Press conference exchange between SCOTT HORSLEY and Fed Chair Jerome Powell:

user: Thanks, Mr. Chairman. You said in your opening remarks that the, the economy in many ways had proven more resilient than, than people expected, and reflected the adaptability of both households and businesses. Are, are there adaptations that caught you by surprise, maybe related to remote work or new ways to do on-site work, in-person, face-to-face work that, that the economy’s proven tougher than, than you expected at the outset of this pandemic?

assistant: Well, yes. So I think, if you go back to the—to the beginning, there was a real concern. I mean, just, just take the financial markets, for example. Suddenly, all of those big buildings all over the, the—New York City and all around the world where people work in the financial markets with terminals and everything, everybody had to go home, and they had to take their terminals with them. And I think there was a real concern that there would be a tremendous loss of functionality just at the time when the financial markets were under historically difficult conditions. And yet, it worked out okay. So I think people—many people in the financial sector are still working with their terminals at home, including people on trading floors or on virtual trading floors. Now, some of that’s reversing now. But we have definitely learned that we can do more work from home in many, many different lines of work. Of course, that’s not possible if your job involves being at a place, doing personal services. For many people, it’s not possible. And that’s very much something that skews to higher-income, higher-educated people being able to work from home and others not so much. So I think we’ve learned that. The other thing, though, even conditional on that, when we saw the wave in the South and the West, the wave of cases this summer, I think, intuitively, having seen what happened in March and April, we expected there to be a significant hit to economic activity. And people just got on with their lives and went and, and dealt with it. And, and it didn’t actually—it had a much smaller effect on economic activity than we expected. Then comes the fall wave, which is just so much larger—a very, very large wave as, as was very much forecast. People going indoors, the cold weather, all of that. And even there, if you look at—I would say, look at the December jobs report. So, big job losses in, you know, in that part of the service sector. So I mentioned 400,000 jobs in bars and restaurants. There’s another 100,000 in similar kinds of activities. But if you go—if you look elsewhere, it’s not having an effect. You know, even purchasing manager index and sentiment indexes on, on areas of the economy that are not directly—really directly—exposed to the pandemic in their economic activity, they’re doing okay. They are. Housing is a great example. You know, the way—the way—the way the housing industry worked, that when you buy a house, there was a lot of in-person contact. They managed to pretty much immediately go to a more virtual—you know, with all the technology. They were able to completely avoid that. And the housing market has been really strong, notwithstanding that it’s, it’s now quite virtual rather than in person. So there’s been a lot of adapting, and—but you can’t adapt, you know, hotels, sporting venues, movie theaters, restaurants, bars. You just—you know, those are just going to—and that’s—again, that’s millions and millions of people. And so you’re just going to have to defeat the pandemic, which, as I mentioned, you know, we, we have a plan to do that, but we haven’t done it yet. And we need to—we need to finish the job. And we—it’s, it’s within our power to do that as a country this year. And I would just urge that—and I know people are working hard on that. But that, that is really the main thing about the economy, is, is getting the pandemic under control, getting everyone vaccinated, getting people wearing masks, and all that. That’s the single most important economic growth policy that we can have. Thank you.