Campaign News

BetaWired - November 15, 2014 - Jean Andre an American activist decided to visit the Federal Reserve Board’s headquarters on Friday to express his concerns about getting a decent job. Janet L. Yellen, the Fed’s chairwoman, agreed to meet him together with about 30 workers concerning the plight of Americans searching for work and struggling to make a living.

Accompanied by Fed’s board of governors officials; Stanley Fischer, the vice chairman; Lael Brainard; and Jerome H. Powell, the jobless Americans had a chance to express their views for about an hour.

Ady Barkan, a lawyer with the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy group based in New York that orchestrated the meeting said “The Federal Reserve is too important of an institution to be insulated from the voices and perspectives of working families, we think that the Fed needs to listen more and be more responsive, and we’re very grateful for this first opportunity.”

The Fed declined to comment, citing a policy of silence about private meetings but the workers described what they said in the meeting that was closed to the media. Ady Barkan’s group is campaigning for the Fed to carry on with its stimulus program, citing the high level of unemployment, particularly in minority communities, and the slow pace of wage growth. The group further argued that the Fed could help drive wages up by keeping interest rates low.

According to Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group, “monetary policy would be “the single most important determinant of wage growth” and that he was glad to see workers recognize the Fed’s importance. A conservative group, American Principles in Action, criticized the meeting as “highly political” and inappropriate expressing that it would seek a related meeting to share its view that the Fed’s stimulus campaign is damaging the economy.

The labor and community groups at the meeting wore green T-shirts that said “What Recovery?” on the front, with a chart demonstrating meager wage gains on the back. They also compelled Yellen to change the way the Fed chooses the presidents of its regional banks.

On Thursday, The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas stated that its president, Richard W. Fisher, would step down on March 19 2015. Furthermore, Charles I. Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, plans to retire at the beginning of March.

Source

JACKSON HOLE, WY – Last Thursday was the first time the most powerful financial players in the U.S. formally met with the people their policies affect. During the Federal Reserve Economic Policy Symposium at Jackson Lake Lodge, a meeting between the Fed and Fed Up sparked impassioned speeches that burned through barriers of language, culture, race, and socio-economic status. But the fervency expressed by Fed Up members seemingly had little influence on the Fed’s impending decision to raise interest rates, something Federal Reserve board chair Janet Yellen announced in her annual address the following day.

Still, members of Fed Up—a syndicate of the Center for Popular Democracy built around the ideology that the Fed’s policies affect people of every skin color and income bracket—were encouraged by the meeting.

Shawn Sebastian is the field director of the Fed Up campaign. “I think the meeting with the Fed was historic and unprecedented,” he said. “There are never that many Fed officials in the same room at the same time talking about monetary policy, and they’re certainly not doing that with low income people of color.”

Federal Reserve board leaders like Neel Kashkari, Lael Brainard, Esther George and board vice president Stanley Fischer all participated in the Fed Up roundtable.

The landmark meeting was the result of Jackson Lake Lodge overselling hotel rooms that Fed Up members had reserved. After the group filed several federal complaints, the Fed agreed to the sit down.

‘Don’t slow down the economy’

Echoes of agreement among Fed Up’s constituency rippled through the crowded room at Jackson Lake Lodge Thursday as the roundtable began. Members of Fed Up elucidated ideas of stagnant wages, unemployment, and underemployment that disproportionately plague people of color in the United States. Fed Up members explained how the Federal Reserve’s pending decision to slow down the economy by raising interest rates could damage already neglected communities. Nearly every speaker from Fed Up concluded with one central idea: Don’t slow down the economy. Not yet. Don’t hike interest rates. Not yet. Our communities are still underserved. Our people are still underpaid. Our unemployment rates are still nearly double the national average.

Esther George, chair of the KC Federal Reserve, responded to protestors with deference to Congress. “Our objective is to follow mandates of what Congress has made out,” she told the crowd. “The objective is not to slow down the economy; that would be irresponsible.” George continued by explaining that the objective of the Fed was to walk the balance beam between the ideal of full employment and the consequence of potential inflation due to an oversaturation in the job market.

Fed Up’s expert on economic forces, Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, said the Fed’s concerns about inflation should be adjusted in light of the impacts of the Great Recession. Bivens claimed a period of “overshooting” employment targets are necessary to heal the effects of that economic disaster, and that this period of overshooting is especially important to people of color, because it takes longer for their unemployment rates to catch up to national averages.

“[If] The Federal Reserve starts slowing the economy, it starts halting progress in reducing unemployment before the benefits of that reach the last people to be hired,” Bivens said.

Promising diversity

Fed Up seemed to impact members of the Federal Reserve Board on a few fronts. Several ambitious promises were made by members of the Fed, catalyzed by discussions held during the roundtable. Sebastian believes the most concrete impacts Fed Up had on the Federal Reserve were when Lael Brainard of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors committed to seriously considering a slate of candidates for board positions that more closely reflect America’s diversity. The board’s lack of diversity is a source of contention among Fed Up members, as the board is comprised of 16 white, predominantly male members. The only exception is Neel Kashkari of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, who is of Indian descent. Fed Up members are not the first to point this out, however. This summer a formal letter of complaint, signed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and some 127 other lawmakers, demanded the Federal Reserve open up to more diversity.

Another victory for the Fed Up campaign happened when Kashkari recommitted to an impressive research project studying racial disparities. Minnesota and Wisconsin, both states within Kashkari’s district, are rated the worst states in the country for black people to live based on a report by 24/7 Wall Street. Kashkari’s goal is to find the source of the disparities that propagate those statistics.

Blacks in Wisconsin face an unemployment rate of 21 percent which is more than quadruple the national average. Their incarceration rate is the third highest in the country, and their rate of home ownership is the tenth lowest. At a meeting earlier this month in Minneapolis, Kashkari sat down with Neighborhoods Organizing for Change to discuss the problem.

“Some of the racial disparities are a crisis, and we need to treat them like a crisis,” Kashkari said. “There’s something structural in the U.S. economy, in good times and bad, that black unemployment is almost always twice as high as white unemployment.”

However, in spite of all protestor efforts, in what is considered to be one of Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen’s most important speeches of the year, she explicitly stated that interest rate hikes were on the horizon. Yellen told the audience at Jackson Lake Lodge, “Indeed, in light of the continued solid performance of the labor market and our outlook for economic activity and inflation, I believe the case for an increase in the federal funds rate has strengthened in recent months.” PJH

By Natosha Hoduski

Source

Ms. Kniech was one of more than 50 local lawmakers in the United States who sent an open letter to Seattle leaders and residents on Monday supporting the tax and criticizing Amazon’s resistance to it. “By threatening Seattle over this tax, Amazon is sending a message to all of our cities: we play by our own rules,” the letter said.

Read the full article here.

MarketWatch - August 22, 2014, by Greg Robb - With the economy mending, the Federal Reserve’s emphasis is “naturally shifting” to the debate over when to raise interest rates, the head of the U.S. central bank said Friday.

“With the economy getting closer to our objectives, the FOMC’s emphasis is naturally shifting to questions about the degree of remaining slack, how quickly that slack is to be taken up, and thereby to the question of under what conditions we should begin dialing back our extraordinary accommodation,” Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said in a speech opening the central bank’s summer policy conference in Jackson Hole.

Yellen said there was “no simple recipe” for the Fed to follow, but again warned that rate hikes could come sooner than expected if progress in the labor market continued to be more rapid than anticipated or if inflation moves up more rapidly.

Balancing this more hawkish tone, Yellen said 19 labor market indicators followed by the Fed suggest the decline in the unemployment rate overstates the improvement in overall labor-market conditions.

The initial reaction in the stock market was a muted one, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.18%   trading in a narrow range. Read Market Snapshot

Her comments “skirted around the issue of future monetary policy by noting that whilst there were a number of factors that might mean the labor market was less of a threat to inflation than in previous business cycles, equally, there were factors that might make it more so,” said ING economist Rob Carnell in a note to clients.

Yellen’s remarks about a shift in the Fed debate toward when, and under what conditions to tighten, lend credence to comments earlier this month from Richard Fisher, the hawkish president of the Dallas Fed, who said that the discussion among policy makers at their last meeting had moved in his direction.

Minutes of that meeting released on Wednesday were also judged by Fed watchers to be hawkish.

Perhaps sensing the shift, protestors have arrived for the first time in Jackson Hole this year urging the Fed to delay any rate hike.

Yellen gave no sense a rate hike was imminent. She noted the Fed still thinks that labor-market slack is “significant” and that the central bank has repeated it intends to hold rates close to zero for a “considerable time” after the Fed ends its bond-buying program, expected in October.

But her remarks suggest the first rate hike since 2006 is now on the table for active discussion.

Yellen and her allies on the Fed have signaled the first rate hike won’t happen until after the middle of next year. Hawks on the committee are pressing for an earlier move, and they have been vocal in speaking to reporters at Jackson Hole.

Source