Federal Reserve Bank president/CEO attends Real Estate Center Roundtable

Bostic: “I often say maximum sustainable employment. It makes me think more holistically about how the economy is performing. ... When I travel, I see people for whom the economy is not working. I take a catalog of those things, and I talk to policymakers as much as I can to make sure they are aware of these barriers. The more the economy works for everyone, the easier our job gets. The economy will be bigger, stronger and more resilient. And, ultimately, that’s where we’re trying to get.”

Bostic: “I didn't have a recession in my outlook. My expectation was that the economy was going to slow gradually, which would mean that inflation would slow gradually. Those two would go hand in hand. My initial outlook a year ago was that it would take several years for us to get to our 2% target because that momentum would just continually be there, and it would take some time. In the last six months of 2023, we saw inflation drop very fast, while the economy was quite strong and more resilient than I expected. But we’re not out of the woods yet, and things are likely to be bumpy. The inflation readings for the last several months have borne that out. As long as the economy is strong, as long as GDP is high, as long as businesses are hiring and folks have jobs, I'm not in a hurry to get inflation down to 2%.”

Bostic: “In the eight, nine years after the great financial crisis, the U.S. economy went on an expanded growth period, one of the longer periods we've seen of positive growth. Economists did research, and they found that when the economy grows long, people who have been historically disconnected get more jobs, and they stay in those jobs. It was the length of the success there that was particularly important. To me, that says if we do our job well, it sets the foundation for the economy to work for everyone.”