It just may be the most sought-after invitation in economics here in the U.S.: A trip to the mountains — to the Kansas City Fed’s annual economic policy symposium at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. This year’s version runs from Aug. 22 to 24, and it is once again likely to transfix investors watching from the outside.
The Jackson Hole Symposium is an economist’s version of a Taylor Swift concert. But only around 120 academics, Fed policy makers and journalists get to go. And instead of chunky heels and friendship bracelets, they don cowboy hats and boots. The headliner the past few years has been none other than Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, making an invite to Jackson Hole priceless for some people.
“I once joked they could probably sell them for a million dollars a ticket,” said Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chair now teaching economics at Princeton.
Blinder estimates he’s been to around 40 Jackson Hole symposiums. When the event was just getting started back in the 1980s and ’90s, he said Wall Street economists were allowed to attend too and got to rub shoulders with top Fed officials.
“You could mingle with them and you might pick up some nuggets of information or — what’s almost as good in the market — make other people think you did,” he told me.
But whoever is president of the Kansas City Fed has the final say on the guest list. And now, very few market economists get invites — crushing news for Lauren Goodwin, an economist at New York Life Investments.
“I do wish I could go,” she said with a sigh. “I would wear a cowboy hat.”
When a Fed chair speaks at Jackson Hole, that’s the only part of the symposium that’s traditionally made public. This year, Powell delivers his address on Friday, Aug. 23. Goodwin will be watching for any indication that the Fed is transitioning its focus from inflation to unemployment.
“That would be a clear signal to me that an interest rate cut starting in September becomes much more likely,” she explained.
Powell’s speech kicks off a full morning. Prominent economists present papers, which are dissected and debated. Speaking last month at the Economic Club of Washington, Powell described what happens next at the Jackson Hole symposium:
“In the afternoon, people go take a hike and let me be clear — this is not a rate hike — it’s an actual physical hike,” he told a laughing audience.
Ah, Fed humor. Deborah Lucas, an economist at MIT, has been to the Jackson Hole symposium several times. She said that Powell is approachable and sociable — but there are limits.
“You wouldn’t run up to the chairman of the Federal Reserve and say, ‘Hey Jay, you know, why are you taking so long to lower interest rates?'” she said.
Still, Lucas added that every economist there will try to share their opinion on what the Fed should do next. Monetary policy is like a giant, slow ship, she said. And people spend their entire careers dreaming of a chance to help steer it.
