Going back to 1982, some of the world’s most significant and distinguished economic minds descend on the shores of Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park every August to forecast and discuss the year’s global financial outlook.
It’s a quietly significant event on the world’s monetary market calendar, where those who create, interact with and regulate fiscal policy gather in one of the country’s most beautiful locations for several days of candid economic conversation.
The gathering is called the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium and the conference is organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, which is one of the 12 regional banks that make up the Federal Reserve System. The first symposium was actually held in Kansas City in 1978 and was focused on growing agricultural trade. It moved to Jackson amid the economic turmoil surrounding the inflation spike of 1981 when it reached 13%, according to the Kansas City Fed.
“The Jackson symposium has had a tremendous impact,” the late Martin Feldstein, economic advisor to Ronald Reagan and the president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, said in a 2008 interview. “This set of meetings really shapes thinking about policy. Some talk about a ‘Washington consensus;’ I sometimes talk about the ‘Jackson consensus.’”
This year’s event kicked off Thursday and runs through Saturday. The topic is “Labor Markets in Transition: Demographics, Productivity, and Macroeconomic Policy.”
“Labor markets are undergoing structural change,” reads the event’s press release. “Some drivers of this change reflect the acceleration of preexisting trends, such as declining birth rates, an aging labor force, and reduced labor mobility. There have also been new developments like the spread and maturation of artificial intelligence, which could potentially change the economic role and value of labor.”
The symposium is invitation-only, with 120 or so attendees hand-picked based on the year’s specific topic. Attendees range from central bankers to policymakers, with academics, financial journalists and economists included. In addition to the likes of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who will give the keynote address Friday morning.
The curated list of attendees — many of whom are in positions to make impactful decisions about global finance — will discuss how the forces of declining birth rates and artificial intelligence will affect labor markets over the coming years, and also how those developments will ultimately influence fiscal and monetary policy.
Despite the influence and nature of those conversations — and the wealth of information contained in the supporting studies and research papers that participants submit in advance of attending — it is the Fed chairman’s address that will garner the most attention at this year’s symposium.
What to expect from the Fed chairman
With increasing tension between the executive branch and Powell, there’s a lot of anticipation for what he will talk about, specifically where he and the Fed stand on lowering interest rates.
Amid the Fed’s conservative approach to lowering or holding steady on interest rates, President Donald Trump has consistently threatened to fire Powell over the last several months and repeatedly called him names such as ”numbskull” and “average mentally person.”
In addition to those direct threats, Trump’s cabinet has investigated an ongoing refurbishment project for negligence. Just this week, the president called for one of the Federal Reserve’s governors, Lisa Cook — a Biden appointee — to step down. That followed an investigation from the Federal Housing Finance Agency that alleges fraud in Cook’s past mortgage applications.
Powell’s complications do not only come from the executive branch. He is also subject to dissenting views about interest rates from within his own board of governors. At least two have come out publicly disagreeing with how the Fed is handling interest rates, believing that they should be lowered more quickly.
All of which makes for a high stakes address this week in Jackson.
How to learn more
The full agenda of the event is not published until Thursday evening at the Kansas City Fed’s website.
There you can also find all of the meeting minutes, research papers and other event materials going back to the first event in 1978. In the coming months, the remainder of the minutes and event materials will be published at the same link.
Powell’s talk will be live-streamed on the Kansas City Fed’s YouTube channel on Friday morning.