 Well, thank you for joining us. And thanks to everyone who's here. I hope you're enjoying some lunch. And we'll also hear some provocative ideas here. What I wanted to ask you about first was a question that is relevant to your work in monetary policy, but that we don't hear discussed a lot in that vein, which is, should different age cohorts and different demographic groups have a different attitude toward these questions of interest rates and inflation? I think you've suggested that older people might benefit more disproportionately from a low inflation environment, whereas younger people maybe would be less concerned about that or even gain somewhat from an inflationary outlook. Yeah, sure, I can talk about that. So we did this paper in Tokyo at the Bank of Japan conference. And if you know anything about the Japanese economy, it has a big demographic factor in aging population. There's a lot of talk in Japan about that the demographics is part of what's driven the inflation rate to very low level. So in the paper, we tried to explore that idea a little bit more in sort of a political economic equilibrium. So usually when you do economics, you just say, well, market's clear and blah, blah, blah. We wanted to also get the interests of the various generations into what we were talking about. So that's basically where this is coming from. And there was, I thought, one thing, I guess one story is that you can think about situations where the older people would want, they're holding a lot of the assets, they want high real rates and that's associated with low inflation and the younger people aren't holding the assets and they want high wages and that's associated with higher inflation and so you get this generational conflict. And I just think one of the things that's interesting in thinking about Japan is that there was talk over the last 15 years amongst sort of a business generation, maybe in Japan, older generation, the deflation is not so bad. Maybe this is a good thing for Japan. There's kind of some of that talk in the market. So I thought this research kind of brought that to life a little bit. But more would have to be done, let's say, to say whether that's really the right theory or not. But I thought it was interesting anyway. No, of course, of course. It bears on research. But the basic idea here is that older people who've been working for a while have had time to sort of invest in the stock market, invest in the housing market whereas younger people don't really have that kind of interest in asset prices, right? And are sort of left to their laborers. They certainly don't in the first phase of their life. They are gonna care later when they're saving for retirement. They are gonna care. But during the first phase, they're not the asset holders. It's the older generation that are the asset holders in there. For older people, the labor income is declining as a share of their total income. So they're very concerned about what are bond prices and what are the stock market doing. Right. And that relates to another interesting talk you gave recently which was about inequality. And that's something that's very much been in the public conversation right now. You see a lot of stories, charts, graphs, showing the wealthy maybe getting wealthier. But your point, similar to this one, is that how much wealth you have is in part a function of sort of where you are in life, right? Yeah. Yeah, so I like life cycle models. And they have a long tradition in macroeconomics going back to Franco-Medigliani and many others. So the basic story is that I think you have to keep in mind when thinking about income and equality is there's a life cycle productivity profile. And let's just say we're all born with the same one. That isn't quite true, but let's just say we are. It's going to be low when you're in 15 to 20 years old, which means you're going to have very little ability to go to the market and sell your labor and get a lot of income out of that. When you get to 50 years old, your peak earning years, that's the best you're going to be able to do. And then when you're 80 years old, you're going to again have very little ability to go sell labor on the market and be able to get income. So what does this mean? We've always got 20-year-olds, 50-year-olds, and 80-year-olds, so you've got immediately out of this model, you've got income and equality because of this life cycle productivity profile. Some are going to be earning a lot. Those are the people that are in the middle. Some are young and old. They're not going to be earning very much. Now, the other thing about this model has other surprising implications, which are among them. Now you let people save for retirement and borrow in the early part of their life. Young people are going to be borrowing a lot. Older people are going to be saving a lot. The other people are going to be lending to the younger people. See, I keep that in mind. And then the amount of, let's say, asset-holding, net-asset-holding, all going to be concentrated in the top 50% of the age distribution. So the very simplest version of this model, you could have substantial income and equality. You'd have even more wealth inequality or net-asset inequality because half the population isn't holding any net-assets. They're borrowing. Younger people will have student loans. They're going to have a lot of debt, but especially household mortgages, about 10 trillion in the U.S., roughly. Student debt, 1 trillion in the U.S., so these are big numbers. And then, you know, even at the Fed, these are big numbers. And then the, so the last thing about this model, I just want to impress upon you, one other thing about, if the world worked perfectly in this kind of, and the markets cleared and everything, just as a benchmark to keep in your head, what would happen is the older people would lend to the younger people and then consumption, the amount everybody actually gets to eat, would be exactly equalized across the whole life cycle. So you'd have uneven income, even more uneven wealth, but you'd have completely flat consumption. Oh, that's pretty cool. So what would be happening is credit markets would be completely solving the income inequality problem and the wealth inequality problem in this model that I'm describing, in this baseline frictionless case. What's interesting about that is it ties credit markets and, you know, whatever you think is good or bad about the way credit markets work, intimately with income inequality and wealth inequality and the outcomes that we're looking for. Because what you're really looking for as an economist is consumption. How even is consumption across people? If I've temporarily got low income and Matt temporarily has high income, Matt should lend to me. I'll eat today and then I'll pay Matt back tomorrow. Matt'll eat tomorrow. This is the way the world should work according to theory. So anyway, I thought it was interesting to be able to relate credit market behavior to income inequality, which is not something I've seen in the public policy debate that much in this space. And would you see empirically that the level of consumption inequality is lower, right? Okay, the stylized facts for the US are wealth inequality really bad. You know, wealth genie is very, very high if you know genie coefficients. But anyway, the wealth inequality is bad. Income inequality not quite as bad as wealth inequality. And then you can look at consumption inequality and consumption inequality is lower than either income inequality or wealth inequality. The model I just sketched out for you in five sentences actually gets that ranking correct. That is what the lifecycle model predicts. It says you should observe high wealth inequality, medium income inequality, and relatively smooth consumption. Does the economy work that way? Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But as a way to think about part of what's going on, that's part of what's going on. And the point is, if you wanna think about policy, you wanna try to sort of dig in a little more deeply and understand how much of the inequality is stemming from these sort of lifecycle factors. Yes, because what you want is, you wanna, okay so there's a benign part of the income and wealth inequality in the US, which is do the life cycle stuff. And you've got older people, younger people, and to the extent that all that is going on, you wanna leave that alone and let that work as best it can. And then you wanna come in with policies, but those policies should be directed to the malignant part of the income and wealth inequality, the part that's not due to the life cycle. That's the part that you wanna think about fixing and you wanna think about what's causing that, and then you wanna come in with your policy. But you don't want your policy to screw up this other part that's a good part of that income and wealth distribution. So that's my only point on that. It's complicated. It's what it comes down to. Speaking of things that are complicated, the state of the labor market is something that is very sort of hotly contested in politics in a partisan way sometimes. One thing I see every month, if we do a story about the unemployment rate, is people come back and they say, well, if we still had as many people participating in the labor force as there were 10 years ago, the unemployment rate would be, I don't know what, but some much higher number. Because we've seen fewer and fewer people even sort of looking for a job. And there's a lot of disagreement about sort of what to make of that. Are we still in a profound recession or is there some kind of deeper reasons behind that? And I know this is something your team looks at quite a bit. Yeah, so we've worked on labor force participation, which by the way is a macroeconomic variable. I barely paid any attention to before the early 2000s, I would say. It was never mentioned in any of my courses or any of the work I did in macroeconomics. All of a sudden it became the hot variable. But the reason I think it wasn't considered an important macroeconomic variable is it was basically on the rise for a long time. And it's only when it's gone on the decline that people have gotten concerned about it. It was rising as women started to work more. So the history of the labor force participation rate is that it was relatively low, maybe 59% of that neighborhood in the 50s and 60s. And then during the 70s, 80s and 90s, it was always on the rise as you had more women come into the workforce and other factors that drove the labor force participation rate higher. It peaked in the year 2000 and then it's been on the decline ever since 2000. So one thing to keep in your head about this is the labor force participation rate did not go down because of the great recession alone. It was already on a downward trend well before that, so from 2000 to now. So 14 years has been on the decline. So some people at the board, a research team with Stephanie Aronson and many other co-authors, they have a paper on this. And they built what I would call a demographic model of labor force participation. So they just said, well, how many people do we have in various age, race, sex categories and how are those categories changing and how much propensity do those people have to participate in the labor, in the labor pool? And then we'll project that forward and then that'll give us a prediction about the labor force participation rate in the future. So they did this in 2006, 2006. And if you look at their prediction for 2013, the end of the year 2013, she's basically spot on and was very close. So I was extremely impressed by this because in macroeconomics we never get anything right. So to have them be able to build a model in 2006 and predict almost exactly what was gonna happen in 2013 despite everything that happened with the financial crisis and world turns upside down on us, I thought that was pretty impressive. So that made me take the view that what's going on is that this is a very long-term demographic trend that peaked in 2000 and it's now coming back down. A lot of it's baby boom retirement but there are other factors going on that are all in this model. And so that's what I think about labor force participation. So that's why I don't like to emphasize it in monetary policy discussions because I think it's being driven by factors that are outside the control of policy makers. So when you were in school, people didn't talk about it. And you think maybe people should have talked about it. It was rising all through the 1990s when I was on staff at the Fed. No one said a word about, this is distorting unemployment rate or anything like that, I never said it. And so the moral of the story is maybe people were right in the first place to think that this is not an important indicator. It's, well, I mean, not important is a little too strong but it's a long-term trend that is outside sort of business cycle frequency movements. It has never had an important cyclical component. So you had a big recession in 1980, 81, 82 when I was the age that you guys are now. And huge recession. And labor force participation didn't really change during that. I went out to do that. I think I have seen numbers though, showing to the topic of today's forum that younger people are less in the workforce than they were a little while back. I mean, what do you make of that? That's concerning to me. I would like, for young people I want everybody to be working because partly, yes, you're working and you're getting a paycheck but you're also accumulating the skills and the knowledge to be able to take leadership positions later. And if that's not happening, then that's kind of a little bit of a broken piece of the macroeconomic machinery. So I think it is a concern. More for its long-term implications than anything that's sort of happening in the short span. So we've talked about sort of life cycle and accumulation of assets. And one of the main ways sort of middle-class Americans have traditionally done that is through housing. And I think we've seen a lot of information that the sort of younger generation right now has not really gotten on the kind of housing cycle in the way that some previous cohorts had, which obviously, you know, it speaks to the future but also to the recent past. Are people missing out on something that's important? I think you wanna have the right mix of housing I guess is what I would say for the economy and for people's economic situations. I don't think that means and I don't think any of you do either. It doesn't mean 100% home ownership and it doesn't mean 100% rent either. It means some kind of mix that fits for people that are more transient, less settled, more in temporary situations, renting is by far the superior way to go. And for people that want to really commit to where they're gonna live and the rule of thumb that you hear is don't buy a house unless you're gonna be there at least five years. You know, for those people, then you want a robust housing market that meets everybody's needs and has a wide range of options. And so I'm not surprised that younger people are getting started later. I mean, we just went through the worst housing crisis that you will ever see in our lifetimes and the prices got way out of line compared to where they should have been and it all collapsed on us. And it caused a global disaster. So it's really not surprising that people are a little bit tepid about re-entering that kind of a situation. And I know something you've said is that people should not anticipate that things are gonna go back to where they were before that crisis. Yeah, I think it was a bubble. I mean, everyone says it was a housing bubble, but then sometimes in the policy conversation, you kind of, people are kind of thinking, well the prices should go back to the peak level or something like that. Ah, I don't know, they seemed way out of line with fundamentals at that time. Right, so people, I mean, I speak sometimes to people in the industry who are, I think they wanna see where we are now as the abnormal state. And they're gonna come back to 2005 when the going was good. Right, so a simple metric that I've liked is just take the ratio of your favorite house price index, case shiller or something else if you like one of the other ones. Take that as a ratio at a nominal GDP. And then that should be, where I would expect housing prices to go. So what we got in the 2000s was it's got way out of line compared to anything that nominal income could support. And so they all collapsed and now they come back, but not all the way. And if you're younger, of course, I mean, I think the sort of most mainstream view of the housing market you get is sort of implicitly from the perspective of a middle-aged person who's already a homeowner. But for younger people, it's in some ways advantageous if your prices are lower. It is, it's a great time to buy when prices are low. That's for sure. And I think housing affordability indexes have shown, it's a great time to get in the market, but a lot of, I don't know about you guys, but when we bought a house, I mean it's driven by life cycle stuff, right? You're getting into the phase of the life cycle where, okay, it's time to start the family and this is what's, this is a lot of what's driving it. You could say, hey, we're gonna rent for a year or something beyond where would be the optimal time would be the right time to buy the house because we think something's going on in the market, but you can't really shift it that far. You can shift it a couple years one way or the other, but you can't do that much. So I mean, it's mostly driven, I think, by demographic factors. Right, and what's sort of going on. And so one thing that's happening in people's lives is that there's more and more emphasis on education as a sort of economic factor, which is going to delay when you're earning. The sort of income that would support that sort of stabilization. And I wonder if you think, you know, we were talking about life cycle financing and paying for higher education is a very important part of sort of how we are doing that in practice in America. Do you think that that system is serving our needs well? You wanna go with tuition, like student debt or? Yeah, student debt. I mean it's often seen as a sort of I would say seen as a sort of unmitigated evil. But another way of looking at it is as you said before is that younger people actually should be in debt in anticipation of higher incomes. Well, I mean, investing in human capital and then that human capital is gonna come online later and be very productive for the economy, not just for the person that has the human capital but for the whole economy because there are some external effects from that. That's a fantastic thing. So you want more and more human capital as much as you can get. So to the extent that people are being shut out of their investments in human capital because they can't get the financing for it then you do want student loan programs and we do have them and I think those are good and reasonable programs. One thing I do worry about is that if people borrow a lot of money then they don't actually complete the degree because we know that if you don't actually have that degree your earning potential is actually quite a bit lower. You're gonna have to pay back that loan on a lower level. So let me just ramble on. Sorry, no, no, please. Ramble on. I had a fascinating result by a student of mine, a PhD student of mine. So I'll just tell you three sentences on her dissertation. Her dissertation was about is life cycle models, human capital accumulation but there's uncertainty about what the payoff is gonna be. So you guys can all relate to this, right? Okay, I'm gonna get the expensive degree. I'm gonna borrow, maybe borrow a lot to get this expensive degree. I have to choose a major, very important, all these things. And this thing is supposed to pay off 30 years from now and my peak earning in is when I'm 50 years old. And how much uncertainty is there really around that payoff? And if it's pretty big, then what people will do is they'll say because of the uncertainty I'm gonna invest less. Because of the uncertainty out there, I'm gonna invest less. So what she did was wrote down a kind of a calibrated model to try to get, put a number on this and her conclusion was, get this, human capital under accumulated by 50%, by 50% relative to what it would be if you had certainty about what the payoff would be. So you only know the mean payoff, but you might get paid this much or you might get paid this much when you're 50 years old. And so because of that uncertainty there's a lot of under investment in human capital and that slows down the economy, makes it not be as good as it is. So I thought that that suggested tremendous potential for reform or better thinking about how we handle investments in higher education. One of the things that I saw in the chart show coming in here, about 30% of millennials have a college degree, do I have the right number on that? Is that right? Is it a right? Yeah. I'll say what I think about that, stunningly low. You should say, well, gosh, I'd like that to be 70, 80, 90%, something like that. But that's not the system that we have in place. And this student of mine that her calculations might suggest some reasons why that occurs. People don't really think there's as much payoff there as there is. Yeah, I think I wanna just make sure that's understood because it's a fascinating result. So people sort of puzzle over the idea that the earnings premium for college degree has been going up. It's huge. And so why don't more people go to college and we would have more supply and it would bounce out. And so the hypothesis here is that it's difficult for people who are 17, 18 years old to know 20, 30 years down the road what kind of degree is going to pay off and how much. So they don't put as much on the line as we would sort of want as a society. I mean, it's exactly so. You're in 1900 and you're gonna get the degree in advanced horseshoe making. And you're expecting this to pay off in 1930 and it doesn't work out. There aren't any horses anymore. Right, so it's just tremendous uncertainty about, with that kind of distance out there in the future, it's just tremendous uncertainty about where to invest. The other thing about human capital that comes out of that model and other models is if you're gonna do what I did, get a PhD and invest a lot in human capital, when you're in your peak earning years, you gotta work to earn the, to get the payoff. The surgeon has to learn surgery and then man, when you're in prime surgery years, you gotta crank out the surgery. So you gotta work more. So this is also a factor in people thinking about, well, okay, I'm gonna make this big investment but then I know I'm actually gonna be working more in my peak earning years than I would otherwise. If I'm a pilot, I gotta fly a lot of planes all over the world and I'm gonna be on the road a lot. Right, it's a different kind of investment. You don't collect it passively. So is there a microphone somewhere that could facilitate some questions if anyone out there has them? I gotta help me out, guys. There we go, there we go. Hi, my name is Michelle Massiam with the Workforce Data Quality Campaign. My question is about kind of housing markets and the way that cities have grown and it kind of alludes to the title of your book but it's interesting because cities like D.C. now talk the list for the most expensive housing markets but we're also talking about millennials having less disposable income. So how does that balance out? I feel like that. You could go. Do you want that? I can't say what I think. What my book was about is that you see in a lot of housing markets in the United States, you certainly see it here, is that there is a lot of legal opposition to building more houses. And so you have increasing demand to come into a city like Washington which is, urban living has become sort of more fashionable. Also just wages and incomes are higher here and in the Bay Area, other sort of coastal cities than they might be in a Cleveland or in a Phoenix. And so you have more and more demand to sort of come like here and it would be natural to see an enormous boom in housing construction but instead you see actually a very modest increase in the number of houses that are being built because if you, I don't know, people here are on neighborhood listservs or anything like that but anytime something new is coming on people get very concerned about the parking, about the noise, about the views, about is it gonna bring the wrong kind of people into the neighborhood. And so prices have tended to escalate and it's nice for people who sort of bought at the right time. I mean, I know a lot of people have reaped real windfalls in this market even though it's been bad for the national housing economy. And we need to really sort of think as a society about what do we want out of our cities? Do we want them to grow and thrive when they become more desirable or do we want these cycles of gentrification where a certain kind of improvement, you know, it is a real improvement if crime falls, if you build a nice streetcar but are the people who lived in those cities going to be able to benefit from those improvements or are you gonna see that as new people come in, old people sort of have to move out? It's not a problem, you know, everywhere in America and many cities would in some way, Detroit would love to have Washington's problems. At the same time, you know, it's a real problem, I think. You know, here, Boston, New York, San Francisco, markets like that. You are exactly right. You should tell your colleagues from the San Francisco Fed who had a, I thought, eccentric view of why San Francisco is so unaffordable the other day. I didn't see that. All right. We'll start in trouble. Are there, that's there? Yes. Yeah, over there. Oh, sorry. I have the mic, I'll have the mic next. Hi, I'm Kaye Glees and I'm with the Center for Popular Democracy. I'm especially interested in the demographic question when it comes to race around unemployment rates, especially when you look at your hometown in St. Louis, unemployment rates in black communities in comparison to white communities is drastically higher, I think, three times higher than the kind of groups of white communities. And when we think about what's happening in Ferguson and nationally, right, there is this black jobs crisis. And so in particular communities, the unemployment rates are in severe crisis. And we're, and across the board, I think unemployment rates are still aren't where they are, especially when you think about the part-time economy. Yeah, I know you've said that you thought that inflation rates were in danger and I'm wondering why your projections are pushing for doing less to stimulate wage growth and job growth. So if you look, we like to look at the 8th Federal Reserve District and it actually spreads across seven states and includes Mississippi Delta, Memphis, Little Rock, Louisville, and St. Louis. If you look at the unemployment rate by metropolitan statistical area for that part of the country, it actually turns out it's not that different from the nation as a whole. So there are definitely regional differences, county level differences. Some of the counties and some of the states will be double digit, even 15%. So they'll be very high. It is tied to race, but not exclusively to race, I would say. So there are some of the counties that are just poorer counties. Mississippi, I don't know if you know the geography here, but the Mississippi Delta is sort of the southern part of the Mississippi River Valley. Historically been poor. So yeah, sure, we're very concerned. We'd love to see all these people do very well. I think when you're looking at the unemployment rate, you look at the national unemployment rate, then you say, well, I don't want to look at that. I want to look at some other unemployment rate that adds in people that are less attached to the workforce and other things. One thing I can say about that is that the main unemployment rate goes up and down like this. If you look at the other ones, that's fine. They're also highly correlated. And I think the same thing for African-American unemployment is higher. Would I like it to be lower? Absolutely, but it's gonna be highly correlated. So I think if we can get unemployment down at a national level, we'll see everything else hopefully follow behind. Now on policy itself, I have said that, if you look at what's happened to unemployment over the last, let's say, two years, it has come down quite a bit faster than what other policy makers were projecting. So we've had, believe it or not, we've had a bit of a bonanza on unemployment because we thought that as a committee, we thought that the unemployment rate wouldn't get below 6% till the end of 2015. And we're October 2014 and we got to 5.9%. So we've continually, as a committee, we've been continually surprised at how well, believe it or not, how well the unemployment rate has performed, how well jobs growth has been, jobs growth has been very strong this year in the US, over 200,000 jobs a month all through this year. So this is some of the things that made me think, well, we're getting pretty close to our goals. 5.9% unemployment nationally is not perfect, but it's getting pretty close to what we think of as a sort of natural level of unemployment. The committee thinks that's in the mid-fives somewhere and inflation's a little bit below target, but not too far below target. So in terms of our goals, we're not too far from our goals, but in terms of actual policy, man, the interest rates are still down at 0%. Usually they're running at 4%, something like that. The quantitative easing has really blown out our balance sheet to a 4.3 trillion. Usually it would be less than a trillion dollars. So in terms of our policy lovers, we're like this far from normal, and in terms of our goal variables, we're about this far from normal. So I think that that's a bit of a mismatch, and that's why I've tried to get the committee, it's not tightening policy, it'd be removing accommodation, nudging these policy levers a little bit back toward normal given that we've had a lot of success in getting labor markets back to normal. So. You respond though, maybe even Janet Yellen has talked about the part time work with problem, right? The job growth that's been leading has been part time in employment. People aren't holding onto their jobs in particularly long. So the unemployment rate is deceptive, right? Okay, so I have a great story about this. So what you can do is, what you can do, we have these workhorse labor market indicators. They are the unemployment rate and the non-farm payroll employment if you track financial markets. So those two are sort of the main ones that markets pay a lot of attention to. And then what you can do, which is fascinating, and which I've learned a lot about in the last decade, you can expand that to many other indicators of labor market performance, one of which is part time for economic reasons, but there are many others, higher squids, many other things. And what you can do, since we're techy, nerdy people, what we can do is take all those indicators and stuff them all into one thing and make an index of labor market conditions. And then you can just ask yourself, where's the index of labor market conditions? Because I want a great labor market. I want that to be as close as possible to normal. So we've actually got an index like that in St. Louis that we're working on. They have one at the Board of Governors. They have one at Kansas City Fed. So here's the thing about these indexes. The correlation of the whole index with unemployment and with non-farm payroll employment is like 95%. They're really highly correlated. So the question is, when you already have the unemployment number and you already have the non-farm payroll number, how much extra information do you get for macroeconomic purposes? How much extra information do you get by looking at all these other indicators? And the answer to that is not very much. So that's my story on, I think it's fascinating to look at these other indicators, but from a macro perspective, we've got our workhorse indicators. They've been looking very good recently. All right, who else has the mic here? Hi, I think that might be me. You mentioned earlier, I'm Sophie Quinton. I write for the National Journal here in DC. You mentioned earlier that when we're thinking about life cycle inequality, that's relatively benign and we shouldn't really be interfering with that too much with policy. What are some of the malignant types of inequality that maybe policy could or should be used to address? Well, when I talk to audiences about that, I like to leave that to the audience's imagination. So, because people have pointed to many things that I think some people think for the high income people that they're not really getting paid their marginal product, which is what economic theory should say, somehow they're getting some other payment or something like that. There are people that have big windfalls maybe because they own a business sitting on property or something like that. So, I don't know how to think about that and they don't really have a good answer or a good theory about that, but I think that's where a lot of the focus of the discussion has been. If everyone has paid their marginal product and everyone can convince someone else to pay them some salary for something, from any kind of perspective, that's not such a bad thing. It's when there's some kind of misalignment that people aren't getting paid what they're really contributing, that kind of misalignment then probably needs some kind of fix. But, when we do that fix, I think we don't want to muck with the other part of the life cycle income inequality, wealth inequality and consumption inequality part of the equation because that part we want that to work just like a perfectly synchronized train that allocates the consumption around in just the right way. I think we've got time for one more. Yeah, we've got it. What's on? Yeah. Hi, so I'm Sarah Lewis from the AFL-CIO. So it's a really exciting time for monetary policy right now for people who are really into this. Too exciting. Yes. I don't want to be in your position. And maybe I'm putting you a little on the hot seat with this question. I don't know if it was the journal or the Times this morning talking about Wall Street being spooked by what they see as possible deflationary pressures with the global slowdown and falling commodity prices as well as signals that QE tapering will begin or QE will completely end by the end of this month. If these play out and we actually do have deflation, not sure what's necessarily realistic, this would be disastrous for a lot of us, especially young people and particularly those of us who hold debt because we're gonna have to pay more to pay off our student debt and we already have falling wages compared to already stagnant wages through the rest of the economy and we're already predicted to start way further back than our parents and have lower lifetime earnings than our parents. So at the same time, we have the Hawks and the Milton Friedman types who are looking at the unemployment numbers, just a strict unemployment and saying, well, we're getting close to that 5.5 or 5% value, we need to start watching out for inflation. So at the same time, the tools that the Federal Reserve traditionally has to contribute or help the economy are getting pretty limited, you've got interest rates already at zero and from my understanding, people don't want to continue QE or extend QE past the RMBS and the regular T-bills. So my question, I promise I have a question, I'm not just, it's just funny, what do you see in either of these situations, extremely maybe, as potential solutions and roles that the Federal Reserve can play in order to at least hold steady or at least get back to 2007, but ideally to help this generation and the economy of this generation to improve. All right, we're short on time, but we're fine if you can. A complex exception. Yeah, I don't know if you guys are, how much you're paying attention to financial markets, but there's a lot of volatility just in the last few days. I can comment on that a little bit. So a lot of this is coming out of Europe. The European situation was expected to get better this year. It's not really materializing and that is really spooking global financial markets. So that's number one. They have declining inflation, declining inflation expectations. Some of this is spilling over to the US. I think fundamentally the US situation still looks very good. Tracking estimates for growth in the US are real GDP growth are over 3%. Labor markets have been improving all through this year. Look like they're on track to continue to improve. The thing about the low interest rates that we have now, we're at zero interest rates, that's way below sort of some normal level like 4% or something like that. And this thing is gonna take years to turn around and get back to that normal level. So even as we're on that journey to get back to some kind of normalcy in the US economy, that's still gonna be accommodative policy relatively long run. And so I think I'm a little nervous about staying at zero as the economy really continues to improve. I think we can start to move off zero at some point and still provide a lot of accommodation for to address a lot of the issues that you talked about. So that's the vision that I have in mind. I don't think that the 2004 to 2006 tightening cycle went very well. We did raise interest rates during that period. Housing prices were going up even faster than the interest rates were going up during that period and it all ended in global disaster. So I'm also nervous about replaying something like that. And so I've got that in mind too. And just one last thing that some of you saw that, as far as the current situation just right now today, one of the things I suggested this morning is that we could, we're tapering our QE program, but we could just go on pause to taper the QE program to see if we could get some more data on how this market volatility is gonna play out. So that's one of the things I talked about this morning. So thanks for the question. All right, thank you. That's time. Yeah, thank you President Bullard and Matt. You can join me in thanking them for their conversation today.