What a Fed President Hears When He Goes on the Road

24:34And it'll include domestic and international and financial markets and lending markets and different scenarios for where the economy might go and different monetary policy operations. And so it's a brilliantly done piece of work. Joe, wouldn't it be cool to see that 200-page Fed staff analysis of the economy? Definitely. But I'll settle for the speeches and meetings. At the same time, Jay Powell sends around his first draft of what the statement might be. And so we work all weekend and end of the week debating how we want to talk about the economy and whether we like that statement. We'll offer Jay, I'm giving this background so you understand what I mean, we'll offer Jay our perspective on the statements.

25:16He always likes mine best. That's not actually true. I'm making the point. The statement that we issued the Wednesday of the meeting has largely, not always, but largely been pretty well vetted by the time you get to the meeting. So we don't go to the meeting and try to line edit a statement for the most part. Every time that the chair has a bad press conference, that's because we've line edited the statement in the meeting, and we send him out there two hours after the meeting to go defend it, which is, I think in my judgment, a little bit of malpractice, but we do it sometimes. In the meeting itself, there's often a special topic, and so the staff will present some papers on the special topic, and we'll have a debate about it.

25:55Then we all go around and talk about economic conditions. So I'll say, I've been in the district for the last seven weeks, and here's what I think I've learned, and here's what I take solace from in the recent data, and here's what I think are some interesting conclusions you might not have otherwise thought about. Then we all talk about the statement. Pretty productive meeting. It's a reasonably formal meeting. It's not really flippant. There's not tons of humor in there. You know, it's a pretty serious meeting, but it's also, every word is transcripted, so if you're having trouble sleeping, you can go get them from five years ago and read through them.

26:39About 30 miles west of Winston-Salem and half an hour's drive south from Mount Airy is Yadkinville in Yadkin County. Population, 37 ,700. And for the better part of the past decade, that population has been shrinking. It's day two of Tom's North Carolina tour, and we're starting off at the offices of textile manufacturer Indira Mills. It's worth a real good look. Well, one of the ways we pick where we visit is when you hear there's something interesting going on. And we talked to the Surry Yadkin works yesterday up in Surry County. Yeah. And then we thought that would be interesting today. And then we try to find the big employers in a market.

27:17Well, we're not a big employer, but we're pretty unique. We've got a good story to tell. That's John Willingham, the fourth generation owner of Indira Mills in Yadkinville. His company can trace its history back over 100 years, all the way back to Colonel Francis Henry Fries, who was the first president of Wachovia Loan and Trust, which eventually grew to be one of the biggest banks in the U.S. before being bought by Wells Fargo in 2008. In addition to banking, the colonel started a bunch of textile businesses in the early 1900s. That's right, because North Carolina used to be a global player in textiles.

27:51There were mills in almost every single one of the state's counties as recently as the 1990s. And just 30 years ago, those mills were employing some 280 ,000 workers. But that started to change as global competition heated up and companies moved production outside of the U.S. Today, there's just an estimated 39 ,000 textile workers in the state. We migrated up here in 1998. We were in 100-year-old facilities in Winston-Salem. And this was a good community. We already had satellite plants up here. So we came to Yakinville and then we got on board with NAFTA and moved our manufacturing, a lot of our labor work to Mexico.

28:32And is that how you managed to survive the whole trauma that happened around here? That's exactly right. So what we kept here in Yakinville is back office functions, design work and distribution. So all of our labor assembly work is in Mexico. We have plants in Monterey, Mexico. So Yadkinville was a big mill town once upon a time. But like lots of places in America, this particular type of manufacturing just got hollowed out. Endura survived in part by outsourcing its production. They also started specializing in thermal underwear. And Tracy, I just have to say, I love thermals. Anyway, today you can buy Endura's thermals at places like Tractor Supply and Dick's Sporting Goods.

29:15We realized that to survive we needed a niche. we needed something that we could control. And it was a very small market and not a very interesting one for a lot of larger players like Hanes or Gildan or Brew of the Looms. So we picked thermal underwear and we became sort of the go-to people in thermal underwear. It's a highly seasonal business. It requires a lot of working capital because we build inventory all year and that keeps people out of it. And who do you sell into? Do you brand yourself? Do you sell into... We do mostly our brands. But we also do private label. We like to tell people that we do everybody but Walmart.

29:55Now, just like with the carport business, pricing is obviously an issue in the apparel industry, too. If you look at apparel in the Consumer Price Index, you can see clothing inflation basically peaked at more than 6 percent year on year back in 2022. But in more recent months, inflation in apparel has been kind of moderating. It came in at 0.40 % in March, and that's kind of been the story of inflation across the U.S. recently. Housing costs and services keep going up, but some goods, like apparel, aren't seeing quite the same kind of price increases anymore. Endira's experience also says something about post-pandemic demand.

30:34It's basically ridden a roller coaster here. When COVID struck, it started making face masks. But demand for masks went away as the pandemic petered out and people aren't buying thermals like they once were either. We were the very first people to make masks. I mean, we were like the day after the shutdown, and we couldn't get off the telephone. It was everybody from American Airlines to CentOS uniforms. They all wanted masks, and so we just did everything we could do. By June, it was apparent that that wasn't going to last. When the economy started to come back, It was so strange because demand was just out the roof.

31:17There was a lot of money in the consumer's hands. And they were buying anything and everything. They were buying online like crazy. And so there was a surge of business that occurred. And we were all chasing it as hard as we possibly could. We were just, you know, we were blind to the fact that this was an artificial situation and it wasn't going to last. We were riding the wave. And then it caught up with itself and there was literally a crash. Obviously, inflation had gone crazy. So now we're in late 21, early 22. Exactly. And demand just fell off. Our largest customer at that time, Amazon, just shut the books.

32:01They were so overstocked because they had been chasing it just like all of us. Joe, in Deera Mills is also where we learn there's basically a Jones Act for textiles. It's called the Berry Amendment. Here's Tom and John talking about that, as well as the company's decision to move their textile production out of the U.S. I know I know the answer to this question, but I'm going to ask because I get asked it a lot, which is, did you consider moving it back to the States? No. And just give us your logic.

32:34The skill level is just not here anymore. When we closed out sewing here in 1994 when NAFTA, I believe it was 94 when NAFTA came in, we had 300 people here in Yakinville sewing and they were gone instantly. They found other jobs. to bring that labor force back and to train it and to pay not just the base, but all the fringes and all the ancillary costs that go with it, we would not be competitive. I hate to say it. Now, you're familiar with the Berry Act, which is products that have to be made in the U.S. because of government requirements, whether it's military or all that sort of thing. There are manufacturers of our type of product on a small scale here because of the Berry Act.

33:25They make flags or they make uniforms. Exactly. Lots of military. We chose not to get into that. But we would not be able to bring our company, the labor part of our company back to the states. It's unfortunate. I mean, it broke our hearts when we had to move. But we either moved or when we moved. Yeah, we had moved. You saw what happened. Everybody did. But even after outsourcing production in Mexico, a company like Indira isn't sitting still. and they're currently shifting manufacturing again. We're leaving Mexico. Oh, to go where? El Salvador. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. A lot of companies are just now moving into Mexico.

34:05Well, China is. Yeah.

34:10Mexico, we've been in Mexico 25 years. Yeah. Monterey, Mexico. I don't know if you've ever been there. I have. It's quite a city. Yeah. You could be dropped in there, and you would think you were in Atlanta or somewhere. But we've seen it grow up in 25 years from carts and buggies, horse and buggy, to modern highways and everything. Inflation is pretty serious there. Of course, everything is unionized there, so you're dealing with an element that we don't have to focus on. Now, we have maquiladoras, so we just contract for labor. We don't own the labor. We don't pay directly. But inflation is pretty tough there.

34:47And they've essentially priced us out. So Endear has been able to survive in the mill business, in part by adapting to these new challenges. But there are still some complications that come from being based in a small town. Housing shortage here is dramatic. And it hurts. It hurts the manufacturers here. It hurts the economy. Small-town America is a special place to live. And I consider Yakubil small-town. I mean, the values are so great, the work ethic. Just knowing everybody in town, first name basis, fewer fears of certain things. So it's a cool place to live, small town. But you've got to be successful as a small town.

35:29You need good, progressive government. And you need a base of businesses. A few large businesses, a lot of small, medium-sized businesses. You need culture. You need the elements that make life enjoyable. Yatkinville isn't alone here. We heard similar things in Mount Airy, too. Smaller towns may have cheaper land for construction, but that doesn't mean developers are flocking to them. Here's Tom talking to us about exactly this. You know, every small town is competing for developers. And there's a limited number of developers. I gave a speech on this in November. And developers care a lot about availability of cheap land.

36:08Developers care a lot about permitting and infrastructure in the land. And developers have the ability to choose. And so what they told us here is if you go a little bit further south where it's closer to an interstate, the developers are prioritizing there. Now, they had a bit of a roadshow for developers, and they think they're making some progress. So that says something about what a community can do in terms of proactively seeking developers. And I think that's actually a pretty important thing if you want housing built in your community. I find this actually to be like a kind of fascinating dynamic, right?

36:38Because in my mind, you would think of like the developers are all competing against each other to find the cheapest land available or whatever it is. But this idea that from a maybe like a community standpoint, it's the other way around, arguably, and that it works in such that they need to basically pitch the developers on coming here. Yeah. So after the Great Recession, what happened is a lot of developers went under and left the business. A lot of banks stopped financing development. We underbuilt housing for a decade. So we're light developers. In addition, what's happened during the post-pandemic era is there's been so much construction going on, not just houses, but also data centers and warehouses and state and local government, you know, educational, that we're short construction people too.

37:27And so, you know, if you took the entire economy, you'd say we're actually really short construction capacity. And that's what leads to it. It's an adjustment issue. It doesn't mean it's a permanent problem, but it is right now an adjustment issue. And if you're short housing your community, you really need that housing to get launched today. So towns like Yatkinville and Mount Airy are doing what they can here by proactively courting developers and experimenting with new models for child care to course correct for that ongoing shortage. And there just isn't enough child care. When we did the study in 2021, Yadkin County was the third worst in the state for the number of children, according to a Think Babies report, for the number of infants and toddlers per slot.

38:15We're about 19 to 1 slot. Why is that? There has been a huge reduction in the number of child care providers. It's like 82 % have reduced within the last 12 years. So it's been shrinking. Partially because it is difficult to maintain a license to get the star rating. Star rating is like a quality rating. And here, for private providers, we don't, other than one family home, in the western part of the county, there are no four or five star rated child care providers. That's Sandy Scanelli of the Shallow Ford Foundation. She's spearheading a new type of child care model that would see providers pool and share resources like buildings, playgrounds, and operations to help lower their costs.

39:08Tom met with her as part of his tour of the county. So typically speaking, a child care provider would have to do the legwork of like finding the location and furnishing it and building it out itself yes to meet licensing requirements right and so the main thing that this solves it sounds like is just like they just have to rent this they can focus on what they do taking care of children right without having to worry about all these other ancillary things to get the physical because licensing is both for the individual as well as for the facility and when we did our study what we found is that I'll give you an example.

39:46One of the playgrounds needed new mulch. It was going to cost$8 ,000 to replace the mulch. That's a key licensing factor is you have to have six inches of fluffy mulch. And so every time it rained, they were running outside with pitchforks to fluff up the mulch. Well, those kinds of stresses are a distraction, honestly, from managing that facility. So to have the facility taken care of and maintaining that license really allows more focus on the child care. But Smart Start's only doing the facility. It's not a other shared cost model like HR or that sort of thing. Actually, no. They will also offer back office support to each of those businesses if they are interested in it.

40:37So the hope is that if some of the back end can be centralized, then the actual child care providers can focus on what they do best, providing child care and reversing the decline in total capacity. And of course, this isn't just a small town problem. A shortage of child care providers and high housing costs, all of which contribute to inflation, is pretty much the story across America's economy. At our next stop, we talk to one of the largest employers in the county and see how all the things we've talked about, labor, housing, prices, have impacted them as well.

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43:13I knew it was the jacket he was after. I tossed it, giving up the jacket in exchange for my life. I'm alive today, but jacketless. We'll buy this jacket again soon. Five stars. Amazon customer 69. Thank you for listening to Amazon Five Star Theater. Looking for unforgettable gifts this holiday season, like a jacket that becomes your whole personality? Shop the perfect gift this holiday on Amazon. How are you doing? Hi. Hi. Thank you very much. Hi. Welcome. Welcome to Unified. Hi. Tracy Alloway from Bloomberg. Tracy, Eddie. I'm Joe Weisenthal. Great to meet you. Eddie, Eddie Engel. I'm the CEO of...

44:03I'm great. And everybody calls me sweetie. Sweetie. Just a few minutes away from Indira Mills is the Yatkinville factory for Unify, a publicly listed manufacturer of polyester, nylon, and spandex yarns. It's headquartered in Greensboro, but it has a pretty big facility here in Yatkinville. It is a big facility. There is a huge recycling center where Unify turns plastic bottles into a recycled fiber it calls reprieve. There are big trucks parked outside that say bottles equal cool stuff. And there's cool stuff inside too, including a showroom showing off some of UniFi's material. Reprieve and where it comes from.

44:40Absolutely. Reprieve is a product that we have now that we take recycled plastic bottles. And it's chopped up almost like plastic cornflakes at a reasonable facility. It's cleaned. We separate the green and the brown plastic from the clear and the blue. We use the clear and the blue plastic in our yarn. That's Smith Williams, Unify's HR manager, but everyone calls him Smitty. But the clear and the blue plastic is shipped here to our recycle center, where it goes through another process, becomes PET resin. It's PET resin. Then we take it, and it is in like plastic BBs, and it is melted and extruded, goes through like large shower heads, And as it falls by floors, it becomes a solid again.

45:36That plastic yarn is then sold to companies like Nike, Patagonia, Asics, and others who weave it into their products. In this country, only about 28 % of the bottles are collected. And when we get a bale of bottles, we get around 56 % yield because the collection system here is not. And that's Unify's CEO, Eddie Ingle. Bigger companies like Unify haven't been immune to post-pandemic challenges either. Eddie describes to Tom how the price of plastic shot up in 2021 and 2022, including the cost of the plastic bottles that they used to make into fabric. So that price of that bale bottle goes up and down significantly.

46:14It's been as low as 13 cents in the last six months. It's been as high as 18 cents, but it has been as high as 50 cents two years ago. So with a 56-minute yield, it can get very, very expensive very quickly. And that's an average number I'm giving you. but it's the fact that we have to take the bottles and we have to take the caps off, take the labels off, make this flake, and then we have to take this flake and make it into chip. And the yield losses are throughout that whole supply chain. But what's cool is, I say this all the time, but you've never met a sad recycler. So what we're doing here attracts young people who want to be sustainable, want to be purpose-driven.

46:52and while yes, this raw material is more expensive and the yields are higher, we are giving the brands what they need. See, Unify is a lot bigger than many of the other local businesses around it. In fact, it's the biggest private sector employer in Yadkin County. And it's had the sort of secular tailwind of demand for more sustainable fabrics behind it. But it has encountered some similar issues. Supply chain disruptions are still kind of reverberating and clouding the picture of demand. So I would say from a demand perspective, there was a lot of overpurchasing. And stocks of all these brands that I quoted, the parallel brands, went way up.

47:30Because they basically had this supply chain issue. What used to take 30 days in China was taking three months because the boats were sitting out there. But everybody started ordering them, not just in China, from Vietnam, from India. So they had not just long supply chains, they overordered to compensate. And then suddenly 18 months ago, 19, 20 months ago, things started freeing up. So all the brands globally just pulled back on as many purchases as they could. And that really impacted us. We're seeing consumer demand for our products are down about 7 % or 8%, maybe 6%. So with the de-stocking, and not only did de-stocking happen, but they said, oh, I don't want to spend any of my cash on inventory.

48:16So they're actually tightening up the supply chain, too, because they're going further, taking more risk than they normally would. But I will say, starting really beginning this year, most of the inventories seem to be cleared out. So we are seeing business come back slowly. Consumers are still constrained a little bit, as far as what we're reading. You know this better than I do. But when COVID happened, and everybody jumped to a casual, and now they're coming back to wearing a bit more formal. Oh, I've got to go to the office. I'm not going to the office. I've got to go to the office. If I had thought about it, I'd have worn a fleece today.

48:52Sorry. And of course, hovering over this entire conversation, there is still the question of price. But, you know, in my day job, I'm worried about inflation. I think what I take from what you just said is, you know, over the last couple years, we have not been your problem. You know, our prices have been headed down, not up. I mean, I think, you know, one person's opinion to somebody who's very knowledgeable about this, I think labor always goes up no matter what. Yes. But if you think about energy here, energy in North Carolina was very, very stable for a long time. But as energy companies like Duke have invested in renewables, they've been able to pass that cost on as they should or shouldn't, I don't know, but they passed that cost on.

49:35So our energy costs have gone up, not just because crude's gone up, but because the investment renewals. So we are a very, very energy-intensive company. We use a lot of energy here. We're involved in trying to negotiate that with the group. So that took your costs up? That took costs up. Labor's taking your costs up. Packaging's taking it. Yes. So you're saying prices have actually gone up? Yes. But when 2021-22 happened, we had cost escalations because of bale bottle prices going out of the roof. And you had to pass it. And we had record, it was record, petrochemical prices went up to a record.

50:07If you remember, crude was at 122, 123, maybe 130, it spiked for a day. So all of that got passed off. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here. But as it crashed, and because the demand slowed down, there was pressure to drop pricing. So I think we're in this, today, this weird spot where everybody knows prices have to go up. And it's just a matter of slowly doing that in a scientific way. And again, where is the value we're bringing? How do we capture that? How do we price that? It is very challenging, perhaps, to save from a price improvement. This is another theme that comes up regularly in Tom's meetings.

50:45Big and small companies seem to have experienced a lot of the economy of recent years in very different ways. We asked Tom about this. Do you notice a big difference between what larger companies are saying versus smaller companies? I do. too. Smaller companies are still struggling to fill workforce jobs. They're still struggling to fill jobs. And that's in part because there was more wage, more capacity to raise wages in the larger companies than there were in the smaller companies. So when, and we were with one earlier today, but when you go to a smaller company, you do hear that kind of constraint being much bigger.

51:19During the supply chain shortage era, you absolutely heard that the big companies had a lot more benefit than the smaller companies. And I think when it came to the margin recapture cycle. The big companies have led the way on that. And a lot of small companies are still saying that they're working to recapture margins. Being able to compete on wages isn't the only edge that larger companies have in the current environment. Many of them have also been able to refinance their debt. Contrast that with the smaller company Carport Central, which told Tom that bank lending is becoming a constraint on its business.

51:53That might be one reason, according to Tom, that economic growth has so far defied the gravity of higher interest rates. They just haven't flowed through to some parts of the economy just yet. Well, so the data that I keep coming back to is interest payments is a percent of either personal disposable income or corporate revenue. And those numbers have only now finally gotten back to 2019 levels. And that's because a lot of individuals paid down their credit cards and refinanced their mortgages. And a lot of companies paid down their debt and refinanced their debt. And so the in aggregate impact of having the Fed funds rate at five and a third versus, you know, where it was basically at zero hasn't really flown through the aggregate economy.

52:37Now, it's certainly flown through to individual parts of the economy. And, you know, the most surprising things to me, you know, obviously the residential market where you've got the 3 % mortgage holders who don't want to trade into a 7 % mortgage and are unwilling to sell their house. But behind that is that, you know, 92 % of mortgages are fixed rate. OK, so that's different than what the economy was 15 years ago. In commercial real estate, you know, multifamily, you hear about a set of people who really can't develop anymore, want to turn in the keys, whatever version of it. And another set of people who are owners who are feeling actually just fine.

53:17And Unify's experience underscores that big refinancing trend. They refinanced their debt in 2022 and have since been investing in new equipment.

54:03Well, you guys are great to make the time. We really appreciate it. I'm just going to make it sit you walk out there just to look your head out. Unify's factory was the last stop for us, but not for Tom. As we made our way to the airport, he was already back in the car and on his way to Greensboro for the next leg of his listening tour. Barkin spends about two to three weeks of every month on trips just like this one, which means that most days, if he's not getting ready for the next FOMC meeting in D.C., he's in the car or at another luncheon or taking one last look at another factory floor. It packs it automatically.

54:37Yeah, it goes all the way.

54:42But if you saw that, you wouldn't, you have to see it.

54:52So after two days on the road with a Fed bank president, what did we learn? Well, on the one hand, there are some businesses that seem to be doing fine in this environment. Meanwhile, others are struggling with the impact of higher rates and moderating demand. All of these varied individual experiences are one reason why it seems particularly challenging right now to figure out what's going on with the larger economy. One of the questions that I think people are scratching their head is, how did the Fed raise rates so much and yet the economy hasn't slowed down as fast as people expected? Well, I've done intentionally over the last three months, probably 15 different sessions with commercial real estate groups because they're definitely feeling the impact of rates.

55:30And I want to hear from those segments. When you talk to banks, which I do a good bit, you also hear the same thing. I was very interested because in theory, higher rates should hit the whole economy relatively quickly. It starts with interest-sensitive sectors like real estate and banking, but historically, manufacturing's followed pretty closely. And I haven't heard that much on the manufacturing side. So it was very interesting to hear these guys talk about how credit availability was constraining their ability to grow. Now, they've had some margin challenges, which they talked about that could be relevant.

56:04And I do think the banks I talk to will talk quite openly about tightening credit. And part of that is just being prudent, you know, in a world of uncertainty. You hear about it, but then you get to see it, right? So now we have in the economy, it's not just what people are saying might happen. There's some evidence that actually is happening. Complicating the whole picture is also the overarching weirdness of the post-pandemic business cycle and the long-term impact that the pandemic experience may have had on businesses. This is something Tom talks about a lot. I'm curious if there are any lessons that businesses you speak to seem to have internalized from the past few years, the post-pandemic experience.

56:46So we used to talk a lot about the idea of labor hoarding. Everyone was caught short during COVID, so they hired a lot and they're terrified of having to go through, you know, the same scarcity of labor again or the experience of raising prices and testing that elasticity of demand. Are those things that people seem to have actually internalized in your mind? Yeah. So maybe three things that come to mind. Supply chain resilience. If you had everything in China before, you have to ask yourself the question how smart that is. And so I see everywhere people diversifying their supply chain, more nearshoring than onshoring, but still in certainly Thailand and Vietnam and Indonesia playing a role too.

57:29That's very clear. Second is, I think, a new respect for the scarcity of labor. We lived in a world where labor was long for a long time. Now it's short. You talked about labor hoarding, but I think it's even more than that. It's about investment and benefits and compensation on a continual basis. By the way, on the other side of that, there's investment in automation that's going on as well, but new respect for the scarcity of labor. And then I do think on the pricing side, you know, I've been talking about this for a while, but there's a bunch of businesses that before COVID knew they had no chance to increase prices.

58:01And then COVID happened, supply chain shrunk, labor costs increased. They had no choice. They went from having no chance to having no choice. And when they raised prices, there were no consequences, right? And so we'd like to be on the other side of that, where they really thought there wasn't any chance to raise prices again. But I'm not sure they're done. And if they're not done, part of it is they're trying to recapture margins. Part of it is they're just a little more courageous. I talked to a furniture manufacturer a couple days ago who just said, yeah, I used to just give in. But now I'm just a little bolder.

58:35I've had the experience of raising prices. I'm a little bolder. And I think it just takes a while to get from no consequences all the way back to no chance again. And that's ultimately Tom's message in this part of North Carolina and beyond. Economic scars can linger for a long time and play out in unexpected ways. There's still an undersupply of housing in places like Yadkinville and Mount Airy, in part because of the 2008 financial crisis, not just 2020 and the higher interest rates after that. Meanwhile, the hollowing out of manufacturing in this area and other parts of the U.S. has been going on for decades.

59:11Now, companies might be more aware of supply chain disruptions and labor shortages, and they may be more willing to raise their prices to offset them too, which could add to inflation. All of that creates difficulties for the Fed, which is still trying to balance inflation and unemployment in both big and small towns across America. It has its data and it can attempt to assume some relationship between things like prices, labor market tightness, and so forth. But it's hard to know what that lingering psychological effect of the past few years might be, let alone what aspects of the economy still have yet to be normalized.

59:45And if you think about somewhere like the Richmond Fed District, which has both booming cities and deep rural areas, trying to gauge the disparate effects that a given policy change might have gets even trickier.

1:00:09So, Tracy, after seeing all that, I'm not sure how good we would be at the rate setting part of the job of being a Fed president. That seems pretty tough, but I actually think we'd be pretty good at the asking questions of businesses part. Yeah, I would not want to be voting on policy moves, but I did like how odd lotsy, let's say, a lot of Tom's questions actually seem to be. I feel like we could do that. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart.

1:00:44Thank you to Tom Barkin and the Richmond Fed's Jim Strader and Maya Cotello for their help in putting together this episode. You can follow them at Richmond Fed. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmin, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. And thank you to our sound engineer, Blake Maples. And a special thank you to all the businesses who participated and let us listen in on their conversations with Tom Barkin and let us join their meetings and even ask our own questions. If you enjoyed this episode, if you like it when Joe and I go on the road, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.

1:01:21Thanks for listening.

1:01:53This podcast is brought to you by FedEx, the new power move. Hey, you know those people in your office who are always pulling old school corporate power moves? Like the guy who weaponizes eye contact. He's confident. He's engaged. He's often creepy. It's an old school power move. But this alpha dog laser gaze won't keep your supply chain moving across borders. The real power move? Having a smart platform that keeps up with the changing trade landscape. That's why smart businesses partner with FedEx and use the power of digital intelligence to navigate around supply chain issues before they happen.

1:02:34Set your sights on something that will actually improve your business. FedEx. The new power move. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here. Wishing you a very happy half-off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50 % off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three month plan equivalent to$15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy.

1:03:09Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.