Survey of Business Uncertainty: Eye-Opening Moments
Atlanta Fed president Raphael Bostic and executive vice president and research director David Altig recall the evolution of expectations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Transcript

Dave Altig: Does anything, one or two items, stand out to you as eye-opening moments when we brought the survey results and it altered the course of our conversation and our thinking?

Raphael Bostic: There are a lot of them. I would say, for me, perhaps the first one in this pandemic period was the migration of the expectation about how long this was going to last. When we first started, feedback that we heard was, oh, five months, six months in April. Then we got to September when it was supposed to end and the survey response is, oh, 12 months, 18 months. Then we got a year in and now it's 18 months, [or] I have no idea. That really helped me understand and appreciate that I've got to step back and I'm going to have to not have any preconceived notions about what the trajectory of anything is going to be because we are learning so much in real time about what the experiences are, how deep and intense these new bottlenecks and challenges have been. It's been very helpful. You guys have no idea. I still talk about that when I give my talks, just to remind people that we're in unprecedented times and the work and the responses that you've given us have given us an easy way to talk about that and a real way to do it.