Mike McKee

Well, thank you very much.

And we'd like to welcome all our viewers and listeners around the world to Bloomberg Radio and Television.

And we'd like to welcome Austin Goolsbee to Bloomberg Radio and Television.

I want to start with the next meeting and the meetings beyond, because that's the general focus of the folks on trading desks.

Coming out of the last two years, the focus seemed to be on the unemployment rate, on the labor market and cutting rates to get ahead of a problem with the labor market.

But listening to you this morning, it sounds like you're more concerned about inflation, that inflation may have become the primary risk.

Well, you talk about that a little bit, and it's a question I asked Jay Powell once.

It seems like every time you put out a summary of economic projections, the economic outlook by the various members of the Open Market Committee, the 2% target gets hit two years from now.

The next one, it's two years from now.

Well, now you've got this whole new tariff uncertainty from the Supreme Court.

The president's going to impose, well, he started today, a 10% tariff universally.

Brings down the tariff rate some, but they say they're going to use other means to get the tariff rates back up to about where they were.

So now you'll have this dip, perhaps, in inflation, and then it could go back out again.

So you said you want to see inflation going down.

Does that get pushed out?

Does it become later in this year when you can even think about it?

Well, what are CEOs telling you they want to see before they would be willing to hire again?

Well, we've seen productivity rise a little bit in the last couple of months.

When you look at what the companies are telling you, are they saying maybe we don't need to hire as many people because we're getting this job done, we're keeping up with orders?

Well, productivity is going to be a big issue for the Fed coming up with a new chairman coming in, Kevin Warsh, who's pretty much wed to the idea that AI is going to create a lot of additional productivity, which will bring inflation down.