Austan Goolsbee

Someday you guys are going to get in and see this.

I heard it's a huge table.

It's a gigantic table.

It's awesome.

If you're an econ nerd, it's just as cool as you would want it to be.

Now, that said—

There are 1,700, 1,800 employees at the Chicago Fed.

Most of them are working on payments, and we're kind of a bank to the banks.

The Fed systems are running $6 trillion of payments per day on FedWire and ACH and FedNow.

All the cash in the economy is printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, but is distributed by our banks.

So at...

your ATMs are filled with cash that they're saying, hey, take it out of my master account.

I'm going to send a Brinks truck over there.

And we've got billions of dollars in our faults and we're running it through the machines and pulling the counterfeit.

And it's a whole operation.

We're running bank supervision, so we have thousands of people who are in the banks checking to make sure that they have the capital they say they have.

They're not doing something nefarious with the money.

And we have major regional community development, community engagement components where we're out talking to business people, civic leaders all through the region.

Because they can tell us things quicker than you can see them in the data.

Because as you know, the data come in with a lag.