Marketplace All-in-One
"We're trying to control what we can control": A Fed president reflects
24 Feb 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What insights does Raphael Bostic share about his time at the Atlanta Fed?
Turns out central bankers aren't all about monetary policy.
I've actually been a model for a skateboard company.
The president of the Atlanta Fed on the program today, embarrassing stories and all. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. From the studios of Georgia Public Broadcasting, today I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Tuesday, the 24th day of February. Good as always. Have you along, everybody. All right, so to be fair to Rafael Bostic, the skateboarding modeling gig was when he was a kid.
But that is, in fact, how our interview started at an event this morning here in Atlanta. After nine years, Saturday is Bostic's last day on the job, running one of the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks and, on a rotating basis, voting on interest rate policy. So we started with him not getting to do that anymore. The first thing I want to ask you is,
Not that you're done done, but what was it like leaving your last FOMC meeting, knowing that you were on your way out?
Yeah, you don't know this. So the last FOMC meeting I took virtually, it was in January, and that was the time when they had the ice storm. And I had three flights canceled trying to get up there. And so I figured three strikes, you're out. And I was just, so I dialed in. So it was kind of surreal to have the last few statements be from a distance and not be able to see people in the room.
But, you know, it's funny when you notice the last time you're going to say things differently. you're going to make a different kind of statement. And what I really wanted people, my colleagues, to know is what I appreciated about what Atlanta allowed me to bring to the table and how we have a distinctive voice because of what we do and that more people needed to lean in on that and be that way.
And then I... I just said I'm going to be cheering for you as we move forward and know that from everything I've heard, Americans trust the Fed and believe in it and think it's a really important institution and need everyone to remember our mandates, remember our mission, and just be true to it always. So let's talk about right now.
This is, and you've said a version of this, as uncertain a time, as tough a time for monetary policy and central bankers as there has been in a very long while. First of all, why do you believe that? Why do you say that?
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Chapter 2: How does Bostic view the current state of monetary policy?
what unemployment rate that's reasonable should be, because the same number is sending a very different signal. And then there are some things that could be episodic, but they also could be structural. So you think about the tariffs. President Trump in his first term introduced tariffs. President Biden kept them. And now we've doubled down in Trump, too. Is it episodic?
Will we at some point return back? Or is this our new reality that all businesses are going to have to adapt or adjust to for the next 10, 15, 20 years?
Let me go sideways here for just a second. Since you mentioned the president and tariffs, I truly do not want to get political about this. How did, because you're almost gone, how does it make you feel when you're... Sorry. Not gone, gone. Are we clear on that one? He's still a young man, which we'll get to in a little while. How does it make you feel when your job is through...
data-informed decision-making, and public communications to try to control as best you can the fate of this economy. And really, kind of now the last year, it hasn't been in your control.
So I actually don't think it's ever 100% in our control. Yeah, no, granted, granted, right? What I would say is we're trying to control what we can control. And in order to do that, we need to understand how decision-makers... are operating in whatever environment that we have.
Look, at the beginning of 2025, most businesses that we were talking to said, we know there's going to be some tariffs that are going to be put onto the economy. Then April comes, and what everyone discovered was what they thought the level was going to be was maybe 20% of what it turned out to be.
And what's been interesting is that businesses and families as well have been quite creative to try to mute the impacts as much as they can. So it's meant that the influence on tariffs through the economy has been stretched out over a much longer period of time because... Everyone's trying to delay, postpone, parry, and they've been successful.
But that doesn't come without stress, right? Small businesses are stressed. Consumers are stressed. You know this. You go out and talk to as many people as I do.
Oh, I'm stressed, too. We're all stressed. So, yes. Okay. A couple things. So, one, uncertainty by itself makes people nervous. Second, big changes lead to real questions about viability of business models. So now businesses have to figure out, do I have a business model that's going to work? And small businesses don't have as much buffer to really be able to weather it.
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Chapter 3: What factors are causing uncertainty in the economy right now?
We will circle back. But first, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrials up 370 today, three-quarters of 1%, 49,174. The NASDAQ up 236. That is 1% finished at 22,863. S&P 552 points to the good, also about three-quarters of 1%, 68,90. The Home Depot outpaced expectations in its earnings report today despite macroeconomic challenges. Tariffs, housing market, immigration crackdown. Repeat after me.
Home Depot notched up 2% on the day. Bond prices, thanks for asking. They fell. Yield on the 10-year T-note up 4.03%. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. Part two now of Rafael Bostic, the soon-to-be former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. All right, to the nuts and bolts of this economy, and now you are allowed to use labor market or inflation.
You notice I haven't said either of those words.
I follow directions.
You mentioned unemployment once. Where do you stand? Where's the balance of risks? Inflation.
Thanks for coming on my TED Talk. So I would say it like this. One, the longer we're not a target, the higher the likelihood that people will stop expecting that we will ever get to target. And then they'll start making decisions as if inflation is not going to be 2%, but it's going to be 3%. And that will change the set of investments that make sense.
It'll change the amount of risk-taking that you have to take in the marketplace. It will put our economy in a, in a tougher situation, so I worry about that. And then the second thing is that we've been talking about getting inflation to 2% for a long time, and we said, well, do whatever it takes.
If it looks like we stopped doing whatever it takes, then people might start worrying about our credibility. Do they have the stick-to-itiveness that we need them to have to have that longer-run potential? And that's a problem. The inflation side has been a big concern for me for a long time, and so that's that. Now you go to the labor market, and there I think it's actually very complicated.
And it's complicated because I do think there are some structural changes happening that are making it difficult for me and anybody really to have a good sense of what the implications are for where the economy is moving forward. So I think about AI and technology. Businesses are less eager to hire.
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Chapter 4: How are technological advancements influencing labor markets?
And on quite the contrary, we're going to produce at a pretty robust level.
Somehow an hour was not enough. Thank you all for your time, ladies and gentlemen. Dr. Bostic, thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Not only was an hour not enough in the moment, the 17 minutes or whatever it was that we got into the program today weren't enough either. One more short-ish installment from Rafael Bostic coming up tomorrow.
There are definitely structural pieces of this economy that artificial intelligence is going to rearrange, as Dr. Bostic was just saying. There are also pieces of the artificial intelligence economy that just... Well, hear me out on this one. Meta and the chip maker AMD, Advanced Micro Devices, announced a deal today that could come in at more than $100 billion.
Meta is going to buy millions of AI chips from the NVIDIA competitor. And depending on how things work out, in exchange, Meta could get a 10% stake in AMD. And if that kind of deal sounds familiar, it might be because it is nearly identical to the one that OpenAI made with AMD last year.
Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino explains why the AI economy does seem stuck on this kind of, shall we say, investment structure.
Calling AMD a competitor to NVIDIA might be a bit of a stretch, says Tufts historian Chris Miller. The company commands less than 10 percent of the AI chip market.
That's meant that the ecosystem around NVIDIA, not just the chips themselves, but also the software that surrounds them is much, much more developed than at AMD.
So Miller says it makes sense for AMD to give up part of the company to attract a big money customer like Meta. And Meta gets more than equity in AMD, says analyst Gil Luria at DA Davidson. It also gets a diversified supply chain for the hardware that is the choke point in the AI boom.
They have been beholden to NVIDIA, especially over the last three years, and that means that NVIDIA has all the pricing power.
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