At the risk of oversimplifying, this is not good.

From American public media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl. It is Thursday 10 April. Good as always to have you along, everybody.

Well, let's see. There are tariffs to talk about, of course. There is inflation to talk about. The consumer price index up 2.4% year on year, 2.8% if you take out food

and energy, both of them, lower than expected. And there is gesturing wildly here, everything else.

So it seemed to us like a good day to get a central banker on the phone. Thus, we did. Rafael

Bostick is the president of the

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Dr. Bostick, it's good to talk to you, again, sir. Good to talk with you, as always, Guy. All right, so we'll go with the data point of the day. First of all, consumer price index came out this morning, lower than expected. One data point does not a trend make, But what do you think?

Well, it's a positive development for sure.

The numbers could have gone in a different direction. data point does not a trend make, but what do you think? Well, it's a positive development for sure.

The numbers could have gone in a different direction, and I was worried about that.

But as you know, there's a lot that's gone on since those numbers were produced.

And that's really what we're focusing on and trying to figure out what the next set of numbers is going to look like.

Well, so let's talk about that. The through line from Fed speakers of which you are one today, and there have been many this week.

And all you all have been saying, listen, we need to look through this tariff situation. We need to figure out long-term what they're going to mean.

And my question is, how do you look through them when, number one, they're so big, and number

two, they seem to happen or go away on a whim? Well, you're asking a very difficult question,

and it's the question that I ask my team all the time. It's my job. I appreciate that.

So, you know, one of the things that we are trying to do is figure out how everyone else is doing this.

We're talking to businesses, we're talking to consumers to figure out how they're dealing with this unprecedented level of uncertainty and volatility.

You know, as things are changing on a day-to-day basis, folks don't really know what they

should be planning on or what they should be planning for. And so the question that we've been

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