Tom Barkin

But, uh, and the, and the committee wants to watch that and see that.

We- Tom Barkin had this to say, "It's not some unicorn in the forest.

It's actually something that you can hit." He was talking about the 2% inflation target, and I laugh because then why didn't they hit it for five years? We were actually cutting rates where CPI was higher than where CPI was going into the September meeting.

Do you believe that the Fed truly believes that 2% is a target, or is that something they say, but really it's 2, 2.3, 2.5?

Bloomberg's Michael McKee on Bloomberg Businessweek Daily.

Bank of Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin says it makes sense to act against persistent inflation.

He told an audience at Howard University in Washington, D.C. that what once looked like one-time shocks are continuing and that inflation is enduring.

Stocks rallied on Williams' comments, but they didn't quite make it out of the red.

I'll mention one more thing here, and that is that there was this panel of presidents from the Federal Reserve We had the Kansas City Fed president, Richmond Fed president, and the Boston Fed president talking about just what they see when it comes to rural economies overall and where the investment opportunities are.

And I thought it was interesting that Tom Barkin, the Richmond Fed president, said that you know a lot of times when we're thinking about economic development you're thinking about how to attract more jobs to a place and he said what he's seeing if he looks out across his six-state region is that really rural places that are going to make it economically down the road they're going to be attracting workers not necessarily jobs kind of flipping that script on economic development trying to identify where more workers can come from overall Jeff Smith, who is the president of the Kansas City Fed, talked a little bit about infrastructure and infrastructure investments.

And anybody who spent time in a rural community knows that that's something that, you know, it's keeping people awake at night, sometimes thinking about how to get infrastructure in their town.

And we know that, you know, transportation infrastructure, the roads are so important.

Am I paying more for this item because, you know, the cost of the inputs and labor and all of those things are up and so they need to charge me more to cover their costs? Or are companies using those events as cover to go further than they might otherwise? And the story I love to tell is...

You know, the chair of the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank, a guy named Tom Barkin, after Liberation Day and the trade war started, he convened a small group of business leaders and CEOs in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

And he says, you know, come on, guys, like, are you raising the price because of tariffs? Or are you raising the price because of his words, tariff noise? Right? The kind of...

fog of the trade war if you will