Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker speaks with Yahoo Finance [Transcript]

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Patrick Harker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, spoke with Yahoo Finance on April 17 to discuss his economic outlook and the Fed’s recent $2.3 trillion effort to support the U.S. economy as the coronavirus continues to grip the nation.

Below is a transcript of his appearance:

JULIE HYMAN: We are joined to talk about that, by the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Patrick Harker, as well as our own Brian Cheung. President Harker thank you so much for joining us.

I want to bring up a paper that was written by researchers at the Philly fed, and it found that a full quarter of all workers in the United States, we're talking about, about 38 million folks are defined as “at-risk” because their jobs involve working in close proximity with other people and those jobs also tend to be lower-income, but at the same time are pivotal to the households that they're a part of.

Does that mean those jobs are not coming back in the short or even medium term, after the reopening of the economy? And then what are the economic implications of that?

PATRICK HARKER: Thank you Julie for having me. So you're referring to a project we have which is really a three part project. This is the first of three on the impact that this crisis is having on low-income families and communities. So the first paper you just mentioned, is the impact on workers. The second will be the impact on small businesses. And the third, on neighborhoods and communities. So the physical aspect of this. So, the answer to the question is, those jobs where physical distancing is hard, have gone away to a large extent, including though in some states like our state in Pennsylvania, where construction that is not life-sustaining — that is our hospital etc. — is shut down as well. So what you saw in this report, one of the things we think a lot about our service workers but a lot of construction workers are now out of work right now because they can't do those projects.

So as you think about ramping the economy back up, when we're able to do that safely. And again, our hearts go out to the people who are suffering this all across the country. So as we're able to do this safely and not cause even more problems, we're going to do that in a staged way. Obviously some industries where social distancing is easier — possibly construction — is going to be far in advance of opening up big arenas for events. So, I think, most of these jobs will come back in some form. It may be very slow for certain industries.

One of the things I think about is areas like travel and tourism. Well, you know, that may take a little while to rebound for that maybe companies are looking at their bottom line saying, “maybe we shouldn’t travel as much.” So I think there are a lot of factors at play here. And but the main factor that is determining when and how the economy reopens is how well we get control of this virus.


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