 Good evening and welcome. I'm Pat Parazzini, Director of Alumni Engagement, Regional Chapter Development for Fairfield University, and I am so thrilled to be able to bring this presentation to you via Zoom. In my position here at Fairfield, I have the pleasure of working with alumni from across the country, coordinating with chapter leaders, and volunteers to host events that keep alumni connected to and engaged with the university. We have nine regional chapters from Boston to Washington DC alphabetically and from Boston to San Francisco geographically. So I hope to meet you all in person and event in your local area in the very near future. Before I introduce our esteemed guest presenter, I would like to go over the format of the lecture this evening. It is a PowerPoint slide presentation, and our guests will be speaking to those slides. Many of you send in questions during the registration process. Our guest already has those, and there will be a time at the end for him to answer. If questions arise about a point in the presentation, please type them via the chat function on the Zoom, and our guest will answer those as well. And please make sure your video and audio capabilities are turned off unless he calls on you. So be prepared. Today, I have the great honor and pleasure of introducing our esteemed presenter, with whom I partnered previously. Dr. Phillip J. Lane, parent 2010. Dr. Lane is an associate professor of economics and a mentor in the Apeation Residential College at Fairfield University. He's been the advisor to Fairfield University's Federal Reserve College Challenge Team for more than 15 years. He was awarded one of two 2019 magis medals by the National Jesuit Honor Society Alpha Sigma Nu. This highly competitive honor, rarely awarded to a faculty member, is presented annually to two Alpha Sigma Nu members who exemplify the Honor Society's core values of scholarship, loyalty, and service in their work to better the world. Dr. Lane has also received other awards and honors, including Teacher of the Year from Alpha Sigma Nu, Advisor of the Year from FUSA, and the Father Thomas McGrath SJ Faculty Award from the National School of Banking. And he is the proud grandfather of future stags, Shannon, Colin, Molly, and Max. I give you all Dr. Phillip J. Lane. Thank you, Pat. You're very kind. I'm going to do what I do usually do, which is drive you all crazy. And I'm going to try to get this technology to work, which is, as some of you know, not what I'm good at. So what I'd like you to think about is me trying to do this in the framework that you are used to. And that is, for those of you who know me, I am the guy who would show up day one with chalk and would go from there and we would be off and running. So this is the official university logo, not the seal, which I assume anyone who's graduated can explain all of the pots. And if they can't, Ms. Kelleher, there'll be time for you to learn about it later. All right, so I'm going to try to walk you through a couple things. And if I call on you, I don't mean to embarrass you. Those of you who have had me in class know this is how I roll. I would be bored if I talked to myself that long. So, sort of tolerate me. So Tom V, you know I'm coming after. I love the t-shirt, by the way, brother. All right, so I'm going to talk a little bit about, because some of you know I had, I taught money in banking. And as some of you know, I had to wait for Joan Walters to retire before I could teach money in banking at Fairfield. And I had the misfortune of trying to follow a superstar. But when we got to the Great Recession, which I'll talk a little too much about probably, this was money in banking on what I'm going to politely describe as creativity. We learned a whole bunch of new things and a whole bunch of new tools and vocabulary that we had to learn on the fly. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the Great Recession since I thought up till like February, that was the thing we would talk about for the next 50 years. And then along we had this minor adjustment in starting match or end of February that has really been just, it's off the charts. And I've got some very depressing numbers and data. I apologize if it's going to be depressing but it's reality. And I want to look at the difference between the Great Recession and the pandemic. How the policymakers responded differently. And Holy McGillicuddy trying to teach in this has been just a new experience. So if I talk about the Great Recession, now again, as you may or may not know yesterday, the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge announced without two periods of GDP growth that we were in a recession. And for anybody in the real world, it's like no kidding, Sherlock, we're in a recession. But in the Great Recession, the peak of the previous period was in December of 07 and the trough, the bottom of the downturn was in 09. Now that's for the country as a whole. For the people in Connecticut and certain parts of the Northeast, their trough came a lot later. And a matter of fact, it was up till a year ago before Connecticut got all the jobs back. It lost during the Great Recession. Connecticut was one of the last ones in and the last one out. Right now for the people in Connecticut, you should know you have one of the lowest unemployment rates of the six New England states right now. It's not pretty, it's at 7.9, but it's much better than everybody else in the Great New York area. Now as some of you have heard me do this dog and pony show before, the players in the Great Recession, it all started, it starts with housing. Now there's this alphabet soup that I will be referring to and I apologize for using too much terminology, but as some of you know, it goes with the occupation. Now I'll do this in a way that will probably definitely show my age, but also show the institutions I remember. When I went to get my first mortgage, which is in a previous century, I went to the Essex Broadway Savings Bank in Lawrence, Massachusetts. So they originated, that's what the O stands for. So they originated the mortgage, they also serviced it. Those were the ones who collected, they collected the check on my mortgage and they were the ones that actually held the mortgage. Somewhere in the late 70s and early 80s that market got divided with some people originated, some people serviced, some people portfolioed. So it changed the risk profile rather dramatically in the mortgage market as well as having new products, everything from adjustable rate mortgages, the interest only, and something we've learned that was not very interesting after the fact. They were called ninja loans, no income, no job, no assets, who cares, you're breathing, give the person a mortgage. And we had a lot of financial engineering and I don't mean to insult engineers, but anytime I see these two words together as an economist, I have a certain amount of what I was told by Common Francis Donor Room called Ajida, and if you don't know what that means, that's stomach distress. They're very creative and they do some interesting things, but God help us if it doesn't work out well. Our financial sector really was the, I'm going to call it the culprit, but in the great recession, it's the classic tradition, there are not a lot of saints. We got a lot of people who didn't do good things. We had our depository institutions, and I'll take an example from a bank that has been very good, the Fairfield students, Newtown Savings Bank. They didn't do any of the Milwaukee, okay, they didn't do any of the silly stuff, but at the time that they were writing mortgages in the Greater Bridgeport area, there were 1700 people licensed with the state of Connecticut to originate a mortgage, and a lot of those were non-depositories. I actually did some work with Kurt Schlittin and Jay Bus, names from the past, on some of the secondary market stuff that was done in the Greater Bridgeport area. So we got to learn a lot about who some of the non-traditional players were. Our agencies, so that's Fannie and Freddie for those of you who remember those lovely agencies, the GST's government sponsored enterprises. There's a whole lot of politics I'm going to stay out of those. They did, they took on too much mortgage debt in an environment that was kind of crazy. The raiding agencies, Fannie, I mean Standard and Poor's and Moody's, I'm all I'm going to say is they are held harmless and they did some funky stuff, and people played their models. So it's, the securitization didn't help. And as you know, and I learned a long time ago from Ed Dieck that of course, Phil, housing prices never fall. And then he just hit me on the side of the head and said, don't be silly idiot. Housing prices do fall, they fall basically once a decade. We had a huge bubble and then any of you who lived through this know that I love the classic answer, Phil, you can sell your house today and make money on it, but where the heck am I going to live? I'm going to have to buy a house that costs more. We had the subprime challenge and about what near the end of the chaos, about one seventh of the mortgage is being underwritten with subprime. I'm going to argue with some data that maybe we had interest rates too low, too long. We'll find out how that comes out the other side of this one. For those of you who remember the financial markets actually stop, I was at Fairfield that summer when the commercial paper market literally froze. Even at the time, GE, IBM, GE, General Motors, nobody could actually even borrow a commercial paper market. The market literally froze. And the money market mutual funds were actually insolvent technically. You and I can argue to LeKausen home about how well the Fed did and how well Ben did. At worst, I would give them a B plus. They were making it up as they go along. And as I said in class a long time ago, if I was Ben Bernanke, I would have had two choices. One was a lot of Tums and Rollades or a lot of Irish whiskey because you needed something to get through what he was going through. There was no script. He sort of made it up as he went along. ZBL stands for Zero Bounded Limit. That's who we are today. We have quantitative easing one, two, and three. We had a fiscal stimulus, which 2020 hindsight probably wasn't enough out of the box, but it is what it is. So teaching in this environment started with reading the Wall Street Journal. And unfortunately, we didn't have all the resources that exist today on the internet, but we had a lot that were used. So we're looking at the Federal Reserve websites, all 12 of them, plus the board every day. And then learning about these things that God help us. I never heard of before. I didn't know what a CDS was, so I had a clue what a CDO was. We will learn it faster than you guys are trying to stay at one chapter ahead. All right, Charlie, don't go downstairs yet. Okay. So here's your toolbox. You're trying to teach this. And you've got aggregate demand. You've got consumption, durable goods, went in the toilet. Non-durables actually declined. And for the first time ever, services fell. For those of you who remember, there were restaurants in New York that in 2005, or in Boston or Chicago, they'll pick a place that you couldn't get in. They were closed by the end of this chaos. Non-residential fixed investment, ground to a halt. It actually went negative. Housing market, well, hello, it sort of fell on its face. Federal, state and local governments were all in chaos. City of Bridgeport had more than 10% of the property that was in foreclosure. The tax revenues were falling through the floor. What gets lost in a lot of this conversation is obviously the demand curve fell like a rock. But what gets forgotten, and I would assume, Joe, you remember this, that oil prices rose. So we got stagflation. So the supply curve's going in the wrong direction. The demand curve's going in the wrong direction. It's basically the perfect storm. So relative to today, it's bad, but this is another chaos. Now, when in doubt, you know, I'm an economist and Joe will verify in the whole rest of this group, you got to have pictures. Okay. So what you've got here is the unemployment rate. What I'd like you to look at is the, oh, the gray bars are recessions according to the NBER. So what you've got there, hi Anissa, how are you? And I'm picking up names. I can't see everybody. I apologize if I don't recognize you, but I only get four names that are shot on my screen. You'll notice it sort of cranked up in 2008, and then peaked it up just a little over 10. But if you look at today, holy McGillicuddy, it kind of set a new bounce. Now, the most recent number argues we've come down to 13.3. I hope it's right. There's some questions about that going forward. GDP, the number you see the decline there in the last recession was a little over two. The numbers I'll show later are kind of crazy. The Fed funds rate. Now, this is the 2002 through 2004 low interest rate environment, went up, set off all those adjustable rate mortgages, beautiful way, and we stay at the zero bounded limit of really till the almost till 16. And then we start up and quite frankly, we're back down. Somebody wants to chat. Oh, you're great. Thank you, Anissa. All right, somebody's talking to me being very polite. All right, so let's see if I can make this work again. Oh, come on, machine talk to me. There we go. Fed funds rate. Whoa. I didn't want to do that, PJ. You go down. Okay. Now, one of the things that's kind of interesting when you look at where we were and where we are today is the housing price bubble, which we thought was a bubble. This is the case Schiller index. There's a bunch of different ways to do it. I think that this is a reasonable story. It's indexed to 2000. And you can see that it rose basically unabated till 2006 and then fell like a rock. It has not gone down yet. And part of it is that we got a supply problem. Anybody in the business will tell you, there's an inventory problem in a lot of parts of the country because production has not been able to keep peace. But that's sort of where we are. So we have the standard drill fill and build of unemployment rising and output declining in this thing. This is the other piece that during the Great Recession, that oil price spiked up almost to $138 a barrel. In this chaos, it's actually gone down. And that's been good news. That's actually helped reduce some of the chaos. It hasn't been good for certain parts of the country, but I haven't been driving. So for those of you who know me, I actually, I currently live in Massachusetts. And so I would come down to Fairfield at least twice a week. My poor little car doesn't know what it's like not to do 200 plus miles a week. And I don't think my, well, it's been interesting. I don't have to worry about service, but I do have to worry about getting the snow tires off. I got to find them. All right, so here's the pandemic. So let's switch gears. And then I'll go back and have some chaos with you. If I look where I went when we ended last year, GDP was okay. Wasn't getting to get excited about two one consumption was kicking along inflation that PC is the inflation, right? CPI looks pretty nice. Unemployment is three five. We were happy is all get out. Housing starts one full and no excitement. The Fed started to move interest rates a little bit. 10 year treasury was still kind of low by historical standards. Well, by the time we finished the first quarter, which would be the end of March, GDP was already down by almost 5%. Consumption had fallen by 8%. Inflation is really not an issue unless you will buy in toilet paper or hand sanitizer. Unemployment hadn't really kicked up yet. Housing starts was still okay. But the Fed had got ahead of the curve because remember, this is the end of the quarter. The current forecast and I'm basically big borrowing stealing this from a bunch of places, the Congressional Budget Office, Wells Fargo, I'm not advertising for them, but they give out their forecast for free. And they actually do a pretty well, but the former guy used to do it. I went to graduate school, so that's why I always watched it. But you got, you got the feds going to come out with a forecast hopefully this week, Joe's Wednesday, right? That they should come out with an update. You got a whole bunch of places, the CBO, usually the Council of Economic Advisers should be coming up at a midterm estimate, but they're not. CBO is available. There's a lot of other places to look, but that's sort of what we've got. Consumption has dropped. And here's sort of put it in context. Over 20 million people lost their jobs. The biggest sectors, and I've got some graphs that I stole from the Congressional Budget Office, leisure and hospitality. I mean, the hotel business has been completely decimated. I mean, the people who are doing Airbnb's or people who are running conventions or travel of any kind, not happening. I don't know where you guys have gone in terms of retail stores since, you know, March 1, other than going to Market Basket. And that's about it. I mean, Market Basket and I've been to Home Depot, but I haven't been in a regular store. On the other hand, some would argue you haven't needed to. I had the three shirts that got me through the end of the semester. I have the one golf shirt I have, because everything else is either in my house or in storage. Education obviously has got whacked and there's some issues going on now in Massachusetts and other parts of the country now. Health care services was always interesting when I saw this and I looked at the numbers, I went, what do you mean the hospitals were wall to wall? Yeah, but they weren't doing everything else. They weren't doing the normal elective surgeries. They weren't doing the normal stuff that they would be doing to generate other sources of revenue. Consumption fell rather dramatically. I never thought I would hear people who I, or my age, and I'm 67, who would say they would actually thinking about buying a car or a truck online. I couldn't get these people to order something online. They thought Amazon was a river somewhere, but they're actually, you know, were looking at cars online. So here's the sort of, I think one of the better slides I've been able to beg borrow and steal. I did give a credits as Congressional Budget Office, but you'll notice it's the number of jobs by sector. What I find more depressing is the percentage of jobs in that sector that was lost. So while the leisure and hospitality lost over eight million jobs, they lost over 50% of the jobs in that sector and health care's pretty up there. Other services are pretty big. I mean, federal government utilities, not a big deal, mining and manufacturing just some degree, but the big numbers in terms of the jobs are in the obviously the top three, top four rather, but the percentages vary by sector. So it's kind of an interesting chaos. This, by the way, Pat's going to send you all these slides. So, or you have access to them because I cruelly, to try to write down all of the stuff that's in these laws that have been passed by Congress. First of all, as some of you know, I'm not a lawyer. I am also not a good grammar person to say the least. That's why everything that I write is done five times. But these are the big bills. I mean, you all know them. They provided support for state and local governments. They provided funding for individuals. We also have the CARES Act. And so what's the bottom line? Given what the federal government spent in April 2020, they doubled what they relative spending to a year ago. It's the lodge, the lodge of it, you know, some people got refunds or tax credits. Some spending went on Medicaid. We have relief funds, we have unemployment compensation. That's a question I'm going to address later. I've got this, I can send you, I actually there's a link to the CBO if you want it, about their analysis of the extra $600. But this is sort of what's going on. Right now, the number is about $2.2 trillion will be added in fiscal year 2020. And that ends October one. And then about half a trillion, a little over half a trillion next year. So those are significant impacts. The Peter Peterson Institute has this nice picture way to do it. So for those of you who are like me and for visual learners, he is there sort of take on where the spending is done. So, you know, the support for small business, financial aid, the lodge corporations, tax incentives, health care spending, payments to taxpayers, and it sort of breaks it down by player. So that's a different way to look at the chaos. Now in the old days, and again, I'm dating myself. So, Joe, this is when you took economics at Fairfield, and I'm assuming that was just a couple of years ago, that we really only talked about the first three that was open market operations, discount rate reserve. During the Great Recession, we brought in interest on excess reserves. Recently, in the last four years, overnight repos have become particularly important because of the challenge of the floor in terms of Fed funds rate. We did some term deposit facilities for the Fed. The commercial paper funding was done during the Great Recession. It's back. Primarily dealers, those are the dealers that the Fed reserve trades with every day. That has been brought back. The money market mutual fund is back. The primary market, so that's really looking at the bond market. The secondary market is looking at other pieces included in there as ETFs, which is a whole nother pet cattle of fish. Paycheck Protection liquidity facility. The facility from municipalities, the Main Street program, which is for medium, small-sized businesses, going to be run out of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Eric Rosengreen did a piece on that a week ago. The central bank swaps, which is us swapping money with other banks. This is kind of crazy. Let me put it in context. Now, God knows if this will work, but you know how this goes when somebody try, oh, come on, where are you? Okay, boom. All right. All right. This is where we talk, right here. The Federal Reserve. So if I look at the numbers, they have added top-line Federal Reserve credit. They have added $3.3 trillion to their balance sheet since a year ago. Okay. And it tells you, this is what's called H4, 4.1 at the Federal Reserve's website. The link is in the PowerPoints. This tells you how much they've added to the pile, right? They've added treasuries. They've added over $2 trillion of treasuries directly to their balance sheet. Okay? So they've clearly added in that liquidity. And then you have the facilities down below of what they've actually spent. Now, again, this is all in millions of dollars. So that's why it's all taken out. Now, for those of you who remember before the Great Recession, this balance sheet, which is now has total, technically total assets of $7 trillion, $7.2 trillion, was under a trillion dollars. During the Great Recession, it went up to about four, two, four, three, and it was starting to go back down, but we have now gone back to that bit of chaos. I'm going to stop sharing. I got to see if I can get back to where I was. God knows if it'll work. You don't want to work. I don't want that. Okay. So here we go. All right. Now, let's we're headed into the home stretch. This is the outlook. The CBO does a semiannual outlook on the economy. And I think they're close to Switzerland as far as neutrality goes, given its Washington. Okay, there's got to put that in context. So there's the CBO's outlook, and there's the blue chip consensus. So the blue chip takes together about 75 plus forecasts and they come up with an average and here it is. So they've got a terrible second quarter, nothing that any of you in the real world don't know. They've got an unbelievable third quarter, at least CBO does. Blue chip's a little less optimistic. Still got a strong fourth quarter. By historical standards, remember, the old days, the number was three. Anything above three, we were dancing unless we had that other guy down there inflation causing a problem. We're going to have a little deflation though. I'm not sure you and I are going to see enough of it at the supermarket, but we'll see it in other things. And we'll see a little bit of deflation, but it's a one quarter phenomena. And then we return back to relatively modest inflation. Here's where the sort of dichotomy is, and it's really because the most recent unemployment number came up after this number. They had the unemployment rate at about 15% for the second quarter average and the CBO doesn't have it responding very quickly. Blue chip guy's got to come back faster. I think the blue chip folks may or may not be better at this one. And then fundamentally interest rates aren't doing a whole heck of a lot for a long period of time. Now, I basically went out and big barred and stole all of this data. And here's my best estimate, guess whatever you want to call it. And I would tell you right now, these numbers are wrong. Any point estimate that I would ever give you, you know it's wrong. But this is my best guess at what I've read from a bunch of people. I'm going to use a very depressing term. It's a rather sanguine outlook. And for those of you don't know what that means, it means I have no damn idea. So, you know, that's sort of where we are. I don't see the Fed funds rate change until next year, until the end of the year. So, the mogus rate isn't going to be doing a whole heck of a lot. The unemployment rate is going to return back to something that is six and a half in the old days was a wonderful number. Don't see any inflation. See consumer coming back with vengeance. I'm hoping we're right that we get a really nice, okay, PETA. You're not seeing my PowerPoint anymore, Pat. Thanks for letting me know. Yeah, that's what I've got a few messages. Can you see it now, boss? Pat, is it there? I can. Okay, you know, you're dealing with the technologically challenged here. That's all I have to say about that. And by the way, Peter, yeah, we can have deflation for one quarter because if you think about what happened to gas prices and all of that other stuff that you and I haven't been buying, and I'd suggest, you know, in a retail retail sector now, first of all, once if you can get into a retail store, that's a separate issue. But second, they still have the stuff left over in spring. I was at a place in Ames remastered this week, actually, to buy furniture for our rebuilt house. It's the first time we've actually been in a store. They haven't been able to unload their docks for two months. So there's a little bit of inventory accumulation that's going on. And so there's some discounts there. I do think, Peter, it's going to be short term. And no, I don't play racquetball anymore, by the way, Peter. That was a question I got before. And he's a good man to think that I would actually be still doing that. God bless him. All right, I love this. Come on, technology. Talk to me. All right. I got my screen frozen again. It's beautiful. Come on, do your thing. No, you don't want to talk to me. So let me go talk to myself. All right, I'm just going to blow through these hopefully at mark four so I can get back to where I want to be. All right, here's what I'd like to just put up there for you right now. I need you to think about me coming back to teach money in banking after spring break. By the way, all of my stuff is in Fairfield. Okay. I'm in Salisbury, Massachusetts at the time. I don't have a computer. I don't have a laptop, but I have a computer, but it's an old, it's a dinosaur. It's a, it's a desktop that's designed at current numbers. So I have no, I have no screen. I mean, I have no camera and I'm a locky. So I run to see Brooke, uh, staples and get a laptop that I'm talking to you on now. I just soon walk into a classroom with a, with a box of chalk and a blackboard and talk to people. And now I've got to do zoom PowerPoint in the web. And then, and I got to still try to ask people like Joe questions because otherwise I'm going to lose my mind. I just have to say, I have to say thank God for the students. The students were infinitely patient. They had, they, they did the best they could to try to hang with me. So in the middle of this, I'm trying to explain what the Havel has happened. Now I'm doing this with the guys and gals who are coming back from Florence to taking money and banking. And I'm doing this with the fresh people. And the fresh people, by the way, left all of their stuff at Fairfield. So they didn't bring a single book. Nobody had a book. Nobody had a notebook. They went to spring break. Okay. So we ship them out to slide some of the author God knows if I violated any copyrights. I really didn't care. We found, thank God, some of my colleagues found us books that you can use online for free. And the Federal Reserve is obviously really helpful with data. So I'm going to try to talk to them about this, the worst downturn since the post World War II era. Well, we're worried about where toilet papers. I just didn't get that one. Maybe you have some guys have heard some bad jokes about it, but we'll leave that alone. Meanwhile, I got a grandson's going to be born and I'm not even going to be able to go into the hospital to see him. I got to look at him through a window. Well, he's up on the second floor with his mom and dad, and I'm down with the queen on the outside the pocket. That's just sort of what went on. The demand curve felt like a rock. I mean, we shut down the economy. We shut down, technically shut down a half of the economy. No wonder, you know, everything slowed down. How many, and my difficulty, and I'll say this because this is in a house that I know, did it affect me? Made my life uncomfortable, but am I worse off because of it? In the long run, no, it won't matter in five years for me. It won't matter for most of my family, but some parts of my family it does. I got outlaws in the construction business. I got outlaws in retail sales. They got whacked big time. I mean, I hope you've noticed that I have a haircut. Yeah, right. I haven't had a haircut since before spring break, and well, you know, you can go now in Massachusetts. I'm not in a hurry, but we'll leave that alone. Now, here's what I'd like you to think about, and this is Will Outland, and I'll take any and all questions. In the fall, I'm supposed to be meeting with 12 students that are juniors and seniors at Fairfield University in economics and other areas, and they're supposed to be prepared. Professor Shadmani, who's the new young kid on the block in macro, she's wicked smart, not like me. And so she and I are going to be because technically we're getting ready for her in a year or so to take over the Fed challenge because somebody's going to go live in Salisbury permanently. And so we have to get these guys and gals ready for a Fed challenge, and the Fed challenge is fundamentally a couple pieces. I have five people who will show up to do the work. That is five people present. The others are actually more valuable because they're the ones that make sure the slides are right. They're the ones that ask the questions. They're the ones that make sure the data's right. They have to do in 15 minutes where the U.S. economy is on the day they go into the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Should they go in? How it got there? Where this economy is going over the next two years? And of course, why? What are the possible challenges, both positive and negative, that could happen? Now, what are your policy options? So what are you going to make as the options for monetary policy going forward for the next year and a half to two years? And now you're going to make a recommendation. You're going to have to support it. Sound vaguely familiar, Tom and Joe? And they're done it, huh? Exactly. Now, would you like to try to do this in Zoom? Can't say I would be thrilled doing that in Zoom. How about trying to prepare them for this in Zoom? How behavioral are we going to get them ready in Zoom? So this is my conundrum. Oh, and when you're done making your dog and pony show, you take 15 minutes of Q&A from the research staff at the Fed of New York. And as some of you know, these questions can come from anywhere. It's supposed to be about what you presented or what's going on in the economy, but it's kind of a real challenge. This is probably the most difficult teaching assignment I have ever been given. And I know right now that I'm blessed with a whole bunch of really good people in my department, and as well as the students of half of them I know, the other half I've never met. So I don't know whether they can take me full on or whether I gotta soft sell them. I am hoping I am in person and that would make my life a whole lot easier. But I have to prepare them for the Fed having us do this virtual. And that's kind of a challenge. So my take on the economy, and then I'm going to stop because I know some of you might have a question. I think we're in for a relatively reasonable recovery. It's not going to be a V. It's going to be more like a U. But I do believe, based on all of Milwaukee I'm reading and I'm reading more stuff than I care about, that by next year at this time we will be okay. Will it be great? No, it's not going to be great. You think about how wonderful it was last December. That was a special economic time by his historical standards. It's going to take us a while to get back there. And if you remember how long it took us to get out of the last one, I don't think that's going to happen this time. But I do think it's going to be a slow, slow roll. I do have to defer to the epidemiologists and the other science people because I can talk about all those numbers and graphs and charts and all this Milwaukee. Don't ask me to talk about a virus. Please, way above my pay grade. And how do you know whether this, you're going to have a second wave or whether it's going to be small. That's way above my pay grade. I think we have a reasonable chance of a nice recovery. I am worried about the downside. But again, I'm an economist, so by definition I'm pessimistic. I hope that was at least entertaining. I tried not to harass too many people. Now, Pat, I assume somewhere over the rainbow you have some questions or whatever. I do. I'll try to answer them. All right. This one is from Joe Hanlon. It came on the chat. Oh, Mr. Hanlon, how are you on your bride? Are you still in Texas? Chicago at the moment. Oh, Chicago. Okay. So Joe's question is, where do you think housing prices go? I'm assuming down, but curious, curious how much and when, how is your crystal ball? Well, Joe, first of all, my crystal ball should actually have a hapoon in it right now. But we'll leave that alone. Joe, housing prices right now, again, I'm going to, Joe Maher, anybody else wants to jump in and help me out here. Right now, the housing prices is primarily being driven by inventory challenges. That's what's keeping it going. I mean, Boston is on drugs. I mean, in terms of housing prices. New York has at least finally settled down a little bit, but it's these pockets that are driving the national average. I do think, Joe, one of the issues is going to be, still an issue, the millennials. And I don't mean to knock them, but their debt coming out of undergraduate or graduate school is, will be the thing that will slow down the housing prices. And the other piece, Joe, and you're going to have, I would argue, it's the baby boomers and I'm one of them. If we're downsizing, where are we downsizing from in the sense of where's the housing price vector? If we're in the middle, then the millennials or the trader uppers got a shot, but if you're coming out of something that's, again, depends upon where I am in the country, what the numbers look like, that's really not going to wash. The high market hasn't been hurt yet this time, but the low market, they're not building, again, I'm old school, they're not building little capes and ranches anymore. I mean, they're building you know, McMansions. I do think, Joe, that regionally, there are bargains. One of the things that was in the journal today is the people are trying, are moving out of this south east primarily and moving into places, believe it or not, Cleveland, because that's a place they think they can go in and get stuff relatively inexpensively and do okay. I do think, I think it's the rate of change is going to slow, Joe, and it'll slow by the third quarter next year. But remember, you got these interest rates right now that anybody in his brother who can refinance, other than the fact that there's not enough people who do the paperwork has, and that I don't see rates going up, again, based on what the Fed is saying they're going to do, mortgage rates aren't going to jump any significantly till the middle of next year. Did that answer your question, Mr. Hanlon? Yes, sir. Oh, I'm not an officer, I went for a living, Joe. How's Christine? Doing great, sitting here with Caitlyn as well. Oh, God bless you, Caitlyn. I'm so sorry. I hope it's at least happy hour there. Yes, Pat. I have two more on the chat, so I'm going to actually let both of these gentlemen ask those questions. So first, Tom Bitlow has a question for you. Go ahead, Thomas. Dr. Lane, thank you for your time. Nice t-shirt you had on, too. I've had that since Fairfield. God help you. So, you talked about sort of the recovery being a little more U-shaped. Given the data that you showed from the St. Louis Fed there about the job losses in those specific sectors, you know, travel, leisure, it seems like those are very much demand driven and since, you know, I sort of see that after this pandemic it's lifted whenever that is, right? We don't really know, but those are sectors that I feel like could come back fairly quickly. So what do you see as more of the long-term ramifications in that regard? Okay, Joe. I mean, Thomas, a couple things that I didn't talk about that I think I'm not sure how to handle, but let me just put them out there. One is if you think about how work has changed, half my outlaws that are in the either financial services or some other, you know, place where you're in an office, and I'll give you the easy story. One of them works for Bank of New York Mellon, and her office had transitioned from a traditional office with walls to a total open concept office space. And the previous CEO wanted everybody in the office five days a week. Now he has since left and become the CEO at Wells Fargo and works remotely, by the way, from New York, but you can't have that open concept in this world anymore. And how much office space are you going to need? That's going to be a whole question. I mean, I'm looking at the traditional trades, carpentry, plumbing. I think that's not an issue, but I think in retail space, we're going to have to be changing at least for a year or two, how we move things around, how we space things out. How many people are we going to need? I mean, I can't, I don't know, Tom, how quickly, and I'm only speaking for myself, how quickly people are going to be comfortable in restaurants. And I'm not saying outside. Outside's a whole different category of fish. But I don't know how quickly I am willing to go back to the Gaelic American Club inside with the old world, or to go back to any restaurant you want to pick on in Fairfield, whether it's Archie Moore's or wherever, where we're sitting cheek to gel. That's going to be a while. I think a lot of the jobs in the leisure service, retail, health, those are going to come back. I think it's in some of the other sectors that is going to be the more and more people are going to be working from home. So we're not going to use much office space. That's going to change this perspective on downtown. We've already moved at least five years ago minimum, we already started to move significantly to online buying. And I think that's accelerated. I mean, I have outlaws who are older than I am, who are now buying stuff online. They couldn't turn a computer on before this chaos. So there's a lot of changes that I do think it's going to be a reasonable recovery. Again, I'm half of this is hoping half of this is praying that we don't have a serious second wave like we did in the Spanish flu. And that we come back, we come out of the, we come out okay. I'm praying for okay. I hope that answered your question, Thomas. Yeah. Thank you, Dr. You're welcome, my friend. Anyone else? Yeah, Joe Morrow has a question. It's not that long a gated thing in the chat, Joe, isn't it? He's going to cut it down. That was an epistle. Well, I had it pre written. But it came from me probably. Well, I do want to draw upon your many years of teaching experience. Oh God, take the shovel up, Morrow. So one of the things that I know I'm struggling with in some of the classes that I'm teaching, and you alluded to this on a previous slide, and it has to do with kind of teaching monetary policy to undergraduates. So how do we effectively balance those traditional tools like open market operations, which really aren't being as heavily used anymore with these newer unconventional policies, interest on reserves, quantitative easing and everything they just came out with that's not in undergraduate textbooks? How do we kind of explain that? Two things, Joe, to put this in context. One is I'm the crazy person who actually would talk about that in an intro class, but I do it with a sort of a tongue in cheek. I look at the market for reserves, and I'd argue that the market for bank reserves, again, the supply is controlled by the Federal Reserve, but the upper limit is the discount rate. The lower limit usually is the interest on excess reserves. So the Federal Reserve target in a normal state of the world is bounded between those two. Now we do have the challenge of the leaky floor because of the non-participants or the other participants that that's why the Fed has been using reverse repos to try to soften that leaky floor. But I tend to argue that once you get to zero bounded limit, you sort of, okay, probably this is the bad example, but it's the example I use this time around. I said, okay, think about this as a basketball game. In a normal basketball game, you use all five players on offense and defense because you have to spread the other team's defense out and try to spread out their offense. I mean, that's what we do with normal monetary policy. So, you know, old school, so many passes and all that stuff, you know, you want to talk about Michael in the triangle, go right ahead. I don't care. But fundamentally, you're using all of those, you're using all of those players. When you go to OT and you've got a guy number 23 or 33, all right, you don't give the ball to Dennis Rodman 20 feet away from the basket. The ball is going to Michael. So, when you get to the zero bounded limit, you got to bring in the pros. You can't use the regular guys and gals. That's how I tried to explain it, Joe, that once you get there, you had to sort of come to, I use basketball because I know way too much history. Most of it's useless. But that's how I tried to explain it, that it's like, I mean, the other way that I spun it in one class, I talked about relief pitchers. In a previous generation, if you talked about some of the real old time pitchers, and I always use Bob Gibson as an example, for two reasons, one, the guy was an absolute hoss of an athlete. And so, he's a great hitter. But that guy had no problem. I mean, I would not want to be the manager going out here, out there, try to tell him to come out, be afraid it hit me. But he, you know, when we moved on and we realized we needed, we had specialists, that's how I spun it. I spun it as specialists. Not the greatest way to do it, Joe. But, you know, I fall back to sports analogies, probably not the best ones, but it's what I do. I hope that helped my friend. Yeah, no, definitely. And I appreciated the metaphors that I'll probably train, use at some point. You know, I can't do it straight, Joe. I got to have some fun with it. Otherwise, I'd lose my mind. Anyone else? Yes, we do. We have a few more. And I love those sports analogies as well, Phil. So we have William up and he has a question for you. Professor Vazquez. We're complaining about my coffee. That's why we need to fly every day, isn't it? We'll have coffee in September, my friend. And I'll have some new coffee for you. Send me your address. I'm going to send you some. I just got my stock for the summer. 2011's Street, Salisbury, Massachusetts. I have a new coffee for you. It's called Firehouse Coffee. Oh my God. Rest of the world, right? You know, I am the International Guiding Department. Yeah, I don't talk about that, William. This is U.S., all right? So some economists, Phil, have been proposing to you the research of the big central bank, right? So the European Bank, the Bank of England, and of course the Fed to help the rest of the world while developing countries because the World Bank and all the development banks don't have enough money for all the resources that are going to be needed to recover those economies, right? And given that more than 50% of the GDP comes from those economies, we cannot let them die, I guess, right? No. Okay, so how do you see the Fed playing a role in lending to those countries? Okay, so William, there's a couple of things that I'm not sure how far we'll go with this. But obviously they can do lines. They can do swap lines without even blinking. They can do it under section 13.3. They can also provide, again, there's some politics here, and I have to sort of put those on the side because that's not where, that's not how I play. But if Paul is the one who could, I shouldn't say Paul, the Federal Reserve has the ability to eat both directly and indirectly, providing resources to either the IMF, the World Bank, or directly through swaps to other central banks. The one that I'm concerned with from your perspective is Brazil, because they are definitely getting whacked by this now, and they're going into their winter, which is going to make it even worse. And since they basically are the engine of the principle, the largest economy in South America, which you know more about than I ever will, that's an issue. I'm not sure, and we just got new numbers from Southeast Asia in terms of India and that part of the world, so that's a whole other issue. Yeah, I do think the Fed is going to have to maybe either through the G10, or maybe through some sort of a basil consortium, they're going to have to do something. It could also be them buying debt. I'm not sure legally how they can buy the debt of another country, but they're going to have to come up with some creative stuff, because otherwise it's going to come back to bite us next year. Yeah, or in the long term, right? Yeah, oh yeah, no, no. It'll create political instability and a whole bunch of other things. Yeah. Thank you, sir. Oh, anytime, my friend. Oh, by the way, that's the gentleman who brings me the real coffee in Fairfield. Not the jet fuel that you said at the beginning. I was listening. Well, you did one time bring me the jet fuel, sir. You said you were a coffee lover. What can I do? Thank you, sir. You're a gentleman and a scholar. We have another question from the chat. Christian, you are up. Thanks for having me, Mr. Lane. And my question was just, if I don't mean to be an economist, I mean pessimist, but if we do have to shut down again, and other countries, other economies are able to stay open or go back to full economic upswing, what do you think the biggest impacts on our economy are? What do you think the best steps we could take to try to mitigate some of the ramifications of that? Okay, I'm going to answer that question as an economist, not as a scientist. That is a biological chemical, one of them guys. I somewhat argue. Take it the easy part. First part is if we have to shut down again, you have to always qualify that with one is how long and how much. If we have to do what we did on the first round, then you and I are going to be talking about a recovery at the end of 2021. We will be hurt that hard. If we have, I'm going to use the jargon that a good Jesuit educated scientist, Dr. Fauci would use, and that is if we can stay in this, even if we have to go back to phase two, we have some openings and ability to move, I think we'll be okay. Will it be a robust recovery? No. Now you made the argument that the rest of the world is somehow going to be doing okay. Right now we know that Latin and South America is beginning to get the brunt of it. Big numbers are popping out in other parts of the world. Sweden and a few other of the Scandinavian countries have caught up. Europe appears to be slowing. I will be politically incorrect and tell you that I don't believe a single number are coming out of China. And that's as an economist having seen a bank balance sheet brought to me by one of our alums when he was doing a senior honest thesis and the balance sheet didn't balance. That tells me something's wrong. I can't read any of that. I have enough trouble with English if you've already probably figured it out. I think that if somehow the rest of the world does absolutely spectacular and we go in the toilet, then it is what it is. I don't think that's a possibility. I don't think it's a possibility that the whole world does great and we do love. That's the condition I have trouble with. Could we have a second wave? From everything I've read about the Spanish influenza slash flu was it wasn't the first wave that was the problem that was the second. Now we have a whole different world right now. We have a whole different data sets. We have a whole lot more information. Some of it I don't need to know but we get too much of it. I am hoping that rationality in common sense will prevail and if we do have a pause and I'm going to use that politically incorrect word, that means that this first quarter I would argue that between this fourth and first quarter next year we wouldn't get the as solid a growth as we're expecting. My concern and this is just me being crazy. I'm worried about the flu season and that's really the issue. If it happens, that could be the challenge because if you put this virus together with a regular, I don't mean regular, but a traditional flu, this is raising some real issues. I think you're asking the question that if I had an answer to it that was complete, I probably wouldn't be sitting in my daughter's basement in Mary Mack, which is actually where I am. My house is under construction, which has been another interesting story. Pat, do we have any other questions? I have two more, Phil. First is how do the issues of racism affect minorities as they seek funding for their local businesses? Okay, two things and I'm going to take this one. One, we in December of last year, we were at the position of having the best job market for minorities in history. It was maybe not completely, but it's up there in the top four, as I would argue, maybe even higher. This downturn, pandemic recession, has hammered the minority community. The African American, the Latino in particular have been, they have well significantly higher unemployment rates and on one of the slides that's on, that I have a link for you, you can go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and you can see which demographic groups, which age groups, which employment groups have been hit the most. The problem, I think in again, minority businesses have like many small business, but not all have had trouble getting access to credit. As much as local banks, big banks have all tried to provide lending. They have had limited resources. They also have limited staff to do this. So I do believe that many of our minority communities and particularly minority business have borne a disproportionate burden of this. I would give you as an example, my hometown where I was born, which is Lawrence, Massachusetts. Lawrence not only has a significantly above average Corona impact, it also has a significantly major impact on minority businesses and employment in that city. And that's true for most cities that have had those challenges. It's, this has not been neutral to say the least. I hope that helps. And I have one more for you. How will COVID impact the future earnings of the next generation of college students? And who will enact ethics and morality in the modern day workplace? Okay, let me take the first pot first. In terms of their long-term perspectives, now I'd like you to back the bus up for a minute with me. So in March, when I came back from spring break, which means I went to a desk in my house and tried to talk to seniors in financial markets and institutions, several of whom we're still looking for jobs, that clearly changed the equation. I do think that several of those folks decided to go to graduate school. They are still going to be hiring. I think the financial service sector, which is what many of our guys and gals look at, have not, are going to recover slow. I do think one of the challenges we have had at Fairfield is that we have tended to gear our folks to work or to look at what I'll call the big bulge banks. And those are probably the ones that we have the most, we talked the most about our guys and gals who go there, but we probably should be talking about the ones who go to work at institutions like community banks and credit unions and other places, because they're the ones that are going to be growing. They're going to grow, they're the ones that will be hiring more quickly. I do think if you look out two years from now, I think next year is going to be funky, next hiring season, because I don't know what the interview game is going to be like in September. Who's actually going to physically come to campus? Who is going to be trying to do this stuff over Zoom or go to meetings? So whatever toolbox they're going to use. I do think our students are very prepared. I'm not worried about that. I do think that last semester was a learning experience for everybody. I think most of our guys and gals, they're highly resilient. They'll be fine. Will it matter in five years? The answer is I pray to God, no. But I think in terms of the long-run job market, what we saw the last three plus years was just unbelievable. Will we get back there? I'm hoping that you and I can have this conversation in 2022, and we're talking about an unemployment rate in the low fives, and that to me is what we probably should be consistent with long-run equilibrium. I think that's where that's sort of where we're going. I think that, but it's going to be, it's going to be tough because even the accounting guys and gals who are out for their, you know, basically, tryouts this summer. Many of them aren't going to the shop. They're doing it online. Well, how do you get to know a team? How do you get to know people? I mean, no offense. This is a very nice way to do things, but God help me. It's not the same as reaching across. I don't know if I'm going to be shaking anybody's hand anymore, but it's not the same as sitting down and having a cup of coffee across the table or something. It's just not the same. I hope that answered your question. Now I have to ask, there's a Spencer on the line. I need to know which Spencer it is. Is that Colpitz? It is. I have a lousy mic, but it is. Okay, I'm just checking. I didn't know which one it was. We've got a couple. That's me. All right. Good to hear your voice, my friend. Likewise, this is very informative. As you know, this is what I do. Any other questions, ladies and gentlemen? I think, Bill, I think that's it. Can you make sure these guys and gals get the slide should they want them? Absolutely. And I will say to them as well, this is being recorded, so I will pass that along as well. I have to thank you. Informative was the word I was going to use. This was informative, relevant, and it's always so great for me and such an honor to work with you, and I enjoy it so much. So thank you, Phil. I appreciate it so much. As we say in the trade, this is what we do. Yeah. Yeah. I just want to remind our participants, go to www.fairfield.edu backslash alumni events to learn about other online experiences throughout the university, and I want to thank everybody for joining today. I look forward to seeing all of you sometime soon, hopefully in person, but until then, please be well and stay safe and go stags. Thank you, Dr. Lane. Thank you. You're entirely welcome. Stay well, my friends. Thank you. See you later, guys. Have fun. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks. Not really. How do I get off? You get off? Well, you press the button. I got to find it too. Molly's on it now. Molly, take care. Bye, Lane. Stay well. Thank you. Bye, Mish. Bye, Joe. Thank you for making the time, my friend. Veronica, stay well. Take care, Dr. Lane. In the fall, if you need any help with the Zoom Fed Challenge, and we're online teaching, and you need to let a macro person shoot me an email anytime. You got it. I think this was been very good. It was a good thing. Thanks, Joe. I appreciate it. It's good to hear your voice. How's your queen? She's fantastic. You're a lucky man. You're telling me, when you're a marriage, happy wife, happy life. Thank you, Joe. Take care. Enjoy your grandchildren. Having a ball, my friend. Oh, that was great. I'm going to ask you to do me a favor, not now. But in the next week or so, if you could get the emails of as many people as you can who are on here tonight, so I can send them a thank you. Absolutely. You know, I'd like to just say thank you, because they made the time to listen to this chaos. God bless them. It's a nice bunch. Oh, it's always fun. Yeah. It's always fun. It was fun. A lot of my chapter leaders were on here. They're a great group. Good. Good, good, good, good. Always look. Oh, go ahead. Somebody's here. Somebody was saying something. It's always so fun for me to work with you. So thank you. I appreciate it so much. I appreciate the support. Well, let's just say there are some people at the university I don't even question whether I'm saying yes to. Well, thank you. Thank you. You made my day. Some of the others we tell to go pound sand. And they're usually in my division. Well, sir, go enjoy your grandchildren. I'm going to have a ball. All right. Keep me posted. Thank you, Pat. All right. You take care. Bye. Bye.