Red Bay hosts Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta CEO for multi-day visit

The Fed is here.

Local business and community leaders filled the Weatherford Centre Banquet Hall in Red Bay on Wednesday afternoon to hear from a special guest visiting the area. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta president and CEO Dr. Raphael Bostic, as part of a multi-day tour of Red Bay, was the special guest during a business luncheon hosted by the Atlanta Fed in partnership with the Franklin County Economic Development Authority; the nearly two-hour event gave business and economic leaders in the community an opportunity to speak to and hear from an important economic executive.

“It’s really an historic day for Red Bay, the way I see it, because you’ve got a policy-maker that’s setting the tone for the interest rate direction of this country, and he’s chosen to come to Red Bay and listen to people from Franklin, Itawamba and Tishomingo County,” Community Spirit Bank president and CEO Brad Bolton, who played a key role in organizing the event, told the Franklin Free Press. “He’s seeing what’s going on on the ground, and that’s what he’s always done. He listens to Main Street.

“It’s just an honor for our area because if you look at the cities that he’s visited—Jacksonville, Florida; Miami; Meridian; and then Red Bay—that just sums up the magnitude of him showing up here, and it also highlights the economic boom, the industries, that Red Bay and Franklin County have been blessed with,” Bolton added. “He wanted to come here and see firsthand what’s going on and what it’s all about.

“This is significant, so we’re so thankful that he chose to come here,” he said.

Bostic, president of the Atlanta Fed since 2017, and whose long resume also includes a stint as an economist for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1995 to 2001 and assistant secretary for policy development and research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from 2009 to 2012, said he has been intending to make this trip to northwest Alabama for a long time.

“It’s great to be in Franklin County and Red Bay. I’ve been talking about coming here for the better part of seven years,” Bostic said.

“I’m not from the South. I grew up in New Jersey, I was teaching in Los Angeles for 16 years, and then I got a job that the objective was, in large part, to represent the people of the southeastern United States of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee. I’ve felt that the only way that I could credibly do that was by going and seeing it,” he added. “In the time I’ve been in this role, pretty much from the very beginning, I’ve been trying to get to every corner of the Sixth District.”

In his role as the 15th president and CEO of the Atlanta Fed, Bostic is the top policy-maker for the Federal Reserve Bank’s Sixth District, which covers Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and parts of Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana. The banks that make up the 12 Federal Reserve Districts are mainly responsible for helping set the nation’s monetary policy, providing financial services, and, according to the Atlanta Fed’s website, sharing “research and expertise with the public through various channels including speeches, publications, community partnerships, and economic and financial education programs”—precisely what Bostic was in the area to do this week. In addition to the luncheon, Bostic has visited businesses in the area and hosted roundtable discussions with business and community leaders.

The nearly two-hour event began with a provided lunch and was followed by a 30-minute conversation with Bostic mediated by Dr. Timmy James, retired Dean of Academic Affairs at Northwest Shoals Community College. 

During the mediated conversation and the following 15-minute Q&A session, Bostic discussed a wide range of topics and issues like workforce development, broadband access and infrastructure, national and global economic forecasting, tariffs, the business economy, the “benefits cliff,” and even his thoughts on cryptocurrency.

On workforce development, the Harvard- and Stanford-educated economist said the community has been very clear about its desire for a top-tier workforce.

“I’ve already gotten an earful from employers about the desire to have a better trained, deeper, more effective workforce,” Bostic said. “For many types of jobs, that’s a common theme as I go around the country.”

Bostic noted the different ways that the Sixth District has addressed those concerns over the years, such as establishing a center for workforce and economic opportunity. 

Going to different communities and asking the simple question, what’s working and what’s not working?—that helps a lot, too, he said. This allows the Fed to either help solve issues itself or reach out to other businesses, organizations, and entities that can reach a solution.

“If you don’t unpack the challenge then it’s hard to identify the right solution, so we start by asking the questions and get that information and then use that information to try to work with groups,” Bostic said. “Sometimes the challenge that we hear is something we don’t have the in-house expertise to solve…but the Fed network is wide and it’s broad. In almost every case we know people who can be helpful, so a lot of our job is to facilitate.

“One of the things I love about the Fed—and you can see it in this room—when the Fed calls, people usually answer. When the Fed invites, people usually show up. And if that happens, now we have the ability to bring people together to create conversations that aren’t happening otherwise.”

Another topic Bostic touched on—a hot button issue that has been in the news a lot since the last presidential election—is tariffs. He said that while the tariffs themselves were not unexpected—then-presidential candidate Donald Trump talked about them frequently during the campaign—the “size and scope” of the tariffs were unexpected. 

Currently, many of Trump’s proposed tariffs are still in discussion, have yet to take effect, and/or have changed in rate multiple times depending on the country they’ve been leveled against. Bostic said the high tariffs—as opposed to “textbook model” tariffs—have the potential to cause uncertainty about economic forecasts and about the future for businesses and consumers.

“The tariff regime has been changing continuously. Today it’s not finished—we just got a 90-day extension for the China tariff environment. So, that’s a source of uncertainty; that’s going to make it difficult to settle on a post-change trajectory and know exactly what that looks like,” he said. “You can’t say today, I don’t think, I know with any degree of confidence that we know for sure what it’s going to be once tariffs are in place. Because they’re not in place now and we don’t know what they are.”

Bostic also added that if the tariffs are successfully implemented at the high levels being proposed, they could fundamentally change how business is conducted in this country.

“These tariffs are actually intended to try to do something,” he said. “The goal for these tariffs is actually to change supply chains, to change, like, who you source your goods from; which means that the post-tariff world is not the same as the pre-tariff world. You’re going to see fundamental structural changes if this is successful, and if that’s the case then there’s no reason you should expect to see that post-tariff trajectory to look like that pre-tariff trajectory—it’s actually a different economy.”

Given the current uncertainty around that issue, the Atlanta Fed CEO said he likes to take a wait-and-see approach to policy decisions.

“If (the tariff regime) works then you should expect the post-tariff world to be different. Now, I don’t know—different doesn’t mean I know for sure if you’re going to be at a higher inflation rate or a lower inflation rate. It could be a lot of things,” Bostic said. “Some of the worst moments for Fed policy has been when the Fed has done something and then changed their mind and went the other way and then changed their mind and went the other way and then changed their mind and went the other way… We did that in the ‘70s. Inflation didn’t go away for a long time. It stayed with us, and that volatility was actually troublesome for the public. My predisposition is to try not to do that, try not to bounce around…and try to wait ‘til we have a little more clarity about where things are going.”

Again, workforce development and tariffs are just two of the many issues Bostic discussed. The full video stream of Bostic’s talk in Red Bay, which is over 50 minutes long, can be accessed on the Atlanta Fed’s YouTube page for those interested in watching the full conversation.

Wrapping up the event, Bostic made sure to stress again his and his team’s goal in making tours to cities and towns in the Sixth District, including Red Bay: To communicate with and learn from businesses and the communities in which they operate so that the Atlanta Fed can perform its job better and more efficiently.

“Nothing we’re doing is intended to be a secret. We want everybody to know everything that we’re doing. We want full transparency,” Bostic said. “If you’re better informed then you’re going to make better decisions and our economy is going to be better off.

“Over the course of the visit here we’re going to talk to business leaders, we’re going to bankers, we’re going to talk to community leaders; we’re going to see some of the important businesses here just to understand how business happens and how people make their way,” he said. “Those sorts of lived experiences, they’re the ones that stick. I’ll remember many parts of this visit, and it’ll come to my mind as I think about what we should be doing for policy, so these things are super valuable for what I do.”

Dr. Raphael Bostic
15th President/CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta