Edward Bastian
Chief Executive Officer
Delta Airlines
I'm Ed Bastian, the CEO of Delta Air Lines. Delta is one of the world's largest airlines, headquartered here in Atlanta. We have about 40,000 employees in Georgia and the Southeast, in the area that the Federal Reserve covers. We provide the Atlanta Fed our perspective as to how we see the business world going, how our growth plans coincide with not just the business community, but certainly consumer demand and confidence as well.
We will share our ideas about investment—where we're making investment, the size of the investment, why we're doing that, the growth that we project for the business—and consumer confidence, how much demand we're seeing for our product. The Atlanta Fed will take that information and compare that to other reports they're getting from other companies in the region, and I think they'll come out with a view of the health of the local economy, which is helpful for us to hear how others are viewing the world that we all live in and operate in. Getting that two-way dialogue is important to us.
The Atlanta Fed has an important role to play. They are our voice at the table, all the way up through the Federal Reserve System. As the Fed has an incredibly important role to play in the economy in starting to set, whether it's interest rates or economic policy based on conditions. It's our connection to the ultimate decision-makers that sit together in Washington.