CDPS Blog

A message from Dan Sullivan, executive vice president and director of economic outreach, to our community development stakeholders

April 13, 2020

Dear Readers: 

We hope that you are well, and taking all necessary precautions during the pandemic. 

During these challenging times, I am united with my Fed colleagues in our commitment to the American people and to the job Congress gave us – to promote maximum employment and stable prices, while protecting the stability of the financial system. 

Many of our actions at the Fed so far are intended to ensure financial markets continue to function. Smoothly functioning markets are essential to the U.S. economy. You can keep up to date with the latest actions on the website of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, here. The Fed’s regulatory team is also working with financial institutions to ensure they can provide appropriate credit to consumers and businesses. 

We recognize that many of you work every day with economically vulnerable individuals, families, small businesses, and communities. We learned during the last deep recession and during earlier disruptions that marginalized people and places are impacted the most, and take the longest to recover from these events, as jobs, savings, and social support systems disappear. A global pandemic has the potential to impact us all in unprecedented ways. 

As a result, we are expanding our outreach to community leaders, businesses, and policymakers. Our community development staff is in daily contact with stakeholders across our five-state footprint to gauge escalating needs, listen for innovative response strategies, sense where liquidity constraints may be emerging, and most importantly ask for policy guidance – what are you hearing, what would be useful, what is not helpful, and any other relevant information. At the same time, our economists are monitoring high frequency data, from here and abroad, delving into the latest research, and leveraging the lessons learned and the relative success of interventions during past crises. 

We are still early in the learning curve for this crisis, but already taking aggressive and unprecedented measures to help stabilize the economy. We won’t know for some time the effectiveness of either economic or public health measures, or the net cost of the pandemic on either. Until we have greater clarity, we must do everything we can, individually and together, to arrest the spread of the virus and allow measures on both fronts to work. 

Lots of information is coming our way presently and we are working to provide you with useful insights into the functioning of our economy. We hope you will think of the Fed as a reliable source of data and information as we move through and eventually emerge from this crisis. If you would like to communicate with us, please email us with your questions or comments. We invite and welcome your feedback. 

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