Community talks about the Federal Reserve Bank

ESCANABA — Bay College in Escanaba hosted a Town Hall Forum today to answer questions involving the economy, local commerce and details on the Federal Reserve Banks.

The United States has a distributive central bank where it is divided between 12 Regional Federal Reserve Banks. The president of Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank is going around to communities within the region learning about local economy and ways to improve policies.

The event invited local businesses and anyone from the public to join in and ask questions regarding the Federal Reserve Bank, and any processes or policies that are implemented within it. The goals of these forums are to help make sense of the economy by looking past the statistics and looking closer at local business.

“We look at a lot of data, national data and regional data, but we need to make sense of that data,” said, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Neel Kashkari. “The statistics don’t tell the whole story, so by meeting with individuals and community members directly; we can get a sense of, ‘is the economy getting stronger? Is it over heating? Is it getting weaker? Where are the challenges?’ So a big part of my job is to travel around our region and hear directly from workers – from businesses and from community leaders. This is so we can find out what is happening in the local economy. ‘What’s happening in the job market? What’s happening in wages?'”

President Kashkari has made it a priority each year to visit local communities in every state in the Minneapolis Fed’s Ninth District, so that he can get more input on how he can help the region as a whole and work to make the local communities become more prosperous.