A Conversation with Cleveland Federal Reserve President Beth Hammack

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Beju Shah** (0:35)
There we go. It's always a joy to ring the bell. Thank you, Dan, for hosting us here today at The City Club. It really is an incredible room of business and community leaders. My name is Beju Shah, as Dan introduced. I'm the CEO of The Greater Cleveland Partnership. And as you know, at GCP, we talk about being all in. This is an example of what it means to be all in, a partnership with The City Club of Cleveland, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and The 50 Club, bringing us all together for a very important conversation that matters to every one of us in this room. To paraphrase a proverb, we live in interesting times.
We've had unsettled inflation, geopolitical turmoil, AI-driven transformation, energy prices that are spiking, and a volatile political environment.
All of which brings questions on the direction of economic policy that affects every one of us in this room.
And a force, if not a center of economic policy in this country is the Federal Reserve Bank. Its mission, maximum employment, stable currency, and a financial system that we can all count on has rarely faced a more demanding moment. With a new chair, its minutes, its actions, and its outlooks have received even greater interest and importance as we all know.
In the middle of those conversations, informing and helping guide the Federal Reserve's economic policy is our partner and our friend, Beth Hammack, the president and CEO of the Cleveland Fed.
Beth came to Cleveland after a distinguished business career. She brings more than three decades in finance to this role, including serving as co-head of Global Financing at Goldman Sachs, and chair of the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, working alongside US policy makers. From day one, she's approached the role with a quality that I appreciate and I admire. And that is a genuine curiosity about the businesses and places that she serves. She doesn't study the economy from data in a distance. She comes to rooms like this one, at tables with entrepreneurs and with business leaders, visits the companies and community organizations because she wants to know what's really happening on the ground. And I've seen this both as a member of the Business Advisory Council and at numerous CEO dinners that we've convened. And she always leads with questions because she wants to understand what companies are seeing in terms of customers, in terms of cost, and also in their confidence about the future. That's how she informs herself for national policy conversations. She takes that and carries forward not only Greater Cleveland's perspectives, but the Fourth District more broadly into DC, infusing those rooms with what's really happening and what's to come. And in her dialogue with peers and leaders, she also gains insights from what's happening around the country and brings those perspectives back to us. Her learnings inform our region's strategy and our region's economic growth. Which we appreciate and symbolize another standout quality of Beth's. And that's her desire to engage fully in and impact our community. In addition to serving on our board as an observer, she's also a board member of University Hospitals, the Greater Cleveland Food Bank, and also chairs Math for America National On Profit. Simply said, Beth is the right person at the right time in the right role. Please join me in welcoming President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Beth Hammack.

**Beth Hammack** (4:16)
Thank you, Beju, for that very kind introduction. And thanks to the 50 Club of Cleveland for kicking off the discussions to make this event a reality, to the Greater Cleveland Partnership for helping organize the event with us, and to the City Club for hosting us today. I'm going to start by looking back at history, my own. As an aspiring history and economics major in high school in the late 1980s, I myself might qualify as ancient history at this point. But I want to take you back to 1988 Ronald Reagan was president, you may have been carrying around a pager, and Bernie Kosar was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. A hip hop song called It Takes Two by Rob Bass and DJ Eazy Rock was playing on the radio. Now, if you didn't hear, Rob Bass passed away recently, so this song has been top of mind for me. In case you need a reminder, the refrain goes, it takes two to make a thing go right. It takes two to make it out of sight. So I apologize for my singing voice and for my questionable taste in music. Because I'm pretty sure that the musical preferences of my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee are substantially better than my own, I'll point out that these are only my views musically and otherwise. What I'm not going to apologize for is that song playing on a loop in your head for the rest of the day. Because I want you to use it to remember something. Two percent is the Federal Reserve's inflation objective. In my remarks today, I want to explain why the FOMC aims to achieve two percent inflation, why it matters that we get inflation back to this level, and how I see current conditions and monetary policy. The TLDR version, for today, it's reasonable to keep rates steady given the uncertainties around the economic outlook. But if recent data trends continue, it may soon be appropriate for policy to act to address the growing risks of persistently elevated inflation.