This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 17, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

At the Cato Institute's 35th annual monetary conference, I sat down with Loretta

Mester, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, where we discussed

workforce and other demographic trends, and how those changes interact with monetary policy.

You talked about demographics and how that is likely to affect the U.S. economy, how closely do

do monetary authorities need to monitor demographics?

So as you know the population is getting older and it's not growing as quickly.

So my thesis is that we should be monitoring it and sort of taking that into account when you

think about the equilibrium, interest rate, long-term growth rates of the economy, productivity

growth, these demographic shifts can affect those.

And of course, those are sort of fundamentals that monetary policy makers need to take into account when they're

setting appropriate policies.

So I think we should be thinking about these demographic changes and what the implications are.

As you know, we've been lowering our estimates

of our star, the so-called equilibrium interest rate.

I think demographic figure into that,

demographics also figure into the labor force participation rate.

As we know, it's been trending down and a large part of that is demographics.

So what about monetary policy?

How do demographics impact how we ought to be thinking?

What are some of the key factors that we should be thinking about

...