Fed Listens

Wednesday, June 4

The 2025 Fed Listens event held on June 4, is part of a series of discussions held nationwide, that will contribute to the Atlanta Fed's ongoing conversation with stakeholders throughout the diverse region we serve. As the Federal Reserve strives to support an economy that works for everyone, understanding the perspectives of a broad range of community members is critical.

Atlanta Fed president and CEO Raphael Bostic and Federal Reserve governor Lisa D. Cook will moderate a roundtable conversation with leaders from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Hear a wide range of perspectives from stakeholders about the job market, inflation, and the transmission of monetary policy to the broader economy.

Transcript

Raphael Bostic: Good morning, everyone. My name is Raphael Bostic. I'm the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. I want to welcome everyone here in the room to the Atlanta Fed, and I'd also like to welcome those who are joining us via the live stream for this morning's event. And hopefully, you can hear me now and will continue to do so through the course of this program. For everyone, let me just open with a welcome to Fed Listens. We call this get-together Fed Listens, because the intent really is for Fed folks to not talk too much. Instead, the goal is to hear from you about how you and your companies, your employees, and your communities are experiencing the economy and how you see monetary policy play out day to day.

Now, we also want to hear if you have ideas for how we at the Fed might do better, and we're always seeking to continually improve our understanding about how policy can be more effective and how we can continue to strive to best serve the American people. So, by all means, let us know those items as well.

Now, all 12 regional Federal Reserve banks are holding events like this one. It's part of a broad strategic review of our monetary policy framework, and we conduct these reviews roughly every five years. Fed Listens events were first held around the United States in 2019 and 2020 as part of the last major framework review that we did, and the information gathered from those events helped the FOMC, the Federal Open Market Committee, and its efforts to improve the framework. And I really do expect the information from this round of the Fed Listens programs to do the same.

Congress has assigned two policy objectives for the Fed: maximum employment and price stability. Now, the monetary policy framework describes the Fed's approach for implementing policy to achieve those objectives. The framework has some elements that really don't change very much. You might think of the goals set by Congress, for example, but the review also includes elements that have changed over time. And in these instances, the FOMC has refined this approach in response to new information, to changes in the economic environment and to lessons from experience.

Now to be clear, what we are refining is our overarching approach to conducting policy. You might think of this as some of the general principles that we use to guide our decision making. So, in this exercise, we are not grappling with shorter-term issues like what to do if, say, inflation and unemployment both rise at the same time over the next several months. Now, of course, we'll have those discussions if that becomes appropriate. I'm not expecting that it's going to be the bulk of what we do here today. Instead, I think that today's conversation will likely focus much more on providing us a detailed look at whether we need to refresh the basic underlying ways that we formulate and conduct and communicate our monetary policy.

Now, here today, we've brought together a varied group of business and community leaders from the Atlanta Fed's district, and that includes people from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. We're asking each participant to share perspectives on labor market conditions, inflation, and the barriers and opportunities to broad economic vitality. So, on behalf of the Federal Reserve System, I want to thank you all for accepting our invitation, and thanks in advance for your contributions today. I know you'll provide us with valuable insights about how the economy and monetary policy are affecting lives and livelihoods across our region and the nation.

Now, I want to close my introductory remarks by emphasizing that the outreach we are doing through the Fed Listens series is not a one-off. We don't make a show of hearing from the populace every five years and then cloister ourselves away. Instead, we are constantly in touch with decision makers from the business, civic, nonprofit, and education communities, in big metro areas and in small towns across the Sixth District. And the feedback we get from these sources via surveys, round tables, site visits, and one-on-one conversations represent a critical input that informs my monetary policy decisions. So if someone from the Atlanta Fed calls, please do take it.

Now, before we get into the main program, I'd like to introduce a very, very special guest, Governor Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington has joined us for this program today. Now, Lisa now works in Washington, but she is on familiar turf here in Atlanta. She's a native of Milledgeville, Georgia, and a proud graduate of Spelman College right here in this city where she received her undergraduate degree before going on to Oxford and Stanford and to a distinguished academic and policy career. Dr. Cook served on the faculties of Stanford and Harvard and on the White House Council of Economic Advisors in 2011 and in 2012 among many, many, many, many other accomplishments. Lisa is a great leader in the Federal Reserve System and a very good friend to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. It's really good to have you here, Lisa. Do you have a few words for us?

Lisa Cook: I do. Thank you, President Bostic. And, just for the record, before I hear any blowback, I got my PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. I did a postdoc at Stanford University. So, thanks so much.

Bostic: Alright, I'll talk to the scriptwriters about this.

Cook: Thank you very much, and thanks to all of you who came out to join the Federal Reserve today. It is so wonderful to be back in my home state of Georgia. I was born and raised 100 miles down the road in Milledgeville, as President Bostic said. I've been an Atlanta baseball fan since Hank Aaron was swatting the baseball out of Fulton County Stadium. Many Atlanta fans here today. Awesome. And I've spent a lot of time here in Georgia, including when I attended Spelman College and Georgia Tech.

The Federal Reserve has been given a dual mandate of maximum employment and stable prices. By the way, as you might know, Georgia itself has a special place in the history of the Federal Reserve, from the shaping of the Federal Reserve itself to the shaping of the dual mandate. The purpose of today's Fed Listens event is to hear from all of you about how the Federal Reserve's approach to monetary policy affects your families, your businesses, and your communities. I appreciate your interest in our work. Events like these provide valuable information to Fed policy makers like President Bostic and me.

The Federal Reserve System is really designed to be part of the communities we serve. The Fed has a reserve bank in every region in the US. Those banks have branches that carry out many important functions including making sure that priorities and concerns on the local level are reflected in monetary policy decisions in Washington. As an economist, I am always studying incoming data and information to make the best policy decisions. Much of that comes in the form of statistics from various agencies, universities, and businesses. But another extremely valuable input comes from people like you who can tell us how the economy is playing out in their daily lives as they make purchases, consider investments, and think about employment options. That is why I especially value these opportunities.

This Fed Listens event is specifically tied to the review of our long-run goals and strategy for monetary policy, which we call our framework. It was last updated five years ago. At that time, it was determined that it makes sense to revisit the framework through a public review on a regular basis. We appreciate you being part of this today. Again, the primary purpose of this event is to listen to you all, or as we say in Milledgeville, y'all. So I will stop here. Thank you. I look forward to hearing your input.

Bostic: Thank you, Governor Cook. And again, thank you all for being here. We have a number of guests joining us at the table today, and each of you has a unique sightline into many aspects of the economy and know what economic conditions mean for businesses and households. So once again, I want to thank you all for being here. Now, just a few ground rules for the program. The first time you speak, please briefly introduce yourself and your organization. And as we go through the conversation, if you'd like to comment or add any comments on a topic, please place your name, badge, or template up like this, and I'll manage the conversation at that point. Make sure everybody gets their stuff together. Alright, we all ready? Alright, let's do it.

So as everyone here is thinking about what is happening in the job market, how would you characterize the labor market and the conditions that you have seen over the past year? And, I should say, for each of the questions, we've asked some of our panelists to give some opening remarks to guide the flow here. And for this question we asked Lily and Amelia to take that on. So, why don't we start with Lily?

Lily Henson: Thank you for allowing me to participate in this panel. My name is Dr. Lily Henson. I'm the CEO of Piedmont Augusta, which is one of the clinical hubs within the Piedmont Healthcare family. Most people in Atlanta are familiar with Piedmont Atlanta, which is our flagship hospital. But in the past 10 years, Piedmont has grown across the state of Georgia, and we currently are a system of 26 hospitals with 44,000 employees. We're actually the largest employer in the state of Georgia beating Delta, and we are a nonprofit healthcare system.

The Piedmont Augusta hub joined the Piedmont family three years ago when University Health Systems became part of the Piedmont family. We have three campuses in—two in Augusta, sorry, and one in Thompson and we serve the Central Savannah River area. So that's the area within the metropolitan area in Augusta. We have patients from Aiken, South Carolina, extending all the way out to east of Thompson, serving about 25 different counties.

I also am a neurologist and am proud to be serving my third term as a board member on the board of the American Academy of Neurology, which is the professional organization for neuroscientists. And some of my comments will be based upon that experience as well as sitting on the Georgia Board of Healthcare Workforce, which is a governor's task force looking at the distribution of healthcare workers in the state of Georgia. We all know that there is a significant nursing shortage, not just here in Georgia, but across the country. That shortage existed even before COVID and was obviously significantly exacerbated by the pandemic, but less well described is the overall shortage of healthcare workers across the board.

So again, as a board member for the American Academy of Neurology, we're very cognizant of the fact that we don't have enough neurologists to care for our public. We are not training enough neurologists and there will be a significant shortage. And we're looking at how do we utilize other support healthcare workers to provide care for the patient with neurological diseases. But the overall healthcare shortage is a big problem. It's exacerbated in the CSRA where I am, where we have a lot of hospitals. We have Wellstar MCG, which is right across the street from us at Piedmont Augusta. We have a hospital in Summerville, Hospital in McDuffie. There's a new hospital being built in Columbia County. We have two VA hospitals and we have the hospital in Fort Eisenhower.

So there is a significant amount of competition for a very fixed labor pool. Not everybody wants to move to Augusta, shockingly, despite the Masters. And so, it's a constant struggle in terms of trying to ensure that we have the staff necessary to take care of our patients—to maintain the facility so that we can take care of our patients.

Salaries, there is a significant salary competition amongst the hospitals, as you can imagine. At the same time that our expenses are going up, not just in terms of salaries, but also in terms of supplies. And we're concerned that with potential tariffs being implemented, a lot of the supplies, drugs, equipment that we use in healthcare are imported from other countries that that will have a significant impact on our bottom line. We also, and y'all are probably familiar with the fact that payment reimbursements are dropping both from Medicare as well as the threat to Medicaid and other coverage for our population— particularly with what's going on in Congress and what's being debated.

So at the same time that our expenses are going up, our salary expenses going up most significantly, our reimbursements are dropping. That's a concern for healthcare systems across the country, not just here in Georgia. And the fear is that particularly because there are so many healthcare systems with zero operating margins, that we're not going to be able to continue to provide care to our populace.

How are we investing in the future? We're obviously, all of us, are looking at how do we grow the healthcare workforce of tomorrow. We have invested in junior achievement in Augusta Tech Technical College providing faculty and scholarships to nursing students. We're bringing high school students into the hospital as part of collaboration with our Chamber of Commerce to introduce them to the healthcare field. We're having summer camps introduce students to healthcare, but it is a concern in terms of being able to move into the future, have the staff that we need to take care of our patients.

Bostic: Thank you very much. So Amelia, you sit at the intersection of employers and workers as a staffing agency leader. Can you talk a bit about what you're seeing?

Amelia Nickerson: Sure. So thank you again for having me. I'm Amelia Nickerson. I'm the CEO of First Step Staffing. First Step is a nonprofit. We're a 501(c)(3). We use the staffing business model in order to employ and support men and women experiencing homelessness, those impacted by the criminal justice system, veterans, and any others that may have some barrier to re-entering the workforce. We were founded in Atlanta in 2007. We currently operate in seven states and employ close to 8,000 men and women a year. All coming from those situations where they've unfortunately been sidelined from our workforce. They're the folks who don't even get counted in those unemployment numbers.

Our model allows us to provide staffing services in the private sector. So we staff primarily light industrial manufacturing and hospitality roles. And our model also allows us to provide some essential wraparound support services so that the people that we're hiring, and we are the employer of record who are placing them into those jobs, can provide things like transportation, direct housing assistance, free upskilling and training, and financial literacy. So, they cannot just get a job, but they can keep a job and ideally get the training they need to move into those living wages that people need to survive. So we do sit at the intersection of employers and labor participants that we're trying to reconnect.

I would say what we've seen here recently and really over the last couple of years is a line out the door. We have a line of people outside of every office who are interested in working who need to work in order to just meet basic needs of food and shelter. What we don't have is enough employer partners and enough open jobs to be able to provide services to everybody coming to us. So we are constantly looking for additional employer partners. We've seen primarily in the light industrial manufacturing spaces, reductions in headcount—a current slowdown on spending as people are concerned or facing tariffs already so how that would affect their spending. We still face in every market that we're in, issues with criminal backgrounds and how many employers are open to hiring individuals with backgrounds. So we speak to a lot of employers about how to be second-chance friendly and where we can open up more opportunities.

We have seen wage increases, which is wonderful for the people we're helping so that they can get into that entry-level job and instead of making what was in 2018, about $8.25 an hour here in Atlanta is now about $14 an hour, but there are fewer jobs. So we're having people who are able to work and earn more even at that entry level job. Some folks who maybe have never worked in 20, 25 years, but there're fewer jobs and there's less movement for those people moving out of those jobs to be able to bring in a new pipeline of people.

From the employer perspective, we do see some new employers coming online. We have a sales team just like every other for-profit staffing company would. But I would say our sales cycle, which used to be about three months to get new business, gets new people on the door in easily eight months now, on average, in order to get new jobs open, and it's slower to get the headcount increases that we would like to see. The people that we hire unfortunately are some that were burdened the most out of the pandemic. These are folks who were living well below the poverty line and we found a massive need to increase that wraparound support. What we were doing before the pandemic was primarily transportation. Since then, we've added housing assistance, free upskilling, financial literacy, banking access. We have been able to reduce our unbanked population from about 78 percent percent of our workforce to 50 percent percent, but that's taken a lot of partnerships.

So I think an increase, not just in job opportunities, but the support services that the folks who are living at that bottom of the poverty line or well below. The wraparound support services are essential. A lot of that has been federally funded in the past. First Step does not receive a lot of federal funds. We have a SNAP E&T contract is about all that we do, but we have relied on private philanthropy to support that over the recent years. So what I see is a lot of people who need to work, who are interested in working but don't have the access to the jobs that they need.

Cook: Next we want to get-

Bostic: You're good.

Cook: ... a little more specific to talk about wages and the availability of jobs and workers. What sectors or job types are faring well? Which job types are difficult to fill? And how are you addressing the gaps? What wage changes are you seeing for recruitment or retention? Tariq, can you describe what you were seeing?

Tariq Collins Sr.: Yes, thank you for having me. I'm Tariq Collins, CEO of Eagle Financial Group. We are a accounting firm. So we are dealing in a small business space. So we work with business owners on a monthly basis as far as anything from CFO services all the way down to payrolls. We have a number of people who we do facilitate their payroll. And for us, we've been seeing a little bit of steady, we haven't really, our business owners haven't necessarily made anybody unemployed. Obviously though, our businesses are growing in a sense, so there's always the need of hiring new people. And so, we've been seeing an increase, particularly with businesses in our medical field. We have a few businesses that does home healthcare in the medical side. We have some transportation, retail, and so there's just been that gap to increase employment as these businesses are growing.

So we haven't necessarily seen a decline in that regard as far as our firm. We also do taxes on an annual basis. I have seen there's been a tick of people who are employed or they have an increase in their wages based off what we've seen from tax prep. So we've been seeing it consistently. It kind of levels out. We had a few people who I've known for sure that was just unemployed and took almost seven months before they were employed again. But what I find is in the interim, however that's statistically calculated, you have a lot of people who are doing side jobs and wages to get by in between them actually having employment at certain, in any particular field. And so, I've got a number of annual clients who are in healthcare from a nursing position. And so, I've seen increases in wages in there, but we're also talking in cities between Atlanta to, I would say up to New York, we got clients all over.

So I would say it's pretty fair. I mean, we were talking, me and Amelia was talking earlier, I think there's an interesting intersection between jobs, employers who are seeking to hire people for sure from the small business perspective, but maybe can't afford all the bells and whistles, the benefits and higher wages. And then, you have those people who are willing to accept those jobs as well, but then not necessarily may have the ability or the spunk to just be that professional masters of their craft in a sense. So there's a little bit of intersection between that, but it's not too huge or concerning from what I've been seeing.

Bostic: So thank you. I hope folks aren't hearing that echo in the background. We're going to try to continue through. So over the last five years, as I think many of you know, the economy has experienced a period of high inflation, so we're really interested in trying to get a sense of the major cost pressures that are facing households and businesses, and also how it's affected decisions to spend or invest. And I would love to get your thoughts on how you expect the cost and pricing environment to change over the next 6 to 12 months. So Kyle, can you talk about how inflation has impacted families and individuals in the region over the last several years?

Kyle Waide: Certainly. Thank you, Raphael and the Fed for having me here. I'm excited to be part of this conversation. My name is Kyle Waide. I'm the CEO of the Atlanta Community Food Bank. And our food bank is one of about 200 food banks that are part of Feeding America. It's our national organization that serves every county in the United States. Our food bank serves 29 counties here in Metro Atlanta and North Georgia. In those 29 counties, we work with a network of 700 community-based nonprofit organizations. We supply those organizations with food and resources that they in turn distribute to families facing food insecurity in their local communities.

This past year, we distributed close to $300 million worth of food and resources to more than 700,000 people across our community. And what we've seen, Raphael, over the last several years is that lines are getting longer at food pantries all across our community. We are serving today 60 percent percent more people than we did 3 years ago. I think obviously inflation is a key driver of that growth. Inflation, as you know better than I, began to accelerate in the beginning of 2022. And that coincided with the discontinuation of a number of different public supports. For example, the enhanced expanded child tax credit went away at the beginning of 2022. There were enhanced unemployment benefits, there were enhanced SNAP benefits. All of those things began to expire and go away at the beginning of 2022 at the very same time that inflation began to accelerate.

And so, for low and moderate income families, you had resources going away on the revenue side at the very same moment that their expenses were increasing. And so, folks are now spending $100 a week or more every week on gas and groceries and dealing with higher rents and housing prices and healthcare costs, and all of those things are putting enormous pressure on families across our community.

Importantly, the biggest growth of the people that we've seen of that portion of increase that we've experienced for the last few years is among families whose incomes are too high to qualify for different federal benefits programs. So these are families earning $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year in household income. By definition, they're working, but because they're spending more money on gas and groceries and housing and healthcare, they are now no longer able to afford to live on their own and are requiring assistance in a way that they haven't before. We are concerned that the economic environment going forward is not going to make things better for these families. We don't see indications that prices are going to suddenly decrease. Even though we've had wage increases over the last five, six years, those seem to be moderating significantly.

We're concerned about housing costs not slowing down in their appreciation. We're concerned about certain policy choices that are currently being contemplated in Washington that will reduce benefits significantly. And programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), that's going to put increasing pressure on those families who are eligible for those resources—who will now need to turn to food banks for more assistance, more assistance than we have the capacity to provide. And that will reduce the resources that we have to serve those families who are not eligible for those benefit programs. So it is a crisis moment that we're facing, and we know that that is going to have consequences, not just for people at the very bottom, but it's going to have a detrimental effect to the economy overall.

Bostic: Thanks for that perspective. I wanted to turn to Martina now to get a perspective on cost and inflation for small businesses and for entrepreneurs. Martina?

Martina Edwards: Yes, thank you. Very happy to be here just like everyone else. My name is Martina Edwards. I am the CEO and president of Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs and ACE for short. We are a homegrown CDFI, community development finance institution (a lot of acronyms) but basically what that means is that we give folks a chance when others can't or won't. So we've been around now, we're celebrating twenty-five years of supporting small businesses. We started out in rural North Georgia just doing microloans—$500–$5,000. Today, we're proud that we've actually deployed over $250 million into the Georgia market and supported north of 3,000 businesses and helped them create jobs, about 25,000 jobs for the state. And so, that's really big. The community and economic benefit is huge. We provide that affordable capital so that small businesses can use it for working capital, inventory, equipment, things of that nature. And now, we'd go from 15,000 up to about $1 million, and we cover the entire state with our launch into Tifton, Georgia, last year, picking up about thirty-two counties, sixteen of which are persistent-poverty counties.

So, we get a chance, our secret sauce, I always say, is capital combined with coaching and connections. We can lend to anyone, but traditionally we are focused on women, communities of color, those who live in low- to moderate-income communities, or have their businesses there, that's our focus area. And so, I would say capital combined coaching and connections is what's helped us move forward.

In terms of what are some of the major cost pressures and the fact that we've had an inflationary environment. The past 5 years we're just barely removed from COVID-19 in 2020. And then after that we went, that was a period of historical lows in terms of interest rates. So that's one of the cost pressures. We've had north of 10 interest rate hikes between in this five-year period. That translates to increased cost of capital—it would cost more money to borrow money. And whether you're in a business and looking for a business loan or a mortgage for your home or something to purchase a car, the cost of everything has gone up everywhere.

And for small businesses, they're having to make decisions about, how I can reinvest into my organization. With the subsequent tariff situation that we're in now, there's a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace. So, you have some businesses who are actually in Q1 contemplating: do I go ahead and purchase inventory in advance because there's lower cost? or do I hold on to the cash flow that I do have? which oftentimes they have really small cash reserves. So those decisions they're making back and forth within their organization.

But the cost of goods, the cost of materials, the supply chain, there're a lot of disruptions that are happening right now and they're figuring out, do I pass that 25 percent increase onto my client or I'm paying it? but I don't know that I can pass it in full down to them. And many of them concerned about whether or not they have sticky clients where they're going to keep coming back. I think from a household perspective, which has been said here by some of my colleagues on the panel, during this period of time also, folks are dealing with their own wage challenges or companies are having reductions in force, so they have less to work with, and they're making decisions, so they're reducing their spending.

And at the end of the day, in terms of what I see is going to happen going forward, is that there's a lot of shifting around pricing strategy that corporations and small businesses are going to have to make. But they also have the labor concern. There's a lot of fatigue in the workforce, and it's also harder to retain your talent. So there's increases there. Thank you.

Cook: Turning to the cost of housing, I'm sure those of you in Atlanta know nothing about that. So, Phil and J. D., from a developer's perspective, what are the biggest costs? What conditions could shape housing prices in the future?

Philip Tague: Thank you very much. I appreciate being part of this panel. My name is Phil Tague. I'm president of AMLI Residential. AMLI has been in business for forty-five years. Forty-five years in Atlanta as well as some other cities. We have about 30,000 apartment units, 90 apartment communities, and most of the units are market rate units. We have about 1,000 units that are so-called affordable, and we run a small construction company that builds our own products and manage our own properties as well. And so, the properties, the 30,000 units are distributed among 9 major US cities and Atlanta is one of them. Costs have obviously gone up a lot during the COVID-19 period for housing, in particular.

I think there are two driving factors that have produced higher housing costs, and these have always been evident, but they've been more pronounced in the last 5 years. One is the land use itself, the amount of density of housing that is allowable in different metropolitan areas. Obviously, land use policies are in almost every state delegated to local communities. And in general, they're following a state law that provides for the necessity of having a comprehensive land use plan that is reevaluated every ten to twenty years. And the procedure differs state to state, but in general, there is some prolonged period of time every ten to twenty years when a community decides on what its land-use policy should be. And inevitably, the decisions are always driven by single-family homeowners and town homeowners rather than renters.

Obviously, owners have skin in the game in the community, they show up at meetings, they vote at local elections, and in general, they prevent density of housing to be developed in most communities in metropolitan areas. Anybody in real estate knows that outside the perimeter in the Atlanta metro area, it's very, very hard to get density of housing approved in local communities. And in general, they're following land-use plans that were adopted for a ten- to twenty-year period of time. And so, to change the land-use plan, you have to go through often a long zoning case where you inevitably draw opponents who are single-family homeowners. And you show up at these meetings and everybody but you is wearing a T-shirt with your name or your case number on it with a dagger through it. And it is not a pleasant experience to go to be the proponent of changing the density on a piece of property.

And so, the consequence of all this is that there just aren't very many zoned properties anywhere in metropolitan Atlanta or any of the other major cities that allow for an immediate or fairly immediate approval process for multifamily housing, even dense townhome housing is difficult, as well. And that drives up the cost of land. It drives up the cost of all the resources you have to assemble during the period of trying to change zoning. And it's become more pronounced during the COVID-19 period. It's all grouped under the acronym NIMBYism: not in my backyard. And it cuts across political partisanship.

And so, as a homeowner, it really doesn't matter very much if you're a Republican, Democrat, or independent, most people who own homes feel that density will intrude on traffic patterns. It will bring somewhat lower-income people into the community, and that will have an impact on their children, little league teams, employment patterns. And so, it's a very difficult obstacle to overcome, and it has been a subtle cause of a lot of increase in housing prices. It's going to continue unless there is a better understanding of what the consequences are at the local level.

So, I don't think federal intrusion on comprehensive land-use planning is the right method, and it has often failed at the state level. California is a perfect example where there are state requirements for local communities to allow density, but every community has gamesmanship and often is able to avoid the requirement. So that is one driving factor on inflation.

The other key one is labor. I don't think everybody realizes that, at least in the apartment industry, labor constitutes about 60 percent of the ultimate cost of the product, and 40 percent is material steel, concrete, lumber, et cetera. And what happened during the Great Recession from 2008 to 2010? Construction got crushed during that period of time. There was very little new development, and the employment base in construction went from about 7.5 million down to 5 million. And so, 2.5 million people who were skilled construction workers left the industry. Some of them gradually came back, but most did not.

And so, the recovery since the Great Recession has put a premium on skilled labor throughout the industry, and it's not being replaced anytime soon by robotics. And that in itself has become another key component of inflation and labor. And it can change as the industry does a better job of trying to attract younger, newer people into the industry. But it's had a huge consequence over the last fifteen years on construction costs. Let me turn it over to J. D.

Bostic: And J. D., I'm going to ask you to pull that mic a little closer so that we make sure everybody can hear.

J. D. Espana Jr.: Okay. My name is J. D. Espana. I am president and I'm a partner in Piedmont Residential. We're a local home builder. We are probably the largest privately held home builder in the metro area, at this point. We do close about three hundred homes in the metro area. I agree with Phil, the biggest obstruction to affordability is zoning. You cannot, it doesn't matter what age is it either. It doesn't matter if they're twenty, it doesn't matter if they're eighty. If it's in their backyard, they don't want anyone coming back in. And in some ways, we create our own problem, because we're building the neighborhoods.

But I think that one of the things that has changed specifically in Atlanta that's driven up costs is that, Phil's right, these comprehensive land plans were created back when Cobb County was a suburb. I grew up in Cobb County. It now has seven hundred and fifty thousand, seven hundred and eighty thousand people. That's an urban core. And land-use plans have not reflected the change in that. And do you need density throughout the county? No, I don't believe that's the case, but there are business nodes and other places that should be looked at. But that's not going to happen because anyone that we sell a house to doesn't want the next generation, honestly, to be in their neighborhoods, which is an odd thing when you think about it.

You grew up in a neighborhood, you thought that it was going to be somewhere you could live, and now your own parents are protecting you out of coming into the neighborhood you grew up in. And we have had people stand up and say that. And so, that's a change that needs to be educated like Phil's saying. I do agree with him on the labor side of it, we have been very fortunate that we actually started in 2007 to work my partners out of developments that National Home Builders were leaving them with. And we were a beneficiary of that and grew. But the number of people that have left our industry has never been replenished.

So the other thing about that is there used to be about two thousand five hundred builders in metro Atlanta. I would be pressed to say that if there's one hundred and fifty, that would be amazing right now. So coming up with trying to replace a shortage that was created can't be replaced by the number of builders that are out there. It's just impossible. You don't have enough people, you don't have enough capacity. Atlanta is a growing area, and so more people are moving in than we can supply housing to. And so, that drives up costs as well. But then there is part of it, the National Housing Bank (NHB) has done studies year in, year out, and I think about 33 percent, 30 percent of all housing-related costs all have to do with some type of regulation from either federal, state, or local governments.

So that is a cost that you have to figure out how to deal with. So there's a lot of that, and some of it has come from our own industry as well. But I think that there's just issues that our population is dealing with in general. I think that when you look at our population with the boomers retiring, and we had fewer people coming into the workforce, is creating a shortage of just human bodies in the system to place such a large group of people that are coming out of the population. And that's driving up wages as well because you are fighting for qualified workers.

But I will say that on the other side of that, we have seen some changes over the past year or two where we have seen some more pro-growth people elected into office. We are seeing that young men, particularly in their twenties, are looking to come into the trades, maybe not go to college. They feel like they can make a better living, faster, which is probably a true statement. You can get paid really well. There's a lot of plumbers and electricians and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) guys that own really nice houses and really nice boats and, some of them, airplanes. So they're not hurting. So you think blue collar, well, they're living a lot better than some white collar workers.

So I think that that's a positive, but that's going to be a time, it's just going to take time. But I think those challenges are probably not unique to certain eras. I would think that in the seventies when the boomers were coming in, housing crisis was probably huge. So I think that the good news to me is that we will figure out a way. I do think affordability is probably the most complicated thing to deal with. We focus on the first-time home buyer. That has been a passion of mine. I believe that first-time home buyers are very important to the fabric of our communities. It's how you build wealth in this country. It's the most expensive investment you have. And I don't care if you're Jay-Z or whoever, if you have a $40 million home, it's probably your most expensive asset.

So it's important to me that folks have access to owning a home. I think that the natural progression has been to move out of your parents' house into an apartment. And I do think there should be apartments that people can afford. Having a loft that's $3,500 a month is very expensive for most people. So when you start looking at that, to me, that's the biggest. I don't know how to solve that problem. And you're talking about inflation and things of that nature. In 2018, we were selling a 2,200 sq ft. house, four-bedroom, two and a half bath for about $205,000. We're selling the same exact house for about $410,000 today.

And a lot of that has to do with land costs and some other things, but it's getting harder and harder to even provide that, especially in what I would consider the core counties and that has expanded out. I mean, you're not going to be into Cobb County. You're not going to be in Cobb, Fulton, or Gwinnett, in certain areas, and even come close to that. But you're looking at Cherokee, you're looking at Dawson, you're looking at Jefferson, and all these other areas. It's almost impossible to provide that kind of housing, which in the past, that's where those growing communities are. And a lot of that has to do with land-use maps that just aren't allowing anything less than an acre lot. And what do you do at that point? So I think there's some things, but I do think as time goes, there will be change. It just isn't going to be quick.

Cook: Thank you. Kimberly, from the consumer's perspective, how are families negotiating increases in housing costs, both as homeowners and renters? What are the greatest risks or opportunities related to housing stability for households?

Kimberly Charles: Thank you for inviting me to this listening session. I'm Kimberly Charles with Atlanta Legal Aid. I'm the deputy director. So along with our executive director, Rita Sheffey, she and I run a program of approximately ninety lawyers across five Atlanta metro counties. We are legal services corporation funded, which means we're a member of a network of one hundred and thirty non-profit law firms across the United States that help clients who are less than, well for us, 150 percent of the federal poverty level nationwide. —under 125 percent of the federal poverty level with their basic civil legal needs. So we, in 2024, had approximately twenty-one thousand people seek our assistance across the 5 metro counties.

And I will tell you that the number one problem that they came to us about was about their housing. And what I like to say, is that if you have a legal housing problem, oftentimes it starts as an economic housing problem. It is a money issue before it becomes a legal issue. And so, so many of those cases come to us for people who simply cannot afford to live where they are anymore. And so, they are having trouble making that rent payment, and pay for groceries as Kyle alluded to earlier, and pay for basic transportation costs.

There is a decline in the amount of federally subsidized housing as well. And I heard just this morning that Congress is considering things like time limits on federally subsidized housing vouchers and work requirements. And I'll tell you, that Atlanta already has that, it already has work requirements for people who are able-bodied, and the city of Atlanta housing has for almost fifteen years now.

So the pressure just keeps getting greater and greater for our clients and for renters in general. I agree with these 2 gentlemen about zoning being an issue. I think that that is a long-term issue. If you won't let people have space to come into your communities and have a safe, decent, and affordable place that they can live and stay, this is not going to get any better. I think that there are 2other issues that I see with the rental market specifically, and that is that our clients and that renters in Atlanta and Georgia see there are very few what we used to call mom-and-pop landlords anymore. Most landlords and rental companies or property management companies are very, very large companies, Fortune 500. And there are investment groups actually that own apartment buildings. And some of my colleagues have actually testified in Congress about this issue. But there are rampant issues with fees being charged for every little thing, and that makes the apartment even less affordable.

The other thing that I see is that for homeowners, it's just really difficult to become one because you can't save—you can't save money. There are some great programs. In the same article I was listening to this morning on the news, it talked about a program in a different state where there was a time limit on the housing voucher. But what they would do is, as the person who was a young person who had a steady income and was moving up the career market, as she continued to earn more income, they would help her save money so that she could have a down payment. Those programs are fantastic. They're few and far between, so I wish I could be more optimistic, but I don't want to sugarcoat it. It's scary out there for renters.

Bostic: Well, we're looking to hear what's real. So thank you. Thank you for the feedback. So we've heard feedback perspectives on labor markets as well as perspectives on inflation and costs. I wanted now to turn the conversation to barriers or opportunities to sustainable economic growth and improved economic outcomes for individuals and families. So we have so many different vantage points. So, we're going to start with 3 and then we'll see where this goes. So Caroline, can you talk about what students are experiencing and what motivates them?

Caroline Angelo: Sure. Thank you, Dr. Bostic, Dr. Cook for inviting me this morning. My name's Caroline Angelo. I have the privilege of serving Atlanta Technical College as the executive vice president for academic and student affairs. We are 1 of the 22 technical colleges in the state of Georgia. We serve primarily the city of Atlanta, Fulton County, and Clayton County. So we have some rural area in Clayton and some of South Fulton. We have the airport as part of our service area. And then, of course, the whole City of Atlanta.

Our student body annually is about around six thousand students. We are in our fifth semester of double-digit percentage enrollment growth. People know that they need an education. All of the things I've been hearing the panelists say, I kept wanting to say, "Oh, we've got students who can do that. We've got students who can do that." So they know they can do that. We have almost two hundred programs in everything from health and public safety fields. We're training nurses, we're training paramedics, we're training construction managers, we're training business management—all of these things that you're talking about.

We're about 65 percent female, which is pretty standard for colleges nationwide. We are currently 81 percent African American, 7 percent Hispanic students. 61 percent qualify for federal financial aid, which means they're in a family that earns less than $27,000—a family of four that earns less than $27,000 a year. So, they are reliant on tuition, scholarships, whatever we can come up with for them. Most of our students, 63 percent identify as parents. So our students are— In fact, we do a financial wellness survey every fall. And this past fall, we found out that 52 percent of our students consider themselves workers who attend school, not students who work.

And so, if you think about what that means, as important as they know it is that they get trained, because they know there's jobs out there. Things come first for them, like taking care of your children, taking care of your family, transportation, rent. A percentage of our students, 57 percent say they're food insecure. The statistic that I think hits the hardest, and that is almost too hard to say without getting a lump in your throat, 72 percent of our student body report that they couldn't come up with $500 cash or credit in an emergency. They know that coming to school is going to make their lives better. They know the jobs are out there, but all those factors of life are affecting what they're able to do. 62 percent of them are worried that they're not going to have the money to stay in school, and those other areas are going to have to be the priority. So, if we don't have the money to go to school, that's fine, because I have to have the money to take care of my family.

Fifty-five percent of our students reported that they ran out of money 6 or more times in the last academic yea—that they just completely ran out. Most of our students are reliant on public transportation. Some colleges report that we need more parking, things like that. We don't. Most of our students are able to take MARTA, some kind of transportation, but that's expensive, too. So we try to offer things like a MARTA card that can help. We have grants, we have scholarships, we have emergency funding. We do different things to try to help them. Even though as the college, so when I say we're training nurses, we have a shortage too. So we've had 3 nursing faculty positions open for 2 years. We could graduate eighty nurses, and I think our nursing dean's goal is one hundred nurses a year, but not if we don't have the faculty to teach them. So we have to limit the number of our nursing faculty.

Construction is another one. We've had a construction and carpentry position open for over a year. Our full-time carpentry faculty are working double shifts. They're teaching all day, take a little break for food, and then they're teaching our night classes, because we can't even find adjunct faculty in those areas. Because we can't compete salary-wise with the private sector.

Childcare is another one. So we have our own early learning center lab school on campus. So it's wonderful. Our students, there's a place where their children can go where they're in school. The problem is there are also, just like with nursing and other fields, there are requirements about how many children, at different ages, can be with a teacher. Well, we can't find teachers. We are actually in crisis mode right now. I'm saying, well, we could take many more students than we have in the early learning center. We are one of the highest paying in the Atlanta-area for teachers. We can't find any teachers, because highest-paying is relative. So if you can't find a place to put your children, you can't go to school. If you can't go to school, you can't make more money so that you can get out in the world and get the job to help raise your children so that then they can come to school. And so, it's sort of this, we don't have enough teachers, but we don't have enough students to pay the teachers more. And so, we have this vicious circle there as well.

So that all sounds like bad news, but it's not all bad news. So one of the things that has happened in the last few years, and a lot of people ask, why have we had this enrollment growth? Because usually it's backwards. If the economy, if there's not a lot of jobs out there, technical college enrollment is high. Right now, I think what it is that, at one time, the technical colleges in general, Atlanta Tech specifically, we were the best kept secret in Atlanta. People would always say, "Oh, I didn't even know you were there." But we've done a lot of work on making sure people know we're here. And so, if you look at a list at who our partners are, including the Federal Reserve, if you look at who our partners are in doing things like apprenticeships, internships, providing scholarships, coming to us and saying, "Well, what can we do to get your graduates?"

I always love to give the example of Georgia Power. Georgia Power needed line workers. They came to us. They said, "We desperately need line workers in the Atlanta area." They came to us, we helped develop a line worker program. They donated poles, they donated utility belts, they donated bucket trucks. We've got bucket trucks on campus now. They donated all these things. So every semester, that program is full, has a waiting list, and they are assured jobs. So now we have what we call the combine like in football, but we invite Georgia Power, all the energy membership corporations (EMCs), Alabama Power. They come, our students put on a show, they show them what they can do. Georgia Power is our partner, they get first pick.

And so, we're trying to tell all of our partners, "Come and help us. And look, you get your first pick." And where that's showing is, we have this past year, 100 percent job-placement rate. We are very proud of that. We're getting a banner to put outside of the college that says that. Out of that 100 percent job-placement rate, 86 percent are in fields in all of the healthcare fields, in all of the skilled trades fields. It's 100 percent job placement in field. So what you majored in is what you're getting your job in. So I think as business and industry is starting to realize, "Oh, if we need employees, we need to go to the college and help them, and get them, and see them, and meet them. We can provide those. But it's good and bad."

Bostic: Well, as with so many things, there are good things and things to get some improvement on. Thank you very much, Caroline. Tripp, I want to move to bankers, and you all are on the front lines of economic aspirations, triumphs, and struggles for both families and for business owners. What are banks seeing in terms of savings, credit needs, and experiences?

Tripp Cofield: Sure. Well, thank you Dr. Bostic, and Governor Cook for the opportunity—

Bostic: Move your mic.

Cofield: —For the opportunity to be here and participate today. My name is Tripp Cofield, I'm president and CEO of the Georgia Bankers Association (GBA). Our organization was founded in 1892, so we've been around for about one hundred and thirty-three years. We represent the nearly two hundred banks doing business in the state of Georgia. Our membership ranges from the smallest community bank in the state of Georgia in a rural market all the way up to the globally active banks, larger banks. We're also very fortunate. We've got about two dozen boards and committees at GBA with about three hundred, roughly three hundred bankers, a few more who serve on those committees. So we get to spend quite a bit of time with those folks. And they range at various levels of the bank and various disciplines in the bank, from CFOs to HR and marketing professionals. And the last 2–3 weeks, we've actually had roundtables with CEOs, CFOs, credit officers, and lenders.

And I'll say some of you have alluded to it, I know Dr. Bostic, in your statement yesterday, you alluded to it as well. Uncertainty is the theme right now. That's what we're hearing from our bankers. That's what our bankers are hearing from their customers and clients. And a lot of that, it's almost an all-eyes-on-DC moment right now with tariffs and the trade and how the market has responded to that and the volatility and folks sitting on the sidelines there. There's also, again, as you alluded to in your statements, what's going to happen on fiscal policy with deficits and debts? What's going to happen to the 2017 tax laws that many of those provisions set to expire this year? And then, on the regulatory side, what are we going to see there? I think from our industry's perspective, early on, some of the pullback I think we've seen has been positive. But where do we go from here and where do the regulators go from there is what we're seeing.

Also, a lot of folks have talked a little bit about this on inflation prices, costs, and rates. We continue to hear from bankers and they hear from their customers and clients the strain that that it is putting on consumers and businesses alike, particularly the low- to moderate-income individuals in the smaller businesses. I actually spoke with a bank economist for one of our larger banks headquartered in the state earlier this week. They survey on a quarterly basis about seven hundred of their business clients. And most of those are smaller, local businesses. And prices are certainly having an impact. And in areas where they weren't expecting, a lot of the smaller businesses, I was told in some of their surveys, are seeing their margins compressed. They feel like at this point, less than a third of them feel like they can pass along any increased prices. Should we see either a spike in inflation or rates to go up?

I feel like they can't pass those prices along. So it's compressing their margins. It's creating cash flow issues. And also, we talked about talent and labor. It is a challenge. Hiring has been a challenge for a lot of their business customers and they're saying, some of them, it's a skills challenge where they can't find the right folks—they can't recruit them into certain areas. Others are able to find workers. But with those margins being squeezed, they can't afford to hire them at the rates that the workers are demanding and likely deserve.

So on the banker side, I do hear a lot on talent there as well. Over the last year, year and a half, it's bubbled up to the top of one of the issues that I hear the most about. I think most of the bankers would tell you we lost a generation of talent back in the Great Recession. A lot of folks who were in the industry who left went to work in other industries and never came back. That's creating some management succession concerns or some issues. For banks who were current leadership looking to turn the reins over to the next generation, do they have the right people on their team? And if they do, can they keep them? Because a lot of folks don't have the right folks on their team and the competition is fierce there.

It's also something we haven't talked about today is agriculture. Agriculture, being the number one industry in the state of Georgia. Another one of our committees at the GBA is the agriculture committee. It's roughly twenty lenders from around the state. They represent producers of just about every commodity we produce here in Georgia. And Georgia, of course, is a very diverse state agriculturally. We've had some really difficult conversations with them the last couple of years. They're having to have difficult conversations with farmers. The agricultural economy is not doing well. Input prices for them, like so many other industries, have gone up and their challenge is commodity prices have remained low and they're very dependent in times like that on federal support and safety net programs. Most of those are included in the farm bill, which hasn't been reauthorized. So, a lot of really difficult conversations there between lenders and what they would call good farmers who were struggling to make ends meet and get those operating loans. So if you couple that with some of the extreme weather events, I think that's a challenge and will be a challenge for the state long-term.

Another issue that's probably the issue that I hear the most about from bankers, is fraud. And it's consumers, it's businesses, it's impacting everybody. It's check fraud, it's automatic clearing house (ACH) fraud, wire fraud, peer-to-peer—it's all of it. I had a banker 2 weeks ago, a relatively large financial institution in the states, say our fraud losses at our bank exceeded our loan losses last year. That's a big deal. And banks are doing a lot to be proactive to help their individual customers and their business clients on that. If you look at the surveys of bank customers, 3 and 4 will say, "My bank is doing more than any other industry to protect me from fraud and scams." Nine and ten say, "Our bank is very proactive in that space." I think fraud will continue to be a challenge for all of us, because we are all in this together and we welcome involvement. Banks, like I said, are doing a lot. We welcome involvement from telecoms and the social media companies where a lot of the fraud is originating and being pushed over to banks with spoofing phone numbers or online marketplaces, things like that.

So, we had some great conversations in DC with about thirty bankers or delegation of thirty bankers with our regulators last month, trying to bring together a larger coalition of folks and hand up. It is a very difficult issue to legislate, but it's an issue nonetheless, and we're all dealing with that. All of that sounds like downer stuff. I know there are challenges and barriers in what we're seeing, I think, a period of uncertainty. But by and large, Georgia banks continue to perform very well. I don't know if any of you saw the statistics the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) released for the first quarter of this year, Georgia banks are outperforming their peers in just about every category nationally, which is good. We had a group of lenders and credit officers in 2 weeks ago, and we went roundtable again, all across the state. What do you see for loans? And they said, "Loan demand is up right now." And we said, "Are there any specific industries or sectors?" And they said, "No, it's really across the board." So that's good news.

Also, good news is credit quality is really, really good right now. We saw some upticks last year, a little bit, but it was nothing alarming. It was more of a normalization of what we've seen, historically. But if you looked at those again, those FDIC numbers that were just released last week, past due loans for Georgia banks actually ticked down from the fourth quarter of last year to the first quarter of this year. So credit quality remains great. And I would just say I think banks in Georgia, certainly well capitalized, strong reserves, good liquidity, and positioned well to meet the needs of their customers and clients.

Bostic: Thank you very much. And I wanted to turn to Blythe now. So Blythe, you're in the childcare area and you get to see a lot of that. How has the cost of availability of childcare changed since the pandemic, and how do you see the childcare landscape impacting labor force participation in the future? Others have mentioned this as well.

Blythe Robinson: Yes, thank you. And good morning. I'm Blythe Robinson. I'm the president and CEO of Sheltering Arms Early Education and Family Centers. We provide high-quality early childhood education, and we have been doing that since 1888. So we are a very old organization here in Metro Atlanta. We serve about two thousand children every year, 6 weeks to 5 years old, and our families need childcare as early as 6 weeks. So I think about two perspectives when talking about this childcare issue and the state of childcare. And one is about just the overall affordability of childcare.

HHS says childcare is considered affordable when it is no more than 7 percent of a family's income. And we see rates double that almost 20, 23 percent. So families are making really hard choices as they're thinking about what they can spend money on, and what they have to spend money on for their overall family stability. And so, when you hear about the issues around housing, around food, and all of the issues we're talking about today, families are making big choices on where they can and have to spend their dollars.

And then, there's the overall impact to that family's stability. So, I want to share a few numbers from looking at 2018 to looking at 2024, numbers from the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students or GEEARS, they conducted research with the Metro Atlanta Chamber. So, in 2018, among parents with children ages birth to 5, 21 percent quit work, school, or work training. In 2024, it was 31 percent, so that's a significant increase. Going from full-time to part-time, we had 18 percent in 2018. That increased to 34 percent in 2024. So families had to make a choice or the decision to move from full-time work to part-time work.

And then fired from work—In 2018, it was about 5 percent of our families that reported that, 13 percent reported that in 2024. So childcare is critically important for families in order to remain stable. And so, the Atlanta Technical College example around just attracting folks into this industry is really the third perspective, I would say. It is an woefully underpaid profession and it is really challenging. It was challenging pre-pandemic to attract individuals to come into the profession, but to remain in the profession has been extremely challenging. And we're seeing numbers, turnover numbers. Retention rates are significantly different today in 2025 than they were pre-pandemic and even before.

And so, we are working really hard as an industry, as a field to continue to really stress the message around the importance of childcare. It's really not just about the child. While that's critically important around that child's development, we know what kindergarten-readiness means. We know that we need our children to be ready for school, and we are going to do everything we do to prepare that child, but it also impacts the family's stability. And it's a number one reason that we hear families cannot go to work is because they lack childcare. So, this access to childcare is critically important, more than access affordability.

And so, we as an industry, and I would pull my colleagues together in the early childhood world, including our colleagues and partners at the Technical Colleges Early Education Center, really around the advocacy for affordable rates for childcare, consistent funding for childcare, no family should be paying that much in order to secure affordable and high quality childcare. And then, we understand this impact we say on the child, on the family, but also on the economy as I just shared those statistics. We need a stable workforce. And we know that when a parent has that consistent, steady, high quality childcare, they're showing up to work, they are focused at work, they are working really hard for that next great opportunity or promotion at work. It's really about stabilizing the workforce as well, on the side of the parents. And so again, we look at the childcare issue in reference to the child, the family, and then the overall economy. How we're hiring and retaining talent, but also what that means for our families to continue to maintain their work.

Cook: Thank you so much. We're going to open a question up to all the panelists. How would you assess the Federal Reserve's communications with the public? Do you have any advice on how we communicate, and how we can better connect what we do to the communities you interact with? What is the impact of the Federal Reserve's dual mandate goals for maximum employment and stable prices on your economic and financial well-being? Again, I welcome anyone to respond. Now, you have 2 former professors here. We might start calling on you.

Cofield: Thank you. I'll jump back in here, and I know probably the communication we get from you all—very different given that the regulatory piece and that bankers are following what's happening with rates. But back to that fraud piece again, we had a delegation of thirty bankers in DC and the call to regulators for help on communicating with the general public and educating consumers and businesses around fraud. And I know I've seen some things from the Fed in the past, but certainly anything that you all can do, the message from the bankers to federal regulators in DC was it's different when it comes from the Fed. It's different when it comes from the FDIC, it means more to consumers. So we would welcome a partnership and some additional communication in the fraud space. And anything you all can do to help us build out the coalition would be appreciated as well.

Bostic: Alright. Amelia?

Nickerson: Yeah, I think I follow a lot of the information that comes out from the Fed and I think most business owners and leaders at this table, the data and the numbers really matter. But if I think about the people that we're serving, it's the stories that matter. They're not paying attention to the numbers. There's such a disconnect from what is likely happening in their everyday life from the Fed, which feels like this big powerful entity that they would never have a personal connection to. But they do have a connection to the stories that come out of the agencies and the organizations that the Fed's connected to. So I think continuing to help promote those stories will reach a larger audience than just the people who are sitting at the leadership tables.

Bostic: Lily?

Henson: I appreciate the quality of the communications that comes out from the Fed. It really does help provide an overall view of the economy, which is helpful as an employer. I do want to point out that as an employer of four thousand employees, I applaud your dual mandate goal of maximum employment and also stable pricing. Obviously, I've already talked about the difficulties in the healthcare industry. I wanted to comment on Blythe's comments on childcare. I was fortunate to be a physician, but as a single mom of 2 kids, I struggled with what was going to happen with my kids when

I was working really long hours as a physician.

What we're currently doing as a hospital system is we are collaborating with the local YMCA to look to see how we could help subsidize the cost of childcare, particularly for our lowest paid employees, to ensure that we do have a stable workforce. It is an investment in the future and into our workforce that's critical. I have, and it's not just the 6 weeks to 5 years of age. Our shifts for nurses are twelve hours. So, finding childcare that starts at 6:00 a.m. so that our nurses could get to work by 7:00 a.m. and being able to pick up their children after 7:00 p.m. is something that's really important.

There are before school, after school issues, there are summer camp issues, and then there's also when the teachers have their off whatever, the off-site teaching weeks when, out-of-the-blue you have a week or 2 days where your workforce is not available because they have to stay home to take care of their children instead of taking care of our patients. So it is an obligation, I think, on the part of employers to look to see how we could help our most vulnerable employees to be able to stay in the workforce.

Bostic: Thank you. Kyle, you're next on the list.

Waide: So one thing I really appreciate about Dr. Bostic's leadership of the Fed here in Atlanta is that in terms of communication with the public, there's certainly a lot of communication about how the economy's doing and information related to the dual mandate, but I think the Fed and Dr. Bostic individually are very engaged in the broader community around talking about just how is the economy doing for everybody in our community. A lot of what we've heard about today is about an economy that is working really well for some, but it is an economy that is being increasingly experienced as very challenging by a very large segment of our population—not just people at the very bottom, but people in the middle as well.

I know Dr. Bostic convened here at the Fed a number of years ago, a great session that had to do with how we are going to build a more inclusive economy. In particular, it was focused on what are we doing in the private sector to better support lower wage workers with additional kinds of supports like childcare access or other kinds of benefits that make it easier for people to get jobs and stay in jobs and advanced their careers with employers.

And the more that we can do to help engage and educate the community and our policymakers around the challenges that are showing up in the data, economic data about how hard it is for so many people in our community to not just survive week-to-week, but to really begin to invest in a different kind of future for their families—we've got to communicate more about that. As I said, we feel like there is a crisis brewing. This is not an economy that's working for everybody. I'm not an economic historian, but my sense is that periods like this do not lead to great economic expansion. They lead to the reverse and we need to turn the tide. And I think the Fed can play a role in that.

Bostic: Thanks, Kyle. Philip?

Tague: Thank you. I echo Kyle's comments. Your presence and leadership at a lot of local and regional meetings and conferences is notable as well as some of your colleagues here at the Federal Reserve. And I also agree that our industry benefits a lot from the data that the experts and professionals here provide. And we have important constituencies that we use the data with. One of course is our residents. We communicate a lot with our residents over cost of housing, over childcare availability, over other issues that are germane to them, and affect what their careers are like, and their propensity to continue to be a resident of ours. And I know we get value out of that and crafting the story, and the data is very dependent often on Federal Reserve data.

The other important constituents that we have are capital sources and capital is provided to us by large institutions, pension plans, some foreign sources, and sovereign wealth funds., We create story lines for them as well, often with Fed data, with the hope of reducing the cost of money. And that is dependent very much on what the relative health of housing is in the US. And so, those two constituencies, we extensively use Fed data for.

Bostic: Thank you for that. And J. D., we have 1 minute.

Espana Jr.: Well, this is pretty simple. Back during the recession, there was an annual meeting here and a lot of government officials like yourself, Mr. Bernanke, the FDIC president, and all of those folks were here, and they would have an annual meeting. Some of us were invited, and we understood President Obama's direction for banking and that was very helpful. And then, during the same period of time, COVID-19 stopped it, but we had a quarterly builder banking economic meeting here at the Fed. The economist that was going to present to you, Dr. Bostic, your position would come in, do their report, and then we would have feedback to him before he presented it. And I thought that was very helpful. So I thought the communication during that period, I understand that what happened during COVID-19 stopped all of that. But I thought that kind of communication was really, really good for the business community here in Atlanta, because we were learning firsthand what y'all were looking at.

Bostic: Well, thank you very much and thank everyone for your participation. It's a really interesting discussion. Lots of food for thought, and I thought there'd be some insights and I was right. So that's very good. I'm grateful for that. And thanks to everyone who has been joining us via live stream as well. I want to say that our connection with the public is something that is very important for us. We have lots of materials that are available for you to use in your businesses or in just your daily lives. So I'd encourage you to go to our website at atlantafed.org and snoop around. We have things on financial literacy, a whole host of those sorts of things. We have a lot of economic tools as well.

We have an opportunity for you to subscribe to our newsletter. I just released a quarterly president's message that you would get an email about, and you can also subscribe to that also on atlantafed.org. And we will take on board all the discussions and recommendations about how we can engage more fully and more transparently. Because the goal of this is really for you to understand what we're doing so that you can make the best plans for your businesses and for your families to position yourselves to live your dreams and really do whatever it is you want to do.

And ultimately, our goal of phrase we use here at this Bank all the time is we're trying to move us closer to an economy that does work for everyone. This is a theme that we've heard across this panel, and it really dovetails perfectly with our mindset as we go about what we do on a daily basis. So on behalf of Governor Cook, I want to thank all of you for being here for our Fed Listens event. Thank you all for watching. I hope it's given you things to think about as well and have a super day.