really hard, and so I want to think about, how hard do I want to run? How much moment-to-moment accountability and responsibility do I want to have? And I actually don't know what the answers to those things are going to be, so it's actually a bit scary to feel like I'm going to be stepping out into a void for an experience that I've never had—because for the last several decades, when I was transitioning, I always knew what I was transitioning to. I knew when it was going to start, I knew what my responsibilities were. The framework was already there.

Persad: So when you don't set this alarm, what time do you think your body will naturally wake up after March 1?

Bostic: Oh, 5:30. I'll get up, and then the question will be: Do I exercise? Do I roll back over? Do I read a book? It's funny—I've gotten really good about when I'm not supposed to be working, not working. When I'm on PTO and do a trip or a vacation, I have learned a discipline to only look at my email twice a day: once first thing in the morning, because I'm up usually before everybody else. I do one hour, and when the hour is over, the phone goes down. And then I go and I leave the phone, because if people really need to get in touch with me, they know other ways to do it. And then I do it again usually late afternoon, sometime around 4 or 5—one hour, put it down and then done. So I'm not that worried about longing to have the phone and to go look at email. That part will be nice—to just be on an extended break.

Persad: Throughout your time—you've been here almost nine years—are there any lessons or revelations that stand out to you?

Bostic: A big lesson for me has been, if you trust people and you believe in them, they wind up being great. They strive to be more than they thought they could be. And I've had so many conversations with people where we'll be doing something and they'll say, "I never thought I could do this, or would be allowed to do this," or "I always wanted to do something like this but didn't think anyone would take me seriously or listen." And that's been very rich. And the thing that has been also true in this is the types of actions and activities people have been wanting to do have been smart. They've been insightful, they've been grounded in knowledge such that by taking a leap of faith to try things, a bunch of good ideas bubble up that have always been there but have never really been given the space to exist. So that's one, I think: trusting people. Given the space for folks to be great, they usually step into it and they do great things. A second thing is, trying to be calm and consistent is really important for leadership. We've gone through some really crazy times and had the unexpected happen on a regular basis. And what I have tried to do is not let people see me…I can't be on camera wide-eyed and shell-shocked, because then everyone else is going to go that way. I have to make sure that I'm calm and measured but also consistent in the sense that "calm" doesn't mean you have all the answers, and calm doesn't mean that there aren't emotions out there that I'm trying to ignore. It's that we've got to wrestle with these things in a structured way, which is really important. And I think about the pandemic. I didn't even know what a pandemic was, like a week before we were in the middle of one. The first six to eight months of town halls—we were doing town halls regularly—we didn't have answers, and rather than trying to pretend, we just said, "We don't have the answers. We're all trying to figure this out." And I think that transparency and the consistency were also somewhat reassuring. People were like, "They're actually just telling us exactly how we feel—that we're not so different than anybody else," and I think that's been a uniform thing. I'm just a person too, on some level.

Persad: Did you have to learn how to build that calmness throughout your career, or were you always like that?

Bostic: Well, as a child, I was a spaz. I yelled and screamed and ran around, and things like that all the time. There was a moment in childhood when I was like, this probably is not a good long-run strategy—but from a leadership perspective, I've been in a number of organizations where you have a leader who…of course, there is always going to be some amount of chaos. I've had leaders who, when I was around them, I felt like they were chaos amplifiers. Whatever chaos came in, after they wrestled with it, it felt more chaotic and energized. And I've seen some who are chaos dampeners. My experience has been that the organization, the teams—they work better in a dampener situation. And so I tried to commit myself to be like that. Now, it takes effort and it takes training, and you don't always succeed, but you can get a lot done without running around crazy and yelling at people and all that stuff. And it produces, I think, more dividends—especially in the non-chaos times, because now people are like, "Okay, we know where we are. We know what the boundaries are and we can just be and not worry," and that's an important thing.

Persad: Are there any specific experiences you've had that have shaped your approach to leadership at the Fed?

Bostic: While I was at the Fed, or before?

Persad: Before.

Bostic: Yes, there are a couple. When I was assistant secretary at HUD [US Department of Housing and Urban Development]—I'll never forget this—we did an engagement survey. And people wrote all these snippy—because you have the things where you score, and then you have the write-in. People wrote in, "Yes, we know you're just doing this for show, and you don't really care about us," and "We've seen many people like you come in here before, and they never care" and any of these sorts of thing. So then I did the town hall, and I told them, "I read all your comments. I know you think I'm a fake. I know you think I'm not real, and I'm going to show you that you're wrong." For me, that was important. I saw the facial expressions. They were like, "What in heaven's name is happening here?" You've got to find ways to lay markers about how you're going to be, and how present you're going to be in the spaces. Another thing I did at HUD, which I also did at the Bank, was I tried to know every person. We would have little brown-bag lunches, people would tell me what they did. I'd always ask a follow-up question. I'd always say, "Are there things that you don't like here, or that you'd want more of?"—and then talk to them about it, because sometimes I found that people often are not very good at putting themselves in someone else's role. And so, they'll see a decision—which from their perspective is shortsighted or didn't use all the information, but if you flip it around and you're in the other person's spot, that decision is one of 12 decisions. And so, as to how you allocate resources, it depends on what the other 11 things are as to what makes the best decision. And staff didn't understand that. So I started talking to them about these things, and you could just see that people started to feel like this place isn't as crazy—or doesn't have to be as crazy—as they want it to be, and that's a good thing. Another one: so, when I left HUD I got offered an opportunity to run a research center at USC, the University of Southern California, and it was a center where the donor was still alive, and the dean told me that he thought that the donor wasn't as pleased about what it could be. They had staff. I'm the new person coming in, and so I took the person out to breakfast. I was like, "Okay, I want us to be great. You know more about what this is than I do. What ideas do you have?" She had to pick up her jaw off the floor, because no one had ever asked her this before. And I said, "Well, let's go do them." And we, in six months, became the most energized center in the whole school: ideas flying all over the place, people are now copying our things, taking our titles of events and putting it on their own, and all kinds of stuff. And it gets back to what I said at the beginning about how if you give people space and they have ideas and knowledge, most of them are good ideas, so let's run with them. I've often said, as a manager, if you need me to come up with every good idea, we're not going to get very much done. Because I've got a lot of things to do, and you're the expert, and I'm just in here to shepherd things. So, those are a couple of things. And then one thing I've learned here—and I learned it a lot from André, but also from Marie [Gooding, a retired Atlanta Fed first vice president]—is the value of transparency. If people feel like you're feeding them a line, then they're not really going to do what you want them to do. But on the other hand, if you can just talk and build a connection with people so that they're like, "Yes, I know that's who he is, and if he's saying that, there's a reason why he's saying that, and he's going to tell us." And I say that a condition for employment is not agreeing with me 100 percent of the time. You don't have to do that, and I don't expect anybody to do that. And once everyone gets in that mode, then we are all trying to accomplish the same things. And it's one of the reasons why I really love "people positive" as one of our cultural values—the idea that if you go in thinking everyone is trying to help the organization be better, then if you're really doing that well, you're going to leave some of your ego at the door because just because someone doesn't say it the way you would say it doesn't mean that they care any more or less about the organization, that we're all trying to do the same thing. And that's really helped me as a mindset, because I have my way of saying things, but not everyone talks the way I do. And so, I've had to check myself a couple of times and say, "Okay, what are they trying to say?" I do my translation and then we can move to a mutually beneficial outcome.

Persad: This is how I would sum up what you were just saying: There's no ego in leadership. Is that fair? There's no ego when you're a leader.

Bostic: No, I'm not saying that. Ego can't dominate when you're a leader. Look, we all have ego. I was a psych major. I know we all have our issues and our demons and all those sorts of things, but you have to decide—every person has to decide, not just the leader—what parts of their personality and their perspective are going to be the things that dominate how they interact and engage with people. And leaders who start with ego and that's their dominant thing, then they're not going to let ideas come from anyone but them. They're not going to have open discussions so that if someone has a different view, they feel comfortable saying it. They're not going to allow anyone else to have a spotlight, to show the depth and the breadth and develop your team members. There are lots of things that don't happen if you let it dominate. Now, I know at the end of every meeting, I get to make the decision. So, I've got to have enough ego to have confidence that my brain power is going to work, in a way—so, you need to have some of it. It's just a question of, do you lead with that or do you lead with something else? What I have found is that knowing that I get to make the decision at the end is enough for me. How we get to that point is not really the critical point. I just want to make sure that when we get to that point, I've got enough information so I feel like I can make a good decision. And that happens better, I've found, when we get everyone's perspectives. And I've been successful, I think, in creating spaces in meetings and in venues so that people feel comfortable coming forth with whatever they have.

Persad: So, just getting back into work we've done at the Fed: What are you most proud of when you look at what the Fed does?

Bostic: A "what's the one thing" type of question, which I never like. Here's what I would say: I really am pleased by how people have really embraced that I'm just part of a team. And that has allowed us to be us—and that "us" has been fantastic. We have innovated, we've led, we've come up with ideas in basically every part of the Bank, and you can point to every unit and things that have happened where we've been the standard bearer for one thing or another. That's fantastic. And that we've been able to project our ideas and influence the communities that we're in, the Federal Reserve System, how banks interact with and engage the payment system consistently, such that our institution is highly regarded and highly respected—people want us to be in the room—that's fantastic. It's also great because I go around, people are like, "Your folks are wonderful." I say, "Thank you very much." I get to celebrate that all the time, and that's wonderful. But then we've also done some brave things that I think were important things. So, I think about the Racism and the Economy podcast series. That was really important in time, but also in mode. That series was not an advocacy series. It was a series on research and grounded in truths about things that are keeping our economy from being what it could be. And if we want to fulfill our maximum employment mandate, we need this economy to be as much as it possibly can be, and barriers that make that less possible are hurting us and making it more difficult for us to be successful, to achieve our mandate. And that was wonderful. I think about the Special Committee on Payments Inclusion, where we brought together industry and academics and they started working through how we solve some of these issues that are keeping lower income people, people living in rural places, not being able to fully leverage the tools that are available. That's an amazing thing. I think about some of the work our team's been doing on large language processing, to use these new technologies to go through, say, a bank's quarterly report—like their earnings call—and distill it down into things, and that's now becoming something that we're looking at to deploy all over the place. And then just going around and being out in the field and seeing so many things—like going to Red Bay, Alabama, which most people on this podcast probably couldn't find on a map, and seeing just people truly excited that someone with my title would go there and listen to them. And I learned a ton—it's just amazing. So, all those connections are truly wonderful. Actually, I haven't even talked about monetary policy and the tools that we've developed: our Underlying Inflation Dashboard, GDPNow, the Wage Growth Tracker—there are so many dynamic things happening here, and I've just made sure to stay out of the way and let them be wonderful things, and be a great champion for them as much as I can.

Persad: You've answered this question like a proud parent that can't pick a favorite child.

Bostic: Exactly right. I like that—I'm going to use that, actually.

Persad: Okay, I want to talk about advancing economic mobility and resilience just for a second. You said in your announcement that you were proud of what we've accomplished in your tenure to turn the lofty goal of an economy that works for everyone into more of a reality. After the Fed, how are you going to continue that work?

Bostic: Oh, that's an interesting question. I always have more things I want to do than I have time to do, and there are a number of things that I'm interested in that I actually can't do in this role because people are talking, like—I have a mandate. I've got a mission, and I need to make sure that my time is spent on those things. So, there are a number of things I've been thinking about. One is trying to help communities make sure that all their papers are in order, that they have clear titles, that they have wills, that they have powers of attorney, medical directives—all those sorts of things. Because I was actually talking to someone yesterday who was saying, "My brother-in-law, his father passed and they didn't have a will," and so now they had to find a probate attorney and they had to spend all this extra money, and all these things. And they had some resources, but they weren't billionaires. So if there are ways that we can help people that don't have that much keep as much of it as possible in these crisis times, that's really important. And so, I've got some ideas that I want to go forth with on that. Another thing that I'm interested in now is, I think about the civil rights era here in Atlanta—much of that was around economic justice. It was around trying to increase economic mobility and economic resilience, and so many of those leaders were faith-based leaders. The faith community had an outsized role in that. And as I've talked to pastors and rabbis around here, they've expressed an openness and an interest in being more visible in those things. And so I'd like to explore if there are ways to help facilitate that, because our problems and challenges are large. We are not 100 percent to the place where the economy works for everybody, and until we get there, then there's work to be done. And I've always viewed it as an "all hands on deck" type of situation, so if we can get faith communities who are interested in doing this, give them some building blocks. If you want to build affordable housing, this is what you can do. If you want to do an after-school program, this is what you want to do. If you want to promote financial literacy so that people use their funds better, here are some things you can do. I'd be happy to be a voice in that. There are lots of those sorts of things that are going on, and then—who knows? I might be on a board or something of nonprofits that are doing things, or if it so happened, then maybe I'll run something, but I'm not going there yet. I'm going to take some time before I start running things again.

Persad: Do you think people are still going to come up to you and ask you about, "So what does the Fed do?"

Bostic: A hundred percent. One, it'll be interesting to see if people still come up to me. Now, if I'm in Atlanta, if I'm in a restaurant, it's about a 50/50 chance whether someone will say something. It's always nice, so I'm not upset about that. We'll see as time passes whether I return to anonymity and just be like a regular person. I've worked hard on this. I've made some inroads, but most people aren't looking up Bloomberg and CNBC and those things. They're working, and they come home and they just want to put their feet up. So not everyone is seeing things in the places where I've been visible, but it's a very important thing. The Federal Reserve is a very important institution. People need to appreciate that, because if there are times where its effectiveness or ability to do the things it needs to do comes to risk, people need to understand what's at risk there and what the threat is.

Persad: There's a ritual, I guess is the word, where outgoing US presidents leave a note for incoming presidents. If you had to leave a note of encouragement or pep talk, what kind of...?

Bostic: If I was a cagey politician, I would say, "That'll just be between me and my successor." I do think that it's not really possible for someone who's not in the job to actually know all the pieces to the job. And there are always going to be a bunch of things that are going to be super surprising. For me, this idea that I was going to be watched like a hawk from the moment I got to the garage to the moment the back tire left the garage—and that's walking to the elevator, eating a sandwich…it could be anything. That was discovery. So I'll try to maybe point out some things that I think are maybe less-appreciated aspects of the job, but also talk about the aspects that I think make this place really a special place, and when you walk around the halls, you see it. It's so remarkable. I've had so many visitors that will come up, and we'll be in the conference room and they'll say, "People are happy here. What are you all doing, and how is it that people seem to want to be here and do great things?" It's like, "Yes, we work on this. It's a collective effort, and if and when it works, it's magical." It's work, but it's not work, if you know what I mean. It's just, being is that. So those are the things I think our Bank has a very good reputation for. My interest is that that's always the case, so I want to help my successor be as successful as possible.

Persad: Are you going to leave your number for us to just send you a text, should we need help with anything?

Bostic: No comment. People will know how to get in touch with me. Texts may be a little too familiar, but I try to get back to all my emails.

Persad: Raphael, thanks again for joining us today, and thank you for a great eight years. You're the only president that I've known since I've been at the Bank, so...

Bostic: I'm the best one you've ever had.

Persad: I believe that. I'm sure our listeners really enjoyed this conversation. I'm Khara Persad, and thanks to everyone out there for being part of the Economy Matters podcast. We'll see you next time.