Survey of Business Uncertainty: A Complicated Policy Landscape
Atlanta Fed president Raphael Bostic looks at how world events affect decision-making around inflation and financial risks.

Transcript

Nick Parker: How much more complicated is the Fed's policy landscape today versus just a few weeks ago? Dollar funding costs are up. Oil is $103 per barrel. Treasury rates are falling. How do you weigh inflation growth and financial risks differently today than at the last meeting?

Raphael Bostic: Well, it's changed a lot. In particular, it's introduced a lot more uncertainty as to what's going to happen with any of these factors. This is the Survey of Business Uncertainty. I know you guys don't like uncertainty. We don't either, and we already had a lot of it before. We're in this pandemic environment. There's a lot that's going on that we've never seen before and we're trying to, in real time, make sense of. All of the turmoil that we have today is just going to exacerbate that uncertainty. Now, again, I'm hopeful that this gets resolved fast so that some of this uncertainty goes away, but if it doesn't it will actually mean that we have to be even more diligent to get information.

I think about the pandemic. When it first started, we accelerated our efforts to get information in real time pretty significantly because we knew that information was going to be really, really important moving forward. We may need to consider doing something very similar in this environment because energy's changing a lot, as the ability of people and goods to move through Europe changes, and it looks like that's going to change a lot, that has implications for the supply chain, it has implications for production, a whole host of things. We're a week in now, so there's a lot that still we have to figure out before then, so our hard job just got a whole lot harder.